• Due to ongoing issues caused by Search, it has been temporarily disabled
  • Please excuse the mess, we're moving the furniture and restructuring the forum categories
  • You may need to edit your signatures.

    When we moved to Xenfora some of the signature options didn't come over. In the old software signatures were limited by a character limit, on Xenfora there are more options and there is a character number and number of lines limit. I've set maximum number of lines to 4 and unlimited characters.

Are We Alone? - AI Will Tell Us

Gord_in_Toronto

Penultimate Amazing
Joined
Jul 22, 2006
Messages
25,695
Scientists are training machine-learning models and designing instruments to hunt for life on other worlds.

The Biggest Questions: Are we alone in the universe?

“I think within our lifetime we will be able to do it,” says Ravi Kopparapu, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. “We will be able to know if there is life on other planets.”


Just add in AI.

Why (sic) counts as life?

This problem—how to definitively differentiate between life and non-life—is a perennial one, whether you’re looking at distant planets or even phenomena here on Earth. Researchers may soon receive help from algorithmic techniques that can tease out associations too complex for the human brain to fathom. In recent experiments, Robert Hazen and his colleagues took 134 living and non-living samples (including petroleum, carbon-rich meteorites, ancient fossils, and a wasp that flew into their lab), vaporized them, and spread out their chemical constituents. Roughly 500,000 different attributes were identified within each sample’s molecular makeup and run through a machine-learning program.
 
What kind of data do they want to train the AI on, given that the sum total of planeta known to harbor life is 1 ?
 
What kind of data do they want to train the AI on, given that the sum total of planeta known to harbor life is 1 ?

I'd guess probability? It's not like we even have the ability to detect life on far away planets beyond out own solar system, so what we actually know is about as limited as you get. I mean, if you're locked in your bedroom alone, you're hardly the best data resource of what's happening in the world.
 
What kind of data do they want to train the AI on, given that the sum total of planeta known to harbor life is 1 ?

Just chemistry. There are chemicals that (on Earth) are only known to exist as produced by living organisms.

So the A.I. seems to be training not just to look at telescope data for those chemicals, but for other chemicals produced by the breakdown of those bio-origin chemicals, as well as for potentially new (to us Earthlings) biochemicals that (hypothetically) could be produced.

So the scientists are training the A.I. on the characteristics of biochemistry and having the A.I. extrapolate out and guess about what other sorts of currently unknown biochemicals there might be to look for as produced by undiscovered life processes.

A bit like SETI, they seem to be planning to use data collected for other purposes, going through a backlog of already gathered but possibly under analyzed data.

At least, that's what I got from the article. It didn't seem all that well written, so I might be wrong.
 
The last thing I want is for AI to tell me that according to their current calculations I'm alone. "But I can be your friend."
 
Back
Top Bottom