Nature Astronomy, Published online: 05 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41550-026-02876-9 Following two major 2025 announcements of possible extraterrestrial life — on exoplanet K2-18 b in April and in the Cheyava Falls rock on Mars in September — we surveyed the astrobiology community to capture the spread of expert opinion. These datasets establish baseline measures of scientific confidence in each case, revealing that astrobiologists were notably more persuaded by the Martian evidence than by that fro