AI searching for intelligent life in space finds unexplained radio signals

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have given astronomers better tools to search for intelligent life. Or, at least, to look for signs that may indicate it. This is what a group of scientists from Curtin Universitythe results of which have just been published in astronomy of nature.

Its artificial intelligence is able to find what is called technosignatures. That is, it analyzes the signals captured radio telescopes, in search of those that do not correspond to any cosmic phenomenon. It then performs a second screening, separating those that may be associated with possible interference from the telescope itself.

Remain those who originally they can’t be explained in some way so that they can match the signals sent by technologies like ours. In other words, they may have come from another civilization of intelligent life capable of exploring the cosmos like we do. At the moment, the first tests of this artificial intelligence have found eight technosignatures. Does this mean that there is intelligent life there? They don’t confirm or deny, because it’s something much more complex.

Algorithm trained to search for intelligent life

As with any other artificial intelligence algorithm, the one these scientists developed had to be trained before it could be used. For this, real data were taken and some simulated signals. This data was processed by an algorithm, and it was indicated whether it was some kind of intervention. This allows the machine know what are the main characteristics conventional radio signal. It is important to say that although it is called artificial intelligence, these algorithms they do not think and are not intelligentsimply they are studying similarities and differences in huge dataset.

After the training is completed, the data 480 hours of observations from the Green Bank Observatory, from West Virginia. After processing, artificial intelligence threw 20,515 signals of interest. But not all of them will necessarily be associated with intelligent life.

Photo by Stephen Leonardi

Artificial intelligence does not take the work of astronomers

Artificial intelligence saves the work of astronomers, but they are still needed in the search for technosignatures. In fact, the 20,515 signals detected by the algorithm should have been parsed manually.

Thus, the authors of the investigation found that there were eight of them, which cannot be attributed to radio interference. These will be technosignatures that can be associated with intelligent life.

Does this mean that this algorithm managed to find intelligent life? Of course not. In fact, as he explained in an article for Talk one of the authors of the study, Danny Price, two things can happen. On the one hand, that in reality these signals correspond to some rare interference that is not cataloged and differs from what usually happens in the norm.

This would indicate that he had not discovered intelligent life. But, on the other hand, it could also be that he did not find any technosignature and that does not necessarily mean that intelligent life does not exist. There may be civilizations capable of producing technologies like ours, but they are too far away, or for some reason have not yet encountered us.

So far, these technosignatures have not been re-discovered, so there is still no explanation for them. It will be necessary to continue their study with new toolsboth those that already exist and those that are still under development.

At least now we know that artificial intelligence provides the tools to search for these signatures more quickly and, as Price’s own example shows, finds that civilized needle in the huge haystack that makes up the universe.