Scientists express confidence that “artificial intelligence technologies can prove the existence of alien life”, reports the Daily Star
UFO researchers believe that AI will be able to determine whether an unidentified object is a bird or an airplane… or even something unknown to earthlings.
Avi Loeb, chair of the astronomy department at Harvard, says it will soon be possible to determine if there are aliens among humans by tracking correctly entered data.
The author of The Alien plans to build 100 specialized telescopes equipped with wide-angle lenses, infrared technology, radios and an audio system to help identify UFOs and track other planets as part of Project Galileo.
The privately funded project aims to “make the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of extraterrestrial technological civilizations from casual sightings and legends into the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research.”
The technology will be used to search for physical objects, not radio signals like the long-running Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI), and Loeb says they can use AI to determine if objects are coming from Earth or alien neighbors.
“We will have an artificial intelligence system that will determine whether we are looking at a bird, a drone, an airplane or something else,” the professor said in an interview with Sifted.
In turn, Zvi Weizner, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Timbr from Tel Aviv, said that data scientists from his company are working on an algorithm for the project that will identify mysterious objects.
The use of AI for image analysis is widely known, but in the case of Galileo, it is not as simple as training a machine learning algorithm to identify objects.
The bottom line is that it is not known what is being searched for, or more precisely, a search is being made for objects that are not included in the existing image catalog, which could be used to train a machine learning algorithm.
“I expect that the algorithms used for image analysis will generate a continuous stream of unexplained objects described by a set of observational data, which will require classification by characteristics (size, shape, color, location, time, source, etc.). Data scientists will be able to easily discover and select the data they need to create and train new machine learning algorithms that will further reduce false positives and ultimately provide a “clean” list of observations that cannot be explained as known objects,” explained Avi Loeb.
The news comes just weeks after Loeb said the “best chance” for humans to prove the existence of alien life is to look for signs in the form of glows on other planets. The theoretical physicist drew inspiration for his theory from an interview with International Space Station commander Terry Wirtz, who observed the glow of artificial lights on the night side of the Earth.
He wrote on Medium: “Our best chance for imaging city lights outside the solar system is around the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf located 4.25 light-years away.”