As we grow in population, the day may soon arrive when the planet Earth is not enough to contain all of humanity. To this purpose researchers have been working at identifying planets which are similar to ours and may be able to sustain life. The most recent study has been conducted by researchers at the Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems at Plymouth University.

The study has been significantly different than those conducted before it, for the use of artificial intelligence in trying to identify patterns that are too complex for a human brain to handle. They have identified five types of planets to sort their classification into. The new planets are classified based on which of these five planets they most resemble.

The identification and classification is based on the planets that have atmosphere and are rocky surfaced. The five planet classifications are like the present-day Earth, the early Earth, Mars, Venus or Saturn’s moon Titan. The atmospheric observations, also known as spectra, are fed into the network of artificial intelligence to make the automatic classification of a new planet studied.

This is a much faster process than the manual ones used in science projects that came before this one. The effectiveness of the system needs to be studied, before the system can be applied to future robotic spaceships. Selecting and identifying targets in outer space will become that much more easier.