[HN Gopher] A deep-learning search for technosignatures from 820...
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A deep-learning search for technosignatures from 820 nearby stars
Author : taubek
Score : 88 points
Date : 2023-03-02 15:36 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Now that's a novel application for ML. More like this!
| novaRom wrote:
| Civilizations 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?
| Mistletoe wrote:
| How 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| echelon wrote:
| AI 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.
| cguess wrote:
| Anyone got the paper itself? Nature (of course) puts it behind a
| firewall and even my university won't pay for a subscription.
| tdido wrote:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12670
| awb wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| ...and what would those look like?
| janalsncm wrote:
| 820 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.
| aix1 wrote:
| > 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).
| naasking wrote:
| The dataset is mostly in the recorded signal itself I believe.
| It's probably at least TBs of data for each star.
| gazpachotron wrote:
| More taxpayer-funded research that's behind a very expensive
| private paywall.
| edgyquant wrote:
| That's nature right? The actual researchers see none of it
| afaik
| [deleted]
| cornholio wrote:
| > 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.
| BananaaRepublik wrote:
| But we're the ones with these ideas and we have nukes too.
| Maybe it's not that we're protected from aliens, but they're
| protected from us.
| keyle wrote:
| The 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.
| noduerme wrote:
| If there's a relatively low chance of habitable / inhabited
| planets in 100 LY radius, then they're islands of extreme value
| that you probably wouldn't want to just obliterate.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| Or obliterate them all, just in case?
| mabbo wrote:
| I think a civilization that intends to wipe out all others
| would be more proactive.
|
| Pre-seed any nearby system that looks like it could develop
| life at all with doomsday devices preprogrammed to activate the
| moment a technosignature is found.
|
| That's a lot of stars, depending how far out you want to build
| your safety zone, but you only need to send a seed craft that
| builds the rest of the device.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| Suppose one such probe malfunctioned or was damaged, what
| would the results be if it crashlanded on a lifeless
| primordial planet? This probe must be capable of some degree
| of self-replication. It might not actually diminish the
| possibility that some out-of-control self-replicating system
| comes back to destroy you. (Worse, you've explicitly designed
| it to replicate systems that cause barely discriminate
| destruction.) How much might you change before it no longer
| recognizes you?
| sdoering wrote:
| Nice plot for an interesting novel. Imagine your society
| having all but forgotten about the destructive seed-probes
| and coming to colonize the system it crashed in and
| malfunctioned.
| cbennett wrote:
| Check out Greg Bear's Forge Of God and Anvil of Stars 2
| book series . Not exactly the same plot you mentioned but
| covers an interesting variant plot including fall out of
| a situation where Earth is killed by killer probes and
| remnants of humanity painfully search for the Killer's
| system. What they find is different than expected
| walleeee wrote:
| It seems to me that if a civ with high technology is going to
| expend the effort to seed large numbers of solar systems with
| xenocide devices, it might as well spread _itself_ through
| the same space instead
| doctoboggan wrote:
| See the "inhibitors" in Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation Space"
| universe.
| williamcotton wrote:
| What if the rest of the lifeforms in our universe look and
| work nothing like us? What if they can't detect us as
| lifeforms and we can't detect them as lifeforms?
| mabbo wrote:
| Then we have nothing to worry about
| williamcotton wrote:
| Are you familiar with rhetorical questions?
|
| (Fingers crossed that readers have a sense of humor...)
| msla wrote:
| I'm not convinced we as a species have ever sent out enough RF
| radiation to be detectable against the backdrop of the Sun.
| VLM wrote:
| Kraus's radio astronomy textbook has or used to have a
| chapter on this topic. Its all a matter of distance. I never
| had a problem detecting legacy NTSC analog TV from the east
| or west against the backdrop of the sun out to dozens of
| miles.
|
| The same equations that apply to Jupiter's decametric
| radiation would apply to our own analog TV broadcasts. The
| numbers IIRC are not terribly impressive, if you knew exactly
| the modulation scheme and frequencies and power levels in
| advance and devoted a long term monitoring program to
| sampling excellent data using a better antenna than our
| civilization could realistically build, then it would be
| quite realistic to detect old fashioned NTSC TV out to a
| couple dozen light years at least.
