New AI System Broadens Search for Intelligent Alien Life – and Discovers 8 Strange Signals
fliptop writes:
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:
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 in Nature Astronomy - highlight how AI techniques are sure to play a continued role in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
[...] If astronomers do manage to detect a technosignature that can't be explained away as interference, it would strongly suggest humans aren't the sole creators of technology within the Galaxy. This would be one of the most profound discoveries imaginable.
Journal Reference: Ma, P.X., Ng, C., Rizk, L. et al. A deep-learning search for technosignatures from 820 nearby stars. Nat Astron (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-022-01872-z
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