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Augmented Astronauts Needed for Deep Space Missions
A random reader writes "IEEE is carrying a story about how 'extended space missions' may require a little forced evolution, or BORGIFYING. Humans must have additional abilities via implanted technologies (repair bones, monitor radiation levels). Machines must become more organic (fixing themselves, etc)."
Running Windows Update so you don't drop dead is a little dodgy.
Picard: "Mr. LaForge, have you had any success with your attempts at finding a weakness in the Borg? And Mr. Data, have you been able to access their command pathways?"
Geordi: "Yes, Captain. In fact, we found the answer by searching through our archives on late Twentieth-century computing technology."
[Geordi presses a key, and a logo appears on the computer screen]
[Riker looks puzzled] "What the hell is 'Microsoft'?"
[Data turns to answer] "Allow me to explain. We will send this program, for some reason called 'Windows', through the Borg command pathways. Once inside their root command unit, it will begin consuming system resources at an unstoppable rate."
Picard: "But the Borg have the ability to adapt. Won't they alter their processing systems to increase their storage capacity?"
Data: "Yes, Captain. But when 'Windows' detects this, it creates a new version of itself known as an 'upgrade'. The use of resources increases exponentially with each iteration. The Borg will not be able to adapt quickly enough. Eventually all of their processing ability will be taken over and none will be available for their normal operational functions."
Picard: "Excellent work. This is even better than that 'unsolvable geometric shape' idea."
. . . 15 Minutes Later . . .
Data: "Captain, We have successfully installed the 'Windows' in the command unit and, as expected, it immediately consumed 85% of all resources. We however have not received any confirmation of the expected 'upgrade'."
Geordi: "Our scanners have picked up an increase in Borg storage and CPU capacity to compensate, but we still have no indication of an 'upgrade' to compensate for their increase."
Picard: "Data, scan the history banks again and determine if there is something we have missed."
Data: "Sir, I believe there is a reason for the failure in the 'upgrade'. Apparently the Borg have circumvented that part of the plan by not sending in their registration cards.
Riker: "Captain, we have no choice. Requesting permission to begin emergency escape sequence 3F . . .
Geordi, excited: "Wait, Captain I just detected their CPU capacity has suddenly dropped to 0% !"
Picard: "Data, what do your scanners show?"
Data: "Apparently the Borg have found the internal 'Windows' module named 'Solitaire' and it has used up all the CPU capacity."
Picard: "Let's wait and see how long this 'solitaire' can reduce their functionality."
. . .Two Hours Pass. . .
Riker: "Geordi, what's the status on the Borg?"
Geordi: "As expected the Borg are attempting to re-engineer to compensate for increased CPU and storage demands, but each time they successfully increase resources I have setup our closest deep space monitor beacon to transmit more 'windows' modules from something called the 'Microsoft fun-pack'.
Picard: "How much time will that buy us ?"
Data: "Current Borg solution rates allow me to predicate an interest time span of 6 more hours."
Geordi: "Captain, another vessel has entered our sector."
Picard: "Identify."
Data: "It appears to have markings very similar to the 'Microsoft' logo"
Over the speakers: "THIS IS ADMIRAL BILL GATES OF THE MICROSOFT FLAGSHIP MONOPOLY. WE HAVE POSITIVE CONFIRMATION OF UNREGISTERED SOFTWARE IN THIS SECTOR. SURRENDER ALL ASSETS AND WE CAN AVOID ANY TROUBLE. YOU HAVE 10 SECONDS"
Data: "The alien ship has just opened its forward hatches and released thousands of humanoid shaped objects."
Picard: "Magnify forward viewer on the alien craft"
Riker: "Good God captain! Those are humans floating straight toward the Borg ship with no life support suits! How can they survive the tortures of deep space ?!"
Data: "I don't believe that those are humans sir, if you will look closer I believe you will see that they are carrying something recognized by twenty-first century man as doe-skin leat
The Borg Hypothesis
Robert Hoffman, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Patrick J. Hayes, and Kenneth M. Ford,
Institute for Human and Machine Cognition
What if intelligent computing were centered inside humans? This essay's title is inspired by the nemesis of Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the starship Enterprise in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Borg are--or should we say "is"--a species consisting of organic beings symbiotically merged with technology. Each individual Borg is laden with all manner of appliances, ranging from laser eyeballs to appendages resembling drill presses to computational and communication devices implanted in their nervous systems. The Borg is a collective, meaning that they--or it--possess a single mind. That Borg mind has the single intent of "assimilating" all organic species into the collective. Assimilation involves first injecting nanoprobes that thoroughly transform the organic being down to the molecular level, then grafting on the various appliances (or else growing them de novo like so many cloned carrots in a hydroponic garden). Wending their way through the galaxy in huge Rubik Cube-like vehicles, the Borg assimilate entire planets at a time and carve up starships as if they were roast beef, making them (it) an especially nasty adversary.