|
| The problem is technology marches on fast, and the idea of
| pumping out megawatt class narrow band signals for mass media
| seems very temporary indeed, we're done with that as a
| civilization and that era barely lasted a couple decades. Its
| not a "radio cone" its a "radio donut". The engineering
| required to detect my wifi signals from earth orbit would be
| insane; the aliens will never detect my youtube viewing.
| Toward the end of the analog era, I had cable TV which
| theoretically wasn't radiating any signals at all out into
| space.
|
| It would be like trying to detect and track and do intel on
| the 2023 Russian navy by detecting spruce trees from orbit,
| because in the old days sailing ship spars required straight
| long spruce trees to build, so in 1700 whomever controlled
| the spruce forests controlled the seas. Looking at spruce
| forests from space is just not conceptually a useful way to
| even consider doing intel about a modern naval missile
| cruiser or a nuke sub. Or another example, no matter how hard
| you scan for mammoth herds and mammoth fur from space, you
| won't figure out much about our petrochemical spandex based
| yoga pants clothing industry in 2023. You can't just use a
| bigger telescope, its conceptually not going to work.
|
| Now if you had spies or observes or space probes detecting
| and relaying the story back home, maybe back home they could
| build something?
| cornholio wrote:
| There are many radio transmitters in the megawatt range in
| full operation as of today. I don't know what the cosmic
| background noise and probability of detection is in the
| medium - short wave bands, but I imagine a crystal
| controlled oscillator has an extraordinary characteristic
| signature over white noise if you listen to it for years on
| end, especially if you expect a slight Doppler wobble
| somewhere in the habitable zone.
|
| NTSC seems a bad example because it spreads the energy in
| wide spectrum using an unfamiliar encoding scheme and the
| carrier is mostly suppressed. Depending on the content, AM
| radio dumps over 50% of that megawatt into a single carrier
| frequency with a stability of +/- 10 ppm.
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| >> 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 wrote:
| Effort 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
| leducw wrote:
| The Killing Star by George Zebrowski. In my opinion a pretty
| terrifying rapid scenario.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| The Dark Forest, Liu Cixin. You're sure you haven't read it?
| If not, your concerns over geometry are... uncanny.
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| Sure, that's why I am afraid about that, and not the
| thermonuclear probe ;)
| groffee wrote:
| Is there a technical name for that 'bubble'?
|
| Like since we've been broadcasting signals out (television and
| radio etc) and saying they've been expanding at 100% strength
| in all directions (for the sake of argument) then we have a
| bubble around us.
|
| And even if we time-travelled back into our past and changed
| everything, nothing beyond that bubble would be changed because
| nothing we'd ever done previously had gotten that far out.
| eimrine wrote:
| Light-years since radio invention?
| petschge wrote:
| That is the forward light cone of Earth.
| throwuwu wrote:
| These dark forest conjectures are getting boring. The biggest
| nail in the coffin for them is the statistical improbability
| that any intelligence we come in contact with is going to be
| even remotely near us in technological development. They're
| either going to be millennia ahead or behind us and in either
| case we pose no threat to each other. You could try to make an
| argument that an advanced civilization would come by and wreck
| our little planet just for fun but in all likelihood we're
| about as interesting to them as a tiny rock poking out of the
| ocean, more of a navigational hazard than anything.
| DayDollar wrote:
| The biggest problem i see in the dark forrest theory is the
| "interesting information" inwards growth. Basically, most of
| the external universe is boring, slow and drip fed to a ever
| faster progressing species. At some point its just to static
| "up" there, and most of the civilization turns inward towards
| the "infinite" fun space.
| vinibrito wrote:
| > massive thermonuclear probe traveling close to light speed
| arrives in our system to sterilize it
|
| Damn! That hit hard
| DayDollar wrote:
| And there i was thinking, that would be done by rotating a
| black hole/ neutron stars x-ray jet towards a offender.
| sigmar wrote:
| The 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
| [deleted]
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Could 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 wrote:
| It'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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| xmregg wrote:
| > 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.
| shitstorms wrote:
| Seems 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| daveguy wrote:
| Wait... 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.
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