Artificial intelligence has identified a rectangular structure with a triangle inscribed inside in one of the craters on the dwarf planet Ceres. The result of this visual experiment casts doubt on the usefulness of such algorithms for extraterrestrial life search projects like SETI.
Ceres is the closest dwarf planet to the Sun, which became famous a few years ago thanks to one of its craters, Occator, in which astronomers noticed some bright spots. Their mystery was solved by NASA's Down probe, which approached Ceres and saw that they were composed of volcanic ice and salt deposits.
In one of these spots, researchers from the University of Cadiz saw strange geometric shapes. This led them to conduct an experiment: to compare how humans and machines recognize planetary images to see if AI is capable of detecting "technosignatures" of probable extraterrestrial civilizations, reports EurekAlert.
The neuropsychological team recruited 163 non-astronomy volunteers to determine what they see in the crater images. Then the same was done by an artificial vision system based on a convolutional neural network and trained to recognize geometric shapes.
The researchers themselves believe that this is just a play of light and shadow, although they are not sure of this until the end. So far, they recommend not to introduce AI into a program for searching for signals of extraterrestrial civilizations such as SETI. Despite its enormous potential, AI can mislead people into noticing something that is impossible or absent.
But there is another side to the problem. “If a neural network identifies something that our mind cannot understand or accept, will it be able in the future to go beyond our consciousness and open the door to the reality for which we are not ready? What if the rectangle and triangle in the crater on Ceres are of artificial origin?”, Scientists ask.
So far, the search for extraterrestrial civilizations does without AI. For example, Yuri Milner's Breakthrough Listen project signed an agreement last year with the VERITAS ground-based reflector telescope. Astronomers will look for pulses of several nanoseconds that indicate the presence of cosmic beacons.
Georgy Golovanov
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