In our real world, we already routinely replace hip joints with titanium and inner-ear structures with microcircuits; we can carry telephones comfortably on our heads, and Web-enabled eyeglasses can augment our view of reality. To counter the effects of drowsiness or inattention, DaimlerChrysler is developing prototypes that continuously monitor drivers' physical and mental states, while DARPA's Augmented Cognition Program is planning an even more ambitious reach to "plug in" the warfighter of the future (www.darpa.mil/ipto/programs/augcog/index.htm).
Portending an even braver and newer world, it's now possible to insert wires into a person's nerves to control appliances. We can even send such signals over the Internet, where they are decoded by computer and then fed into another person's nervous system.1 Human bodies are getting more and more plugged in.
It's not easy to set aside questions of ethics and choice. It is not even possible. However, in this essay we simply overlook them in order to work toward our hypothesis. To do that, we must take you on a trip into space. Our argument is that if humanity decides to continue human exploration of space, we will sooner or later--probably sooner--be forced to center some intelligent computing inside humans.
Men into space
In 1959 and 1960, Ziv Television Productions and producer Lewis J. Rachmil produced a television series titled Men into Space. This series featured the space concepts of artist Chelsey Bonestell, whose works had a major impact on many writers, including Arthur Clarke, and motion pictures, such as Destination Moon and The Conquest of Space. For his TV series, Rachmil also relied heavily on advice from the US Air Force and the Surgeon General. Men into Space was intended to present the most realistic depiction of what it would be like to establish a space station or moon base and then begin the process of exploring the planets. Episodes included one in which a fold on an astronaut's space suit accidentally became crimped between two large pieces of a space station as he was assembling them in space. The problem: Is there a hole in the suit? If so, freeing the suit could kill the astronaut. In another episode, the crew was stranded at the bottom of a crater on the moon after a crash landing. The problem: Radio waves only move in straight lines, and there is no ionosphere to reflect them to receivers that are out of line-of-sight.
In one especially pertinent episode, an astronaut on a space walk at the space station becomes stressed out during a repair and botches a wiring job. As a result, a stabilizer rocket on the space station misfires, speeding up the rotation of the space wheel to the point where the crush of gravity
Because keeping an astronaut alive in space is so expensive and risky, we struggle to leverage the capacity of each member of the small crew through devices such as the Personal Satellite Assistant, an intelligent flying appliance. And some of you may recall occasional glimpses of Shuttle astronauts using laptops to assist them in various ways.
;)
If Microsoft had its way, this would be powered by "Clippy."
Astronaught (types into console): "Jetison all waste"
Clippy: Did you mean jetison all remaining oxygen?
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
That would depend on your definition of 'deep space.'
But that's only one dimension of space - what about 'tall space' and 'wide space'? We're ignoring two of the 3 dimensions - maybe there's where all that 'missing matter' is...I should call Prof. Hawking about this.
Just because you make a machine out of organic materials, which has yet to be seen... doesn't mean it will repair itself. True, living organisms do have a tendency to repair themselves, but this can't necessarily be recreated artificially. Any machine that could even simply make verbatim copies of itself would be a remarkable achievement. (programming a robotic arm to build another doesn't count...) We are still unable to understand many principles of life, let alone recreate it. Living organisms have extranordinary design for which no evidence is presented to where it might have come from. True, evolution is often stated as a reason, but that doesn't account for the design - only for a possible apparant process. We still don't know how the exact forces that produced life and the complex organisms came to be. Until we can understand this, we can't recreate life.
What about augmenting people just for general health reasons - not fluffing about in deep space (fascinating as it may sound).
Every day thousand of people die because one of their cardic valves cave in or because they cant react fast enough in traffic. The former should be easy to monitor with a simple implant that might also be able to medicate the patient before dialling 911 and dumping gps data and medical stats to the paramedics. The latter is about enhancing reflexes.
