In July, some of the world's leading astronomers and planetary scientists who specialize in the search for technological intelligence elsewhere in the cosmos gathered to discuss their work at the University of Oxford's physics department.
They were attending this year's annual Breakthrough Discuss conference — a meeting of the minds to unravel how artificial intelligence, astrobiology and space missions may one day come to redefine our understanding of life and humanity's relationship to the cosmos.
"This was the first time we had the Breakthrough Discuss conference outside the U.S. It speaks to how technosignature science is becoming more universally accepted across universities. It's now a part of mainstream astrophysics," Vishal Gajjar, search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) investigator and project scientist for Breakthrough Listen's international collaboration, told Space.com.
The conference is associated with other "Breakthrough" initiatives, including the Breakthrough Listen Project, which is a 100 million dollar program that will use some of the world's most advanced telescopes to search about one million nearby star systems for signs of technologically advanced civilizations. Another initiative, Breakthrough Watch, is aiming to characterize a number of Earth-size rocky planets within 20 light-years of Earth to accomplish the same goal of finding life beyond our world. The Discuss conference provides a platform for researchers working in different fields of astrobiology to compare and discuss their work, and to speculate on what the future of this exciting field might hold.
The hot topic of this year's conference centered around how artificial intelligence tools can help comb through massive sets of data generated by telescopes and other observatories to identify any indications that we are, in fact, not alone in the universe.
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