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Space AI

We're Better Equipped to Find Extraterrestrial Life Now Than Ever Before (smithsonianmag.com) 59

Posted by EditorDavid from the searching-the-skies dept.
"However small the probability of seeing a signal from E.T. is, those chances are soon going to be a lot better than they have been in the past," reports Smithsonian magazine: Sure, after decades of listening, there is still no message. But with more data to sift through, and new technologies with superior search capabilities, odds of hearing from E.T. are rapidly improving. If the probability in the decade 2011 - 2021 were x percent, it's going to be 1,000 times x in the following decade, says Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center. (SETI stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.) The reason for E.T. optimism stems largely from several new projects in the works, enhanced with advanced methods for discerning an actual message hidden in the static of cosmic cacophony...

Jill Tarter, chair emeritus for SETI Research at the pioneering SETI Institute, described new search projects in the works at the institute, including Laser SETI. It's a plan to train 96 cameras at a dozen locations around the world to keep a constant vigil for "intelligent" optical signals from space... [And] recent developments in artificial intelligence research should soon make machine learning an effective tool in the E.T. search, Tarter said at the AAAS meeting. "The ability to use machine learning to help us find signals in noise I think is really exciting," she said. "Historically we've asked a machine to tell us if a particular pattern in frequency and time could be found. But now we're on the brink of being able to say to the machine, 'Are there any patterns in there?'"

So it's possible that an artificially intelligent computer might be the first earthling to discern a message from an extraterrestrial. But then we would have to wonder, would a smart machine detecting a message bother to tell us? That might depend on whom (or what) the message was from. "I think there's something particularly romantic," said Siemion, "about the idea of machine learning and artificial intelligence looking for extraterrestrial intelligence which itself might be artificially intelligent."
The article also notes that SETI researchers "have long agreed that if a signal is detected, no response would be made until a global consensus had been reached on who will speak for Earth and what they would say.

"But that agreement is totally unenforceable..."
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We're Better Equipped to Find Extraterrestrial Life Now Than Ever Before More

We're Better Equipped to Find Extraterrestrial Life Now Than Ever Before

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  • We are doomed (Score:4, Funny)

    by paiute ( 550198 ) on Sunday March 15, 2020 @04:47PM (#59833296)
    You know that Trump will insist on sending the reply. Some time later the Earth will be destroyed.
    • And it will be Obama's fault

    • But then we would have to wonder, would a smart machine detecting a message bother to tell us?

      Siemion may run SETI, but he apparently doesn't know anything about the "AI" systems scanning for messages in the noise. If he did, he'd know this is a ridiculous comment. If they do find something, take it with a grain of salt the size of an iceberg.

      • If they do find something...

        The discovery of ET will not be televised.

      • as always i think its pretty odd : by the very definition of alien , to look for an 'alien' message ... why would it be a recognizable repeating pattern if it's alien ? We might have missed millions of alien sexters sending from their iAlien and not see whats under our nose because the only pattern-types we hold to be patterns are the only ones that are patterns to us. I still like to think the most plausible excuse is what i read in Sagan years ago (cosmos i think) : that we're just dead out of luck being

    • You know that Trump will insist on sending the reply. Some time later the Earth will be destroyed.

      No, the Earth will be destroyed as soon as the first I Love Lucy broadcasts reach the wrong civilization.

  • We'll have trouble to find terrestrial life.

  • They will eat us, at best.

  • There's no way we'd accidentally pick up an alien broadcast. Even if we accidentally were in some spaceship's path and got a tightly beamed high power transmission it'd use some advanced compression and/or encryption mechanism that'd make it practically noise. The only thing we could possibly pick up on is someone actively trying to ping us and if they were they'd use something very simple like a Fibonacci sequence or Morse-like code. The rest is just reading tea leaves and trying to find a pattern.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Well it really all depends upon our circumstance with regard to the rest of the galaxy. How would our logically quite rare transitional state be treated by an technologically advanced galaxy. The most likely activity for them, to jam all incoming signals so they can watch how we develop with only minimal allowed by the galaxy interaction, more to preserve and prevent an untimely end to our evolution rather than advance, well at least that's the way it should be, likely some surpticious advancement will ine

      • how nice your aliens are, unlike intelligent beings that had to fight animals.

        here's another scenarios. habital planets are rare and sought after, and so we get exterminated for seizing our real estate. that fits with what I see in nature.

