Scientists at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) are developing an artificial intelligence tool to speed up the search for evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations, with the help of society at large.
The team, led by Professor of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences, Jean-Luc Margot, analyzes the radio signals to distinguish between signals coming from local sources, such as telecommunications systems or radars, and signals from extraterrestrial origin.
Among those coming from deep space, it tries to distinguish between those caused by natural phenomena, such as quasars and supernovae, and those that could have been generated by technical means.
Astronomers call the latter “technological signatures”.
“Essentially, we are looking for other engineers in the outer galaxy,” Margot underlined to the Efe agency.
The project is based on radio waves because, according to this academic, “it’s very easy to generate them, they spread at the speed of light and the universe is very transparent to them, making them very good for communication” on scale space .
Since 2016, the UCLA team has been using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope, to record emissions from stars and planetary systems.
“We examined about 41,000 stars and detected about 64 million signals,” the scientist underlined.
Of the signals received, approximately 99.8% are classified by the project’s computer system as man-made radio interference, leaving hundreds of thousands of the most promising signals still for human study.
But a new tool the team is developing aims to streamline this search.
On February 14, the program invited anyone who wanted to help classify the signals, which requires only a computer or a “smartphone.”
Volunteers go through a short tutorial and are asked to examine radio wave images and answer simple questions, such as whether they are oriented vertically or horizontally.
Then, from a series of illustrations of common types of radio interference, they must choose the one that best matches the signal they analyzed.
With this, scientists are trying to generate artificial intelligence algorithms – sets of precise instructions – that distinguish signals more efficiently.
“The artificial intelligence tool we are building with the help of ‘citizen scientists’ will automatically recognize and eliminate the most persistent types of interference and will speed up our search because we can focus on the most interesting signals,” Margot emphasized to Efe.
For the teacher, the partnership can anchor the conversation about life beyond Earth in science and far from fantasy.
Margot also emphasized that he is “excited by the incredible response from the public”, explaining that after 236 examiners from the previous phase, who completed 5,000 classifications, since the start of the collaborative initiative with citizens “thousands of volunteers have delivered 200,000 classifications “. and more people are waiting to join this mission.
The scientist assured that he is not yet discouraged by the fact that so far no evidence of life beyond planet Earth has been found.
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We haven’t searched for a long time, so it’s not surprising we still haven’t found anything. The search volume is huge, but our features and algorithms continue to improve every day, and I’m excited about this research,” he concluded.
Source: DN
