Artificial intelligence is not reserved for terrestrial use. It can also be oriented towards the confines of the universe.
A team from the University of Toronto is trying to use this technology that we hear about everywhere, whether with Microsoft or Google, in order to detect a potential presence of extraterrestrial intelligent life.
AI evaluates technosignatures
Chatbots like ChatGPT are all well and good, but can’t AI be used for higher purposes than the simple simplified restitution of already existing information? Researchers from the University of Toronto seem to agree with this observation and explain in a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy use machine learning to detect extraterrestrial technosignatures.
These could be used by intelligent life forms to signal their presence, using what scientists call the “ parting at 21 centimeters », a spectral line emitted by the neutral hydrogen atom in the radio wave domain. It corresponds to a frequency of 1420 MHz and would be the best vehicle to transmit a message through the universe.
Against false positives
But then, what is the use of artificial intelligence in all this? Well, to succeed in sorting out the sought-after technosignatures and those which would only be false positives, produced by terrestrial interference such as GPS signals. The team, led by mathematician and physicist Peter Ma, was able to use its algorithm on a 150 terabyte database, accumulated through the Breakthrough Listen program of billionaire patron Yuri Milner.
This project has collected since 2015 a huge amount of radio signals from stars located within a radius of 1,000 light years. 3 million signals emitted by 820 stars were thus analyzed by the AI, which selected 20,000. These were then reviewed by the human eye of Peter Ma and his team, who kept 8 worthy ones of interest. If, for the moment, nothing confirms that these are messages from alien civilizations, experience shows that artificial intelligence should make it possible to significantly accelerate the inspection of the universe in the years to come. To finally allow a meeting of the third type?
Sources: The Dispatch, The Verge
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