<html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2004/12/omml" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40"><head><meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"><meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 15 (filtered medium)"><style><!--
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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link="#0563C1" vlink="#954F72"><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #E1E1E1 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b>From:</b> spike [mailto:spike66@att.net] <br><b>Sent:</b> Thursday, December 14, 2017 10:07 AM<br><b>To:</b> 'ExI chat list' <extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org><br><b>Subject:</b> nasa exoplanet announcement<o:p></o:p></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>>…NASA is in the process of announcing that the record has been tied: it found a star with 8 planets.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><a href="https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive">https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>>…Hit the Kepler tab.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>>…They are also claiming that this one was found using a neural network sifting thru archival data. They didn’t offer any details on that.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>>…Wait, hold it, they just brought on a guy from Google AI to explain it. They are in the process of saying this was done by AI. Coooool! spike<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>WOWsers, NASA just gave a mind-blowing announcement on Kepler, wooooohoooo! They are claiming GoogleAI used the same software it claims can tell the difference between a dog and a cat, then set that on the task of recognizing exo-transits. As far as I know, this is the first time AI has found an exo.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>This is so cool: we often hear the words that aerospace guys really find distasteful but true just the same: there isn’t much point in building new orbiting instruments when we don’t have the budget to even look at most of the data already collected and archived by instruments defunct for years or even decades. When I say most, I mean some instruments have had less than a tenth of a percent of the data ever seen by bio-eyeballs. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>So… It looks to me like the next great wave in astronomy is to somehow automate the process of digging thru skerjillions of MB of archived data.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Aside sorta: picture in your mind an archaeologist. You see this guy pecking away at rocks and sifting thru gravel at some remote site, sure. But those are generally grad student slave labor doing that. We have museum cabinets filled with stuff they dug up decades ago, didn’t know what it was, filed it away, graduated, the stuff is still there to this day. Archaeologists who go thru museums looking at what is already there make huge discoveries, such as Steven Jay Gould wrote about in Wonderful Life in 1989, a book which rocked my world. Those fossils were extracted in the early 1900s, but Wolcott didn’t know what they were so they ended up forgotten in a museum until discovered decades later by Alberto Simonetta, durn near by chance. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Now we astronomy geeks want to know: how many Burgess Shale-magnitude discoveries are sitting there as lonely bits on DVDs, waiting for someone or something to look at them and figure out what it is telling us? Today we heard of the first case of an AI finding an exo-planet. We don’t have the budget for arbitrarily many grad students, but we can replicate this AI arbitrarily many times, and they never get bored, tired, drunk, hungry, sleepy, stoned, distracted by some sexy grad student, none of that. This is a new day.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>spike<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></body></html>