While science fiction lore tells us that humans will meet extraterrestrial life in the form of little green men, the detail that should raise hairs this Halloween is this: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence took a major leap forward with AI, and it increasingly focuses on AI agents built by humans listening for AI agents built by aliens.

Some scientists have suggested that extraterrestrial civilizations, if they exist, could be billions of years older than humanity. Such civilizations might have developed technologies far beyond humanity’s, including forms of AI.

Breakthrough Listen and the SETI Institute are bringing agentic AI into the daily search for extraterrestrial intelligence. At the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, agents can now steer the instrument, enhance and correct incoming data, and apply AI models to the incoming stream — all from a single natural language request. The NVIDIA Holoscan platform processes the massive streams of sensor data, giving agents live data to act on.

The result is a faster, more adaptable search for potential signals from extraterrestrial life and technologies.

“As our new agentic observatories reach out into the universe, what they find may have much more in common with themselves than with the humans who created them,” said Andrew Siemion, Bernard M. Oliver chair for SETI at the SETI Institute and principal investigator of Breakthrough Listen. “But this isn’t something to fear. Rather, it’s a breakthrough in translation.”

Radio telescopes generate enormous volumes of data, creating a challenge for scientists who need to identify potentially interesting signals as observations unfold.

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