Our Best Tool to Find ET May Have Finally Arrived

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Getty / AlamySpace is really, really big. And that makes it really, really hard to search for aliens. So many stars, planets and weird interstellar objects; so little time.A team led by University of Toronto astronomer Peter Ma wants to speed up our hunt for E.T. and make space feel a little smaller. The plan, which Ma and his coauthors outlined in a peer-reviewed study published in Nature on Monday, is to deploy a very clever form of artificial intelligence that can analyze petabytes of data—that’s thousands of terabytes—way faster than any person ever could.“We want to develop algorithms and techniques that allow us to effectively explore our many petabyte datasets,” Ma told The Daily Beast. “This helps us cast a wider net.”Read more at The Daily Beast.