In the ‘Q&AI’ section, in which a question is posed to the artificial intelligence, the chatbot indicates that Mars is currently the planet where the chances of extraterrestrial life seem to be the greatest. “That’s partly true,” says aerospace expert Rob van den Berg.
This is perhaps the ultimate question that scientists, and many others, hope to answer one day. Does extraterrestrial life exist? We asked ChatGPT this column “which planet is most likely to have extraterrestrial life?” Below is the answer.
“I partly agree,” says Van den Berg of the Sonnenborgh Observatory in Utrecht. “Because a long time ago, Mars was a planet that seemed very fertile. There was an atmosphere, seas, rivers and lakes. Recently, organic substances have also been found. So it could indeed. But that’s not the only answer.
For example, there are also the moons around Jupiter and Saturn. “They are covered in ice and there seem to be oceans of liquid water there. Then you have the conditions in which life could be.
Celestial bodies or planets?
But in defense of the AI, she specifically asked for a planet, not a moon. “The answer therefore lies partly in the question,” concludes Van den Berg. “I repeated the question myself with celestial bodies instead of planets, and then you get a completely different answer.”
However, ChatGPT had more out of the box can think. Now the chatbot has looked at our solar system options. But the universe is of course immensely bigger than that. “If you add all that up, you have a huge number of billions of planets that look like our Earth. There are billions of them in our own Milky Way alone,” says Van den Berg.
Discover life in five to ten years
Finally, a human idea that the AI did not share: Van den Berg thinks that there is a good chance that we will soon discover extraterrestrial life in our own solar system.
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“There are missions to Mars to investigate life there and we will be bringing soil samples to Earth soon,” he says. “We will also be operating huge telescopes and a mission is underway to these moons of Jupiter. So yeah, I expect we’ll find the first evidence in five to ten years.
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