Why Alien Hunters Want Jensen Huang to Fund Their AI Telescope

While alien hunting is often associated with tinfoil hats and flying saucers, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute has established itself as a leading scientific organization since it was founded 41 years ago. As it scans the cosmos for alien life, it has published research in peer-reviewed astronomy journals and collaborated with NASA on several missions, including the Mars Curiosity rover. 

Recent AI advances have supercharged its efforts to analyze space data for anomalies that would likely require a technical civilization to produce, such as radio signals and beams of light. Now, the institute wants to take its search one giant leap further by allowing AI to operate an entire observatory—and it’s hoping Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will foot the bill.

“The idea is to—more or less—establish a neural network infrastructure in an observatory,” said SETI president and CEO Bill Diamond. In other words, an AI model would run all aspects of the observatory, from controlling the instruments to analyzing the data, allowing the observatory to operate autonomously. “That’s never been done before,” Diamond said.

SETI is putting together a proposal to pitch directly to Huang, who is already familiar with the institute’s work, Diamond said.