New York, September 26: Researchers have created a cutting-edge AI-based technique that can look for indications of past or current life on Mars and other planets.
The team claims that its artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology can accurately separate biological samples from current and ancient times from those of abiotic origin with 90% precision in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Lead author Jim Cleaves of the Earth and Planets Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, said that the quest for alien life “remains one of the most tantalising endeavours in modern science.”
“This new study has a wide range of consequences, but there are three key conclusions: Third, it is likely that this new method could distinguish alternative biospheres from those of Earth, with significant implications for future astrobiology missions,” Cleaves said. “First, it is likely that this new method could distinguish alternative biospheres from those of Earth. At some fundamental level, biochemistry differs from abiotic organic chemistry.
The cutting-edge analytical technique does not only identify a single molecule or collection of substances in a sample.
Instead, the researchers showed that AI can tell the difference between biotic and abiotic samples by looking for small differences in a sample’s molecular patterns. They did this by using pyrolysis gas chromatography, which separates and identifies a sample’s parts, and mass spectrometry, which finds the molecular weights of those parts.
Molecular analyses of 134 known carbon-rich samples from living or nonliving things were used to train a computer to figure out where a new sample came from.
