from the radio's-playin'-some-forgotten-song dept.
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
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday February 06, @02:54PM (6 children)
Still looking for Alien Life? That's futile.
Alien technology markers do not necessarily coincide with life, because machine civilizations are more suitable for space travels (and expansion) under physical limits than the biologic ones.
LIfe is good only for planetary cultivation and maybe delivering some mined resources, but nothing more. Bio organisms do not scale well, so they need to be managed socially to achieve any significant results. They need to be adapted precisely for their target environment. Unlike machines. A single Machine can colonize the Universe, converting it to itself at the same time.
What about pure spiritual civilizations, can you detect that?
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Monday February 06, @03:19PM (2 children)
Still looking for Alien Life? That's futile.
If you find decipherable signals showing intelligence, you've found life. Or at least, that life once existed; it takes a long time for light to get here just from the other end of the galaxy. You're as likely to find signals from a dead civilization as a thriving one, if there are or were any at all, unless there is civilization on Anglada-Escudé [soylentnews.org] that are just now where we were a couple hundred years ago, before harnessing electricity.
Alien technology markers do not necessarily coincide with life, because machine civilizations are more suitable for space travels
Technology without someone to build it is futile, unless like The Terminator the machines life built exterminated them, or like John Campbell's The Last Evolution [mcgrewbooks.com], Earth is attacked by aliens and... well, no spoilers given.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday February 07, @12:07AM (1 child)
I think SETI well worth doing, but not because the odds of finding intelligent life are good. Yes, of course the odds are hugely unknown, but there seems ample reason to suppose they are very low. Of the 4.5 billion years of Earth's existence, intelligent life capable of SETI has existed for only 0.000001% of that time. Possibly microbial life once existed on Mars, but died out. Looking at our own solar system, so far we have come up blank. To the best of our current knowledge, every other world near at hand is dead and sterile. Most of the universe seems extremely inhospitable. We hope we can maintain civilization for a very long time, though how we're going to make it to 100,000 years let alone millions, I don't know. Perhaps just 1000 more years will be enough time to work out our issues, provided we can keep a lid on the insanity, and thereafter, reaching 100,000 years will be relatively easy.
I guess microbial life of infinitesimal intelligence might be relatively common. Still only 1 in 10000, perhaps, yet that would be enough to assure that the galaxy has millions of alien life forms.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday February 09, @03:14PM
Yes, and they act as if every planet in its goldilocks zone is inhabited, when in our own stellar system there are three planets in the goldilocks zone, but only one has life or is even capable of sustaining life once planted there.
If we do ever discover an intelligent species with SETI it will likely be from a dead civilization whose star died a few hundred thousand (or a few billion) years ago.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Monday February 06, @06:53PM
Why do you think a machine civilization wouldn't qualify as life?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Informative) by legont on Tuesday February 07, @03:46AM
Whatever the base of intelligence, it still, presumably, needs to communicate. Traces of that commutations is what we are looking for.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday February 08, @01:04AM
Self-replicating machines that did come into existence from natural causes are known as life. Intelligent machines that did not come into existence from natural causes, whether or not they qualify as life, have to have been created by other intelligent beings, and thus directly or indirectly by life forms.
Thus if you find intelligence of extraterrestrial origin, you've found (present or past) intelligent extraterrestrial life.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06, @03:00PM
Nice spin and snow job. In other words, so-called "AI" performed so poorly that it picked up obvious false-positives that the previous software was programmed to skip over.
WOW! signal they are not.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday February 06, @08:40PM
read “Replacement part being rushed with all possible speed.” [newyorker.com]
Washington DC delenda est.