00:04Was there ever life on Mars? Is there life there now?
00:07These are the questions NASA has been trying to answer for decades.
00:10But as humanity sets its sights to travel there in just a few years,
00:13we need to know where to land to look for life.
00:15And now experts say AI could be the key.
00:18Researchers at the SETI Institute say that these tools are able to look at topographical maps of Mars
00:23and find specific patterns that might point to signs of life.
00:25Of course, AI has to be trained, and the researchers chose to do that in one of Earth's most Mars
00:30-like places,
00:31the Atacama Desert in Chile.
00:33They fed more than 7,700 images and 1,154 ground samples into their convolution neural network,
00:40all taken from an area known to have once been a river basin millions of years ago.
00:44Now the area is an arid desert, 11,617 feet above sea level, low in oxygen and with salted soil.
00:51But still, life can survive there.
00:53The result? The AI was able to point out what it believed was the most likely place to find microbial
00:57life living in this inhospitable zone.
00:59And it was right.
01:00With the researchers saying the AI was able to point to areas that were almost universally inhabited,
01:05calling this new AI method of searching for life without boots on the ground
01:08the most reliable predictor of biosignatures.
01:11For more information on the sky.
01:12Here's some near-...?
01:15Here's some fear!å¡”wertthatausa.
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