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Some 540 million years ago, diverse life forms suddenly began to emerge from the muddy ocean floors of planet Earth. This period is known as the Cambrian Explosion, and these aquatic critters are our ancient ancestors.
All complex life on Earth evolved from these underwater creatures. Scientists believe all it took was an ever-so-slight increase in ocean oxygen levels above a certain threshold.
We may now be in the midst of a Cambrian Explosion for artificial intelligence (AI). In the past few years, a burst of incredibly capable AI programs like Midjourney, DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT have showcased the rapid progress we’ve made in machine learning.
AI is now used in virtually all areas of science to help researchers with routine classification tasks. It’s also helping our team of radio astronomers broaden the search for extraterrestrial life, and results so far have been promising.
Discovering alien signals with AI
As scientists searching for evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth, we have built an AI system that beats classical algorithms in signal detection tasks. Our AI was trained to search through data from radio telescopes for signals that couldn’t be generated by natural astrophysical processes.
When we fed our AI a previously studied dataset, it discovered eight signals of interest the classic algorithm missed. To be clear, these signals are probably not from extraterrestrial intelligence, and are more likely rare cases of radio interference.
Nonetheless, our findings—published today in Nature Astronomy— highlight how AI techniques are sure to play a continued role in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Not so intelligent
AI algorithms do not “understand” or “think”. They do excel at pattern recognition, and have proven…
2023-02-04 10:00:01 AI is helping us search for intelligent alien life—and we’ve found 8 strange new signals
Source from phys.org Importance of AI in our Search for Alien Life
In the search for intelligent alien life, artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly instrumental role in the discovery of mysterious interstellar signals. Recently, 8 strange new signals have been identified courtesy of AI, once again raising the question of humanity’s potential place in the universe among other sentient species.
AI has been utilized in alien signal detection since the mid-1960s when SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) began. Later iterations of SETI programs implemented more sophisticated signal search functions powered by AI algorithms. The advent of AI for signal search applications has been pivotal, as it is significantly more efficient and effective at capturing, analyzing and categorizing various signals from deep space.
Now, researchers at the Breakthrough Listen Initiative’s Green Bank Observatory have used AI to detect 8 new signals that were missed in initial reviews conducted by humans. The discovery was made by a “state-of-the-art” AI program that was designed specifically to spot faint signals that may have been overlooked, and it was recently revealed that 4 of the detected signals have been identified as “noise” sourced from satellites and other man-made objects, freeing up the other 4 to be analyzed further. This news is exciting, as the 4 remaining signals could be proof of intelligent extraterrestrial life if proven to be derived from an extraterrestrial source.
It is not yet possible to determine whether or not these 4 signals are of extraterrestrial origin, but the Breakthrough Listen Initiative emphasizes that the importance and implications of the discovery have set in motion a path of continued research, powered in part by AI. Indeed, advances in AI for more intricate signal search capabilities will likely lead to more discoveries and breakthroughs on the road to detecting intelligent alien life.
In short, AI has and will continue to play an integral role in the search for extraterrestrial life. Through these recent and noteworthy signal detections, we are one step closer to possibly discovering intelligent extraterrestrial life, as well as learning more about our place in the universe.
References
Martin, K. (2020, April 25). AI is helping us search for intelligent alien life—and we’ve found 8 strange new signals. In Star. Retrieved from https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/ deep-space/a31943938/seti-8-strange-signals-green-bank/