Hamid Valizadegan, a machine learning scientist at NASA, previously trained an algorithm to analyze images of blood vessels in astronauts’ retinas. This has improved efforts to understand changes in vision caused by microgravity. It was an important job, but Valizadegan, whose childhood love of the night sky never faded, could not let go of his desire to study the stars. “I would look at the sky for hours and hours, pondering the meaning of life and whether we are alone in this vast universe,” Valizadegan says. But earlier, space scientists seemed reluctant to use artificial intelligence as a tool to explore the universe. This could be because sophisticated algorithms often do not reveal the methods they follow to reach conclusions. Advanced AI systems are inspired by the brain, so individual artificial “neurons” perform calculations and then pass the information on to other nodes in the network. The resulting systems are so computationally intensive that it may be impossible to know how they arrived at the answers. This black-box quality, Valizadegan says, was frustrating to scientists who relied on historically proven standards for high-resolution modeling and simulation. But modern astronomy had reached a bottleneck by then. Telescopes in space and on Earth gather so much information that humans can’t understand quickly, if at all. Future observatories were being planned that would flood the field with more observational information. Take the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, for example, which scientists first proposed building in 2001. Starting in 2025, it will take pictures of the entire sky every three nights with the camera largest in the world, at 3,200 megapixels. It is expected to acquire data on a million supernovas each year, as well as tens of thousands of asteroids and other celestial bodies. How can any number of human scientists study everything by themselves? In 2014, Valizadegan collaborated with astronomer John Jenkins, who invited him to join the search for another Earth-like planet in our galaxy, using more robotic technology. This was the ideal project that Valizadegan dreamed of. Due to the possibility of life on other planets in strange forms different from our planet, scientists set their sights on finding the form we know: a rocky world with feeling stable and liquid water surrounding a star. But discovering such a planet is an astronomical problem in the literal sense of the word, as some estimates indicate that the number of planets in the Milky Way Galaxy is hundreds of billions. .with a small – but unknown – percentage of them similar to planet Earth.
Humanity has gotten off to a relatively slow start in this endeavor. A. found
