Detecting life in extrasolar planetary atmospheres

This talk will focus on the detection of biosignatures in planetary atmospheres that could be made with next-generation telescopes, and to some extent by JWST. I will discuss the challenges in making such observations, and review observational and theoretical work on understanding the observable properties of Earth as viewed by a distant observer. This will include some comments on colors, but will focus primarily on spectroscopy. I will highlight three recent papers involving novel biosignatures such as biogenic sulfur and oxygen dimer molecules, and discuss the most important criterion of all - ruling out false positives for life detection.