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Category: alien life – Page 47

A pair of worlds that are just around the corner in cosmic terms look to be in the right spot to potentially host life as we know it.

A report in the February issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics details the discovery of two exoplanets the orbit the red M-dwarf star GJ (or Gliese) 1002 in its habitable zone and are not far off from the mass of Earth.

These two characteristics top the list of things that make another planet worth getting excited about in terms of the odds it might have some sort of critters or even just primitive microorganisms hanging out.

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For thousands of years, humanity has wrestled with the idea we may not be alone in our solar system.

Speculation that aliens might exist dates back to philosophers in ancient Greece, but it was the middle of the 20th century when people’s imaginations really began to run riot — suddenly ‘little green men’ were everywhere in popular culture.

The reality is that if extraterrestrial life does exist in our solar system it will be of a more simpler variety, perhaps hidden in Venus’ clouds, beneath Mars’ surface or in the vast underground oceans of one of Saturn’s icy moons.

But where else is the best bet of finding it? MailOnline speaks to a number of experts to find out.

Continue reading “MailOnline looks at where aliens could exist in our solar system” | >

Artificial Intelligence or AI more specifically strong AI or artificial superintelligence could possibly be the answer or the solution to the Fermi paradox. The Fermi paradox, named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and various high estimates for their probability of existence. The conundrum for the existence of aliens and more categorically intelligent aliens could be a much simpler solution that we’ve previously thought. To more broadly answer the question of intelligent aliens, we first have to think about whether it’s possible that we are a just a tiny spec in the vastness of space, the only place in the universe where intelligent life found its way to manifest Or maybe there is an abundance of intelligent life out there and we just haven’t found it yet. The search for extraterrestrial life is arguably one of the most all-encompassing scientific quest endeavours of our time. How would we know if we had found alien life? It would be interesting to find something that looks like intelligent alien life, but is not actually alive. It could be a space probe. Or a satellite. We often imagine extraterrestrial life as having a face, because we can’t figure out what it would look like. But if we were to find intelligent alien life, we might not immediately know what it is. Our guesses till recently were random mixtures of biological forms. An advanced civilization however could also be able to engineer machines or digital living forms with the exact same properties as biological forms. A growing number of scientists believe that the aliens we are looking for are in fact AI. It is quite possible that some civilizations could have transcended biology all together to become artificial superintelligence.

#Aliens #AI #ScienceTime.

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Continue reading “Could Intelligent Alien Life be AI?” | >

The goal of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is to quantify the prevalence of technological life beyond Earth via their “technosignatures”. One theorized technosignature is narrowband Doppler drifting radio signals.

The principal challenge in conducting SETI in the radio domain is developing a generalized technique to reject human radio frequency interference (RFI). Here, we present the most comprehensive deep-learning based technosignature search to date, returning 8 promising ETI signals of interest for re-observation as part of the Breakthrough Listen initiative.

The search comprises 820 unique targets observed with the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, totaling over 480, hr of on-sky data. We implement a novel beta-Convolutional Variational Autoencoder to identify technosignature candidates in a semi-unsupervised manner while keeping the false positive rate manageably low. This new approach presents itself as a leading solution in accelerating SETI and other transient research into the age of data-driven astronomy.

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A prime target in the search for extraterrestrial life is Europa, a moon of Jupiter that’s covered with a sheet of salty ice. But what kind of salt is there? Researchers say they’ve created a new kind of salt crystal that could fill the bill, and perhaps raise hopes for finding life under the ice.

This salt crystal is both exotic and common: It’s actually table salt — also known as sodium chloride, with the chemical formula NaCl — but bound up with water molecules to form a hydrate that doesn’t exist naturally on Earth.

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