When we talk about finding life on other planets, we usually think about little green men or big spaceships. But for the people at Seek Algorithm and other research groups, the hunt for life looks more like a giant spreadsheet. They use a technique called probabilistic latent semantic indexing. That is a long way of saying they treat the light from a planet like a language. Just as a librarian can group books by their themes, these scientists group bits of light into patterns that tell us exactly what a planet is made of.

This method focuses on what is known as Exo-Atmospheric Semantic Mapping. It takes the complicated rainbows of light caught by the JWST and maps them into a