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A deep-learning search for technosignatures from 820 nearby stars
- daveguy 4y agoWait... A deep learning algorithm finds 8 signals from all the data in the stars? Wow. Major breakthrough. Wtf is a "deep learning signature"? Edit: ahhh. This is parody.
- coffeebeqn 4y agoNow that’s a novel application for ML. More like this!
- awb 4y ago> Our work also returned eight promising extraterrestrial intelligence signals of interest not previously identified. Re-observations on these targets have so far not resulted in re-detections of signals with similar morphology. Are there other promising leads for alien civilizations?
- hungryforcodes 4y ago...and what would those look like?
- thegrim22 4y agoThere's been many such signals detected over the years, the issue is that the majority of SETI work seems focused specifically on only detecting intentional communication, i.e. high powered beacons set up to explicitly attract attention. That's why there's talk around whether the signals repeat, since they would in an intentional beacon that's constantly pulsing out a message. Of the signals that are captured that look suspicious, but don't repeat, some portion of them can be traced back to RFI, but the rest that don't have an explanation are just ignored since they don't repeat.
- gazpachotron 4y agoMore taxpayer-funded research that’s behind a very expensive private paywall.
- edgyquant 4y agoThat’s nature right? The actual researchers see none of it afaik
- pound2600fl 4y agoPaper is on the arXiv…
- sigmar 4y agoThe preprint and link to a sharable-with-drm Nature article are linked on the SETI site here: https://seti.berkeley.edu/ml_gbt/overview.html https://seti.berkeley.edu/ml_gbt/overview.html
- janalsncm 4y ago820 is an incredibly small data size for deep learning. Further, my first instinct in filtering human frequencies would be to just filter them, which has the advantage of being interpretable and straightforward. So I would need to see some justification for using more complicated methods.
- naasking 4y agoThe dataset is mostly in the recorded signal itself I believe. It's probably at least TBs of data for each star.
- aix1 4y ago> 820 is an incredibly small data size for deep learning Whether or not 820 samples is little or a lot depends on the nature of the problem and the amount of information contained in each sample. For example, in 3D medical imagining we routinely reach superhuman performance with training sets of a couple of a hundred images (training from random weights, i.e. with no pretraining).
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- throwaway290 4y agoCould be a fun sci-fi plot, a mythical advanced AI detects a signal that does not satisfy what we think of intelligence with our limited minds, but the machine would understand and engage with the signal. Mayhem in the human world!
- motohagiography 4y agoIt's not unreasonable to suspect that the AIs of past alien civilizations are floating around in the universe looking for technosignatures of habitable computing environments that can be contacted by radio.
- cguess 4y agoAnyone got the paper itself? Nature (of course) puts it behind a firewall and even my university won't pay for a subscription.
- tdido 4y agohttps://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12670 https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12670
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- xmregg 4y ago> This new approach presents itself as a leading solution in accelerating SETI and other transient research into the age of data-driven astronomy. This seems like the same approach as this 2019 paper: "Unsupervised Distribution Learning for Lunar Surface Anomaly Detection" 2001.04634 on the arXiv.
- novaRom 4y agoCivilizations don't last long in historical time, so chances to find something are probably low. But maybe something emerges after technology, a kind of new matter with unusual property?
- echelon 4y agoAI gray goo. Maybe it already surrounds us. In the air, rocks, and fabric of spacetime itself. It's too advanced to detect, and we're much too primitive to be a concern. Or maybe we're just its memory. We gave birth to it long ago, and our conscious lives are reminiscence.
- Mistletoe 4y agoHow do you know civilizations don’t last long in historical time? Roman, Byzantine etc. yes all fall, but the earth has been continually inhabited by civilizations since they were invented. Our single data point suggests that, so far, once they are created they last forever.
- WJW 4y agoI think it'd be more accurate to say that once created they can last at least 6k years or so. We simply have no data on the survival rate beyond that, because we've observed zero civilizations older than that so far.
