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- By Emma Woollacott
- business reporter
Image source, fake images
Very Large Array facility in New Mexico searches for signs of extraterrestrial life
There are between 10 and 50 billion potentially habitable worlds in our galaxy, says Bill Diamond. This makes his job quite difficult.
Diamond is the executive director of the American research organization Seti Institute. The letters “Seti” are an acronym for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
“Seti, as an effort, looks for science and technology beyond the solar system as evidence of life and intelligence, and that is generally a needle in a haystack problem,” he says.
“We are looking for something that is probably extremely rare and may be very difficult to find and extract from the background phenomenon that is being observed at the same time.”
But new tools are helping in the search. The ability of artificial intelligence (AI) to handle massive data sets (and detect anomalies) is transforming the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
One of those projects involves a Seti Institute partnership with the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico. This federal facility uses radio frequencies to study celestial objects, such as planets, stars, and asteroids.
Seti is building an AI-powered parallel software system for the observatory’s central facilities, the Very large matrix. Built between 1973 and 1981, the VLA consists of 28 large satellite dishes, 25 m in diameter, spaced across a desert plain. Imagine satellite dishes found in people’s homes, but on a giant scale.
When operational, AI will be able to process every bit of data captured – two terabytes (TB) per second. To put this in context, modern laptops typically have around 1TB of total storage.
Image source, Diamond
Diamond says the use of AI is already invaluable
Diamond says the increased use of AI is already proving to be “indispensable” as his institute continues to search for extraterrestrial life.
He points out that AI makes it possible to search for new types of radio signals from extraterrestrial sources. He explains that Seti has traditionally looked for narrowband signals similar to those used by humans.
“But there was always the question: ‘What if there was an advanced extraterrestrial technology that uses broadband (radio)?’ And if that were the case, our traditional methods wouldn’t work, it would look like a lot of noise on the screen. “.
However, Diamond says AI’s ability to handle massive amounts of data means it’s possible to take millions of “snapshots” of this snowy audio image over time and start looking for patterns. “It’s a way to add something new to look for.”
Another project with which Seti collaborates is Innovative listening. Backed by more than £100 million of private sector funding, this scheme is scanning one million stars and 100 galaxies, across a wide range of optical and radio bands, to search for evidence of technological life.
One member of the project, Peter Ma, a student at the University of Toronto, recently developed a new artificial intelligence system designed to examine telescope data and distinguish between possible real alien signals and interference.
His team did this by simulating both types of noise and then training their AI to differentiate between the two.
Ma says that an extraterrestrial signal, for example, “would only appear when we point our telescopes at it… and disappear when we point it away.”
The project has already identified eight possible alien signals that were not detected by traditional analysis. However, Ma believes that since the observations have not yet been repeated, they are probably false positives.
AI is also being used to try to detect signs of life of a more modest nature and closer to home.
Last year, NASA’s Perseverance rover began collecting samples from Jezero Crater on Mars that, if all goes well, will be returned to Earth within several years.
Image source, fake images
NASA’s Perseverance rover is collecting rock samples from the surface of Mars
Scientists already believe that the rover’s Sherloc instrument has detected organic compounds that glow under ultraviolet light.
However, organic compounds can be created through non-biological processes, meaning it is not yet possible to say whether they come from past lives on the planet.
However, this could all change thanks to new research from the Carnegie Institute for Science, which is using AI to analyze rock samples for signs of present or past life.
The team found that AI is capable of distinguishing living and non-living material, with an accuracy of almost 90%.
“This is a very new approach to searching for molecular biosignatures,” says joint principal investigator Dr. Robert Hazen.
“We used machine learning to look at the vast amount of data in an analytical method that produces half a million data points per sample. So we looked for subtle patterns in molecular distributions.”
Early plans are to use the system to analyze ancient samples from Earth, as well as some Martian samples in the form of meteorites. But, Hazen says, “we could, for example, fly an instrument through the plumes of Enceladus (one of Saturn’s moons) or land a carefully designed instrument on Mars.”
It’s still early days, and any promising results generated by AI must be validated by other observations, or by physics-based models, before they can be trumpeted. But as more and more data is collected and analyzed, the chances of detecting extraterrestrial life, if it exists, increase all the time.
Meanwhile, Diamond says, “progress is measured by the scale of effort, not yet by results.”