Researchers Create Alien Searching AI to Find Exoplanets that Might Host Life

The alien searching AI looks for patterns of habitability in exoplanets

Astronomers are on an unending quest to find life on other planets. However, the search for Earthlike exoplanets is quite a tough one, and the results aren’t always so satisfying. This is why researchers thought of creating an alien searching AI that will look for planets that might support life.

The AI assesses the habitability of exoplanets

Any task becomes easier if you can get some help from a machine learning system. Therefore, researchers from the University of Plymouth, UK, decided to develop an alien searching AI. This algorithm will be able to predict if different exoplanets are likely to host life. Researchers will feed the algorithm with the requirements for life on a planet. Depending on the conditions on each exoplanet, the system will calculate the likelihood of that planet to sustain life.

The alien searching AI is great for finding patterns hidden in different results, as well as analyzing big masses of data. Therefore, such a system might identify some patterns in the exoplanets that researchers might fail to see. At the same time, it can run a scan of all the conditions at the same time.

The alien searching AI can assess multiple exoplanets at the same time

In other words, it can tell if all the given exoplanets are habitable or not. Such a process usually takes time, so human researchers took long to come up with results for one single planet. Now, the alien searching AI can do it for all planets at the same time. Once it finds a planet with a high percentage, it selects and focuses on its special conditions.

Researchers taught the alien searching AI to separate planets into five groups. These groups are named after the planet or cosmic object they resemble the most. Therefore, the categories are Earth, early Earth, Venus, Mars, and Titan, one of Saturn’s natural satellites. Even if the quest for life is actually longer, the AI brought valuable results and helped with a better categorization of exoplanets.

Image source: NASA