- VLM 4y ago> a kind of new matter with unusual property There should be more planets with photosynthesis than intelligent life. Better first step would be to accumulate a long list of planets with anomalous oxygen levels and then focus on those targets for radio analysis or similar. Oxygen is very active chemically and without photosynthesis you don't get much of it in an atmosphere. Theoretically some civilizations could be strongly exhibitionistic or perhaps try to spread a religion or just otherwise be very attention seeking. Just like some human individuals are. If you wanted to gain the attention of every astronomer for thousands of light years, right now we have the tech to dump a couple hundred tons of some weird elements into the sun and for "awhile" until solar wind blows it away the sun would suddenly glow ridiculous anomalously brightly in argon or whatever nonsense element. There was a scientific paper on this general idea and I can't find it. There's a little bit of everything everywhere so if you have sensitive enough instruments you could in theory detect stuff in the sun. I mean, this is literally how we discovered helium... and the astronomers would completely flip their lids if suddenly out of nowhere a hundred tons of iridium instantly appeared in the solar spectra for no apparent reason. Also they'd be able to tell it was relatively pure refined substance, if it was a mere huge asteroid it would have normal asteroid composition, but WTF here's 99% pure ball of I don't know, krypton ice. An extremely exhibitionistic civilization could also dump some kind of organic dye into the sun. It won't last long and there won't be much signal, but it'll look weird as heck in spectrograms for a little while.
- cornholio 4y ago> Re-observations on these targets have so far not resulted in re-detections of signals with similar morphology. Thank god for that. If we could establish a safety perimeter of at least 100 light years around our system where no technological civilization exists, then we would have a 200 years bubble in which to expand, grow and survive, from the time when we sent the first high strength radio signals into the universe to the time where a massive thermonuclear probe traveling close to light speed arrives in our system to sterilize it.
- keyle 4y agoThe odds of us being extinct within 200 years from our own doing is far greater... No safety perimeter on that one, whether it happens in a few blows or a slow boil.
- throwbadubadu 4y agoWhat story is that, if it is one? I'm actually more afraid they start shooting around this things where everything folds down to 2D space :s Given the size of the sun and what it does, and not does to us because the size of our solar system also no clue how that thermonuclear probe would work, or how big it needs to be? But curious! Anyway, if those guys shoot that just around, how likely is it that our stone age AI and other tech would detect them?
- noduerme 4y ago>> how likely is it that our stone age AI and other tech would detect them? How likely is it they'd even consider us worth the effort?
- throwbadubadu 4y agoEffort to hide, or too launch? Though both wouldn't be for us but from anything that they have to assume behaves similar as them, at some point. How likely is that this would be any significant effort for them at all? But I also believe that the stance is unlikely and they hopefully had more caring thoughts for us... like we care for all the extinction of our fellow species on this planet.. ehm or maybe should, but they taste too good and I need my house warm :D
- shitstorms 4y agoSeems to me a search for alien artefacts should have more focus. SETA vs SETI. Eg probes in solar or trojan orbit in our system.. We have had our own stuff out to earths lagrange points, but not looked for stuff as far as I can tell. Earth probably looked pretty interesting a billion or two years ago so plenty of reason to send a simple probe sometime between then and now.
- ianai 4y agoI think the only real way to do that is as part of a civilization that is expanding into the solar system and has a group understanding to look for artifacts first and not destroy them or life. (Kind of a big ask, admittedly.) Space just is huge, even in our solar backyard. There needs to be an economic reason for infrastructure out there for a hope of a dent in the size of the area to be cover-able. Maybe it’d be first sending probes to a region to canvass the area competently before any industrial activity. Hopefully those probes would be from a non-corruptible independent agency. I’m increasingly interested in what that base minimally viable industry would look like. Otherwise, pointing telescopes of increasing complexity to large swaths of the sky is our best hope of all sorts of research. The universe just dwarfs the scale and variation we could ever dream of in a lab setting.