Im sure the common /.'er could come up with a handfull of other augmentations that would be nice - or indeed lifesaving to have.
And i think we will see a lot of those before we see people walking on mars.
For those of you who are truly intrigued by space, time, and the effects it will have on humanity, I highly recommend this book . Hawking is an excellent writer and reknowned scientist, a rare combination, and goes into detail in his book, "The Universe in a Nutshell". I just finished the cd-rom version and enjoyed it very much.
If you would like to be a leader with a large following...drive slowly down a windy two-lane road
I think that the idea of artificially enhancing ourselves with technology is the right approach, but the BORG technique of implanting high-tech computerized devices seems the wrong approach. Basically, this would open up our very bodies to hackers. By now we should all be aware how very difficult a problem computer security is. Personally I feel that computers and networks can never be made secure, and thus we should stop trying. Just imagine the inevitable result when some black-hat cracker breaks through the encryption protecting your enhanced liver, and proceeds to turn it into 'reverse', whereby it spews toxins into your bloodstream? Compound this with the fact that probably our bodies will be running Microsoft operating systems, and you see why this is the wrong approach.
The correct way to enhance ourselves is the technique outlined by Science Fiction Author Larry Niven. In variou Niven novels and short stories, the characters can live for hundreds of years by means of organ banks. If you lose an arm, use nanotechnology to put on a new arm. Of course, this will require two developments: improved nanotechnology, and the development of organ banks for all body parts. Probably this will lead to the death penalty becoming the standard punishmnent for every minor crime, so as to keep the organ banks full of fresh organs, allowing rich people to live forever at the expense of everybody else.
I hope this happens within my lifetime, as it is a Utopian scenario indeed.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
Pohl predicted this in Man Plus(1976), in which a man is modified to survive on the surface of mars. I don't have a copy at hand but there was an excellent passage about how humans can't really live in unmodified form outside of the savanna, the modifications (parkas, fire, etc.) necessary to live elsewere are just reversible so far.
Of course Cordwainer Smith was there in 1950 with "Scanners Live in Vain" with the Habermen and Scanners.
It beats the alternative: "damn." "damn." "Fuck! He's dead."
"Derp de derp."
Well yes we have.
too some extent
I mean that is the basic interface it is all tweaking and compacting from there.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
c'mon, who modded this up?
IEEE is going downhill. I mean, what a fluff piece.
To the degree that "augmentation" is going to happen, it's going to happen for medical purposes here on earth: drug delivery, joint replacement, osteoporosis treatment, etc.
I see the perfection of evolution as the encoding of the human brain onto an Nth generation processing and storage system. For sociological and perhaps aesthetic reasons the system could be housed in the familiar human bipedal form but at a much smaller form factor. A two-foot high android with a human's memories and thought processes is exponentially more transportable than placing the same human in deep freeze.
Obviously, you need to run KDE so you can run the brand new kardiac-arrest package ;3
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Send robots instead.
Until a form of suspended animation is found, deep space mission are impractical and a waste of resources.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Antigravity is too important to ignore. If it can be found, it means that huge spaceships that are themselves biospheres can be constructed on the Earth's surface, then lifted into space by antigravity.
Artificial gravity, on the other hand, is necessary because it will allow cosmonauts to be like on Earth, and skip a whole generation of health problems.
That's the only solution for realistic deep space travel (and if we can crack gravity, maybe the secret of Faster-Than-Light travel is revealed).
Since modifying people has such a high level of ethical and PR baggage, I'd bet that it will be easier and cheaper to modify machines. Nobody has any qualms about trying out new hardware, software, and robotics concepts -- if it doesn't work, throw it out. In contrast, anything to do with people requires such high levels of oversight and ethical review as to make true experimentation impossible.
I'm not advocating unfettered human experimentation. I'm only pointing out that the stiff, but reasonable, restrictions on it mean that borgification should be approached from the machine side.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
In the meantime, here on Earth, something terrible happens and just about everybody on the planet croaks, except for some people here and there. Technology all goes down the drain as most devices and whatnot break down and nobody is around to fix them. People band together in little tribes, tattooing the image of their tribes on their bodies to distinguish one another, and mini-wars break out between these tribes, in which people beat the crap out of each other with clubs. People forget the religions that filled the Earth, and they start worshipping rocks, trees, small statues, old tires on the sides of the roads that haven't disintegrated yet, etc. After some 750 years, nobody even remembers the technology that used to be. Most buildings have crumbled from disrepair. Once again, people are living in huts made of straw, sticks, or bricks. (Like the three little pigs.)
