Roman actually launched on August 30, 2026 and is now in its roughly three-month commissioning journey to Sun–Earth L2. NASA expects first imagery in early 2027. It will generate about 1.4 TB of data per day, and NASA explicitly anticipates AI and machine learning helping identify significant phenomena in that data. NASA

JWST is already probing atmospheres of individual rocky planets. The frustrating TRAPPIST-1 results actually demonstrate the capability: humanity is now arguing about whether photons crossing the atmosphere of an Earth-sized world roughly 40 light-years away contain molecular information or contamination from starspots. NASA says the stellar activity is sufficiently severe that some atmospheric questions may require hundreds of transits over several years. NASA Science

ELT should deliver scientific observations beginning around December 2030. ESO explicitly intends it to characterize rocky planets in habitable zones, and its ANDES spectrograph is being built with atmospheric searches for life signatures among its principal goals. ELT Science Operations

And LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA demonstrate something conceptually important even though they are not life detectors: humanity invented an entirely new astronomical sense. The network is being upgraded again, with another observing campaign beginning later this year and O5 under development. LIGO Observing Documentation

Add advanced AI, enormous astronomical archives, cheap computation, autonomous laboratories, better mass spectrometry, Europa Clipper, Rosalind Franklin, Dragonfly, and increasingly serious SETI infrastructure.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5907625&forum_id=2#50159640)