Life As-We-Do-Not-Know-It: AI and Alien Intelligence

Last night, I was alerted by

a science reporter to an intriguing new transient source in the sky, which was documented a few days ago in an astronomical catalog compiled by NASA. https://archaicmsflip.com/tgktmydn5y?key=de56cfe0f818bb9ef71154a3e151bf1e The last time I analyzed this catalog was 7 years ago, when I asked my student to search the catalog’s data for an anomalous transient of a similar origin. Back then, it took my student a week to come back with the answer and another month to write the first draft of our paper. This time around, I consulted a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) agent to fulfil the same task. The challenge took only ten minutes to fulfil and once accomplished, the AI agent was ready to plot the results and produce a draft of the scientific paper which details the new findings. Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.