VASCO

About VASCO The VASCO project is about finding the unexpected. It was initiated as a different way of performing search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI). Traditional SETI efforts have relied on detecting signals from other civilizations, which has not been successful so far. VASCO is about looking for other signs of ETI, which has been interpreted as looking for the “impossible” – such as stars vanishing for no obvious reason. Our hope is that closer investigation of such targets may reveal a super civilization. It has been estimated that the chance of finding a civilization this way is higher than by traditional SETI. By going through old and new astronomical image data, VASCO strives to identify “transients”; essentially finding light sources that appear or disappear on a short timescale, astronomically speaking. The chance that an alien super civilization will be caught this way is of course still miniscule. But among all the transients that will be found, there is a very high probability that unknown astrophysical objects/processes may be detected. VASCO is therefore SETI research without the risk of wasting significant observational resources. In practice, the VASCO project relies on comparing huge numbers of astronomical images. This cannot be done completely automatically, but requires the scrutiny of human eyes too. Even if VASCO is an interdisciplinary project where advanced information technology (IT) is combined with astronomy, which involve the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, human input is crucial. The problem is the vastness of the astronomical data that we have; a handful of scientists is not enough to pull this through. So far, we have analyzed over 80,000 images. For further information visit VASCO website @ http://user.it.uu.se/~kripe367/MLblink/#/