Anyway, while all this is going on, the space crew's decendants had reached Pluto, done some fascinating experiments like gathering samples of Pluto dirt in small jars, and they started on their way back home to Earth, which isn't visible to the naked eye from Pluto. By the 750 years that I mentioned before, the decendants of those who gathered the Pluto dust arrive at Earth. They come in for a landing, and everyone sees this, freaks out, and thinks it's an alien invasion with UFOs or something. Entire religions are invented over this, and people have bloody battles for the next 2000 years over whose account is correct.
As long as I get to bunk with 7 of 9 that is...
The article mentioned that double leg amputees may be very well suited to long term work in space because it reduces the work load on the heart.
There maybe other advantages as well. Less mass for the heart to supply implies less mass to feed and keep hydrated, thus trips to orbit would be easier.
Internal spaces could be designed differently if you didn't have to account for legs.
Space suits could be smaller and cheaper, or even completely different. I imagine zipping around space stations in a little inflatable Tie fighter with arms to do work.
None of this will matter much until a signifigant amount of the human population does at least some of their work in orbit, or orbit becomes irrelevant.If that happens we will have to start modifying ourselves to be more efficient.
Let's take a leap and say that having no legs, or only stubbs,is demonstrably better for a long term space worker. Will people get them chopped off?
I don't think they will. The reasons might be more social than technical.
Even if large numbers of people eventually start doing this, there will necessarily be a time when the amputees-by-choice will be unusual. This will not be to their advantage in social interaction with people that don't work in orbit, or that work in full gravity space stations.
I'll admit that this may not be reasonable, but I think that amputees are not as good for the ordinary work-a-day world as other people. They are at a disadvantage when competing for jobs, money, women or men, fun and safety, all of which may be mostly the same thing.
Since humans are, by nature, driven by habit and prejudice, people will assume that the voluntary amputee space worker types are at a disadvantage and won't give them the same play as others.
Now, since me or my descendants will be working on the bridge of the ship and 7 of 9, some of us don't have to worry. But what of the average person? Would an average space-joe sign up for this? I really doubt it.
Let's say that we get past this non-sense and amputation is the norm, will it stay the norm or will it ever become acceptable for the upper class, whatever that becomes? Again, I doubt it.
If being an amputee is seen as an efficient work move, then those people that are not force to will not get their legs chopped off. Legs will be seen as a vanity item.
Think of it this way, do people select their transportation option for utility or prestige? What do you think you can tell about people from looking at their car? Why do I think life would be a LOT more fun if I owned a BMW Z3? The inflatable Tie figher could get a space worker from point A to point B just as well as shuffling around on a deck in a space suit. People won't see it that way though.
Serious body modification for utility rather than looks has serious social and technical problems associated with it. In the last millenium human technology has taken huge leaps on every front, but we are still ignorant, savage beasts.
I say that the trend will continue. Practicality will not interfere.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Anybody else attend a particular lecture at Minicon (Minneapolis) c. '93? There was a guy who did a heck of a theatre piece -- or was crazy -- or a visionary. Still haven't picked just one. Story was that he was like a cousin in the Japanese solid booster rocket company's family. The problem with 100% solid rockets is apparently the relatively instantanious thrust -- they take off like, well, bottle rockets. So he was centrifuging salemanders regularly to try to figure how much they could take and what makes them resistant to g forces. If you can't change the rockets, change people! Quite a bit of detail on salemander centrifuging in fact. He did a good part of the presentation with a B&W projection in the background of a Russian experiment with a severed dog head pumped blood. "It responded for several minutes!" And suggested that people should be bred as dwarfs to fit into spacecraft better.
You would not BELIEVE how quickly a con can plaster a 20-story hotel with disclaimers that they had not screened his talk. But was he crazy -- or just "bold"?
I'm betting the salemander-people astronauts are a no-starter for a LONG time. But, hey. China admitted selecting for short people to fit into the capsule. It wouldn't be _unreasonable_ to imagine a race of dwarfs inhabiting tunnels on Demos. And what is a severed head but a crude metaphor for organic AI?
Bruce Sterling's novel Schizmatrix from ages ago: Not unreasonable to think human-directed evolution will branch the genome around the inhabited solar system.