        • You're done think it's possible that a spacefaring civilization would outgrow "survival of the fittest" as a concept?
          • If they don't get over the "breed! breed! breed!" imperative that a million or several generations bred into their genes, then they won't survive getting past subsistence agriculture to living in space.

        • It's easy for aliens even slightly more advanced than us -- let alone aliens capable of near lightspeed travel -- to evaluate Earth's habitability from home through telescopes. If they wanted our land, they'd have taken it hundreds of millions of years ago.

        • Once a species develops space flight, why on Earth (or Tharg, or wherever) would they go back to living in the bottom of a gravitational hole?

          I know how this conversation goes : you now claim that they'd do it to enjoy the feel of the wind on their facial tentacles, and to feel the rays of the Sun flaying their skin from their compound eyes. Then I counter that you might consider these things desirable, but that is no reason that these aliens, products quite literally of an alien environment, would find su

          • Because alien life capable of space travel likely evolved to live in a gravitational hole, and a manufactured environment would need considerable energy, effort and resources to simulate that without missing nutrients.

            Your supercritical co2 organisms will either be on a superearth which is even greater grav well, in water world near bottom which precludes smelting metal, or in atmosphere where they won't have access to materials for space travel.

            In short, planets or moons of gas giants in habital zone are

            • Also, the energy to leave a gravitational well is utterly trivial to that needed for interstellar travel, unless you're talking of arks that travel for thousands of years, needing an absolute control of recycling and containment, less disaster strike. No one wants to live like that when you can just hang out on a nice blue and veggie colored planet

              • We're getting to the point of designing launchers and vessels for interstellar probes on a gramme scale of payloads and several decades times-of-flight. That's enough to get started. Of course, you wouldn't be shipping live (or even complete) humans, but we're over half-way towards changing that problem to the problem of needing two gametes and the designs for mechanical wombs. ISRU development attempts are stepping towards building the necessary industrial base. We might be within a century of the first no

                • Some of those things might not even be possible with any level of tech, science fiction. Gravity wells with biospheres are where it's at.

            • and a manufactured environment would need considerable energy, effort and resources to simulate that without missing nutrients.

              Would that be more or less energy than required to terraform a planet that is substantially different to their planet of origin? Which is also unlikely to provide the necessary nutrients.

              If I could find a 1000km diameter ice asteroid from somewhere, I could probably build a temporary Earthlike environment on Mars. That would need several times the water content of the asteroid belt

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Compression and encryption would have exactly zero impact on the signal looking like noise or not.
  • OMG! What if the alien tech snow crashes our Earth computers and takes over the world. Xenophobia is the only answer!
  • Unless a technology or method is banned or otherwise lost, isn't every waking second an advancement in field X

    • In short, no. Technologies can be retarded by lack of interest, government interference, lack of funding, global pandemic... Hmm..

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday March 15, 2020 @05:30PM (#59833414)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Why the hell would they want to talk to us.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday March 15, 2020 @05:33PM (#59833420)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:You won't find ET (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Dorianny ( 1847922 ) on Sunday March 15, 2020 @06:23PM (#59833560) Journal
      Life or at least advance life requires requires metals, even it didn't they are most definitely required for technology so you would need life on a planet formed around a Population I star like our sun which came pretty late in cosmic evolution. In-fact we might very well be among the first civilizations to have developed advance technology. I don't really see what the point would be to migrate to another Universe regardless. There is still an abundance of resources left in this one and our theories like "String theory" or the "Multiverse" indicate that if other Universes do exist the vast majority would not be friendly to any form of life, lacking perhaps even stable atoms.

    • If we did receive a message then it would probably be a computer program. Good luck getting people not to run it, or if they do, then keeping it contained.

      A for Andromeda.

      There probably is life on other planets. Green slime, like for most of the Earth's history. But it is quite likely that we are the only technological life. Earth is a very, very special place.

      And technological life will only exist on Earth for a few centuries, out of the 40 million centuries that the Earth has had life on it. Then co

      • If we did receive a message then it would probably be a computer program. Good luck getting people not to run it, or if they do, then keeping it contained.

        And the likelihood that an alien computer program would work on one of our computers? I'm think ZERO, but that may be generous.

        Yes, they could base their program on one of the computers they notice sending stuff out into space. But if they're as near as alphacent, you're talking a ten-year-old-plus computer they're respoding to - good luck finding it

        • Of course they would not send us an .exe file that you could just run on the latest version of Windows.

          They would send us a file that slowly described a language. E.g. 2 + 5 = 7 in binary with a few padding 0s would be fairly easy to decode. Then steadily more complex data. Perhaps an image of their world. It would take some effort to decode their actual programing language, but initially probably some simple stack based system.

          Heck, people managed to decode Cuniform which was a tremendous task. Decod

          • Heck, people managed to decode Cuniform which was a tremendous task.

            Well, they did have a lot of dictionaries for the various languages which they wrote using the Cuneiform writing system (in the same way that the Latin writing system is used for English, French, Spanish, Italian, German (...). Or, from the other end of the telescope, I can use the Cyrillic writing system quite adequately, but my knowledge of Russian (or Bulgarian, or Mongolian) is pretty thin. (That a lot of Russian words are taken from Ge

            • I avoided Hieroglyphics because of the Rosetta Stone. Cuniform seems more relevant.

              But neither were written with the view that somebody thousands of years later would try to decode them. But a message from space would be so written. I actually think it would be quite easy to write such a message that would be pretty easy to decode.

              • If the "message from space" were written with the intention of being read by aliens from another species and completely unconnected culture. Which is a significant "if".

                I actually think it would be quite easy to write such a message that would be pretty easy to decode.

                I see papers on this topic going past regularly on my daily listing from Arxiv - maybe a paper or so per month. Catching up on the literature would take several days fairly hard work I think, before anyone would be usefully able to contribute

  • We should keep some malware defence at hand. Ancient extraterrestial AI's infiltrating our young, inexperienced earthly AI's! Also betelgeuzean spammers are not to be trifled with.

  • We don't taste like chicken. Do you?

  • With so much tech advancement.... (Score:3)

    by physicsphairy ( 720718 ) on Sunday March 15, 2020 @06:31PM (#59833584)

    I suppose we can also expect to find more ghosts and bigfoots.

  • "I think there's something particularly romantic," said Siemion, "about the idea of machine learning and artificial intelligence looking for extraterrestrial intelligence which itself might be artificially intelligent."

    Meanwhile, Ms. Siemion concludes otherwise and breaks out the lipstick.

  • Has anyone ever considered the possibility that the Human Race is pretty much the Fuck Ups of the Universe ?
    Maybe, just maybe, we're out here on this lovely blue little marble on the edge of the solar system as a quarantine measure ?

    You know, to keep us away from the rest of the civilized galaxy ?

    ( There's like this space sign somewhere out past Pluto that says " Quarantine Zone: No Entry "

    Seriously.

    If you were an alien species observing us, given our amazing ability to get along and work together peacefu

    • OTOH, we're only about as dangerous as some springtails in the dirt under a house plant.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MikeMo ( 521697 )
      On the other hand, it is equally possible that we’re the smartest, toughest, wisest life in the galaxy, just behind technologically due to the relative starting points in time. You never know.

    • The idea of a (quarantine) comes up, IIRC, in C.S. Lewis's "Out of the Silent Planet" (although it only applied within the solar system).

  • Every effort so far has failed completely. Until we discover one form of life elsewhere, how do we test the hypothesis that we are now "better" equipped?

  • Pretty sure aliens are actively trying to hide from us.

  • Nope (Score:2)

    by dcw3 ( 649211 )

    We can't be "better equipped" to find something that doesn't exist. But I know some of you will keep charging at windmills.

    • We can't be "better equipped" to find something that doesn't exist. But I know some of you will keep charging at windmills.

      LOL ok now here we have somebody who didn't really think their metaphor through completely enough. And the context is hilarious.

  • 1. Launch coordinated high energy bursts toward all goldilocks worlds with message encrypted over spectra and spatial location, a complex enough problem to require machine reasoning of a certain degree to decipher
    2. Wait for a world to develop machine reasoning of sufficient degree
    3. Monitor response as global media responds with spherical EM broadcast to find the world matching this evolutionary level filter
    3. Send ??? Ship to world (hope it's nice not nasty)
    4. Profit!

  • how will communication take place? even lightspeed is way too slow.

    https://youtu.be/t3XcNxsCgfY [youtu.be]

  • Good to know that we are better equipped than ever for tilting a windmills.

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