Deathmatch On Mars: an Interview With Warren Ellis

pigrabbitbear writes "Iconic comic book writer (Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Red), cult novelist (Crooked Little Vein), futurist intellectual, and beloved Internet curmudgeon Warren Ellis, known for his impassioned arguments for space travel, talks to Motherboard about Newt Gingrich's presidential plans for lunar colonies and conquering Mars." Warren Ellis does not mince words.

Comments

The farther and more unattainable the dream...

[hcs_$reboot]

...the easier it is to promise

Re:The farther and more unattainable the dream...

[flyingsquid]

And it's time for that to stop. That's why I promise that if I receive the nomination of my party and am elected, then by 2016, I will put a stop to politicians promising things that they cannot possibly deliver!

Wasted money for decades

[Anonymous Coward]

Every new President has a space dream. And Congress has a different dream. In the end they make a compromise that does nothing but keeps jobs in Utah, California, and Florida.

I wonder how many times we could have gone to Mars and back with the money wasted in these compromises (like the ISS and the Space Shuttle)?

Re:Wasted money for decades

[outsider007]

It just took not wanting Russia to beat us before, maybe it will just take not wanting China to beat us now.

Space travel is next big step

[thesuperbigfrog]

Space travel, real space travel not jaunts into earth orbit, is the most-challenging problem of our lifetimes.

If you like sci-fi, the Manifold series by Stephen Baxter (not a referrer link) makes a great argument about space travel and how "big dumb" technology from the past can be harnessed smartly to lower the costs.

We certainly will need more than reuse of old technology, but it is a start.

Re:Space travel is next big step

[gestalt_n_pepper]

I call BS. Artificial intelligence is more difficult, and gets us more benefits in the end. We get any practical space travel as a side effect of solving AI.

Re:Space travel is next big step

[HiThere]

AI has greater benefits, but is also likely to have greater dangers.

OTOH, there are several people who believe that with proper funding, they could build an AI using just what they've already developed. They may, of course, be wrong, but it's difficult to be certain of that, because computation is still so expensive. To build a computer as powerful as the human brain is something that not even IBM has yet attempted. Watson ran on something that might have a powerful a brain as a terrapin. (That's a wild guess. Don't take it seriously. It's a double order of magnitude approximation.)

Still, one needs to remember that a lot of our brain's computation power is used to control our body. But it's also true that a lot of our thinking is done based on models of the world that we derive from sensations received by our body, and those sensors (well, something equivalent) would be needed by any strong AI that was intended to solve problems in the world and communicate the solutions to people. So it's not clear how much can be saved.

For that matter, *I* have a theory of "How to build a stong AI", but my problem isn't just funding, I have theoretical problems that I can't solve. But the basic essence is "People aren't of one mind. They have lots and lots of rather simple special purpose processes that do things like signal processing in ways that we already know how to handle more efficiently than the body has handled them. (Because we don't need to solve every problem with a specialized connectionist network.) That which we think of as our conscious mind evolved from a serialization mechanism which was needed to store memories in a retrievable manner. Language started from sounds that got attached to the serialization mechanism, so that a sound would recall a specific memory. This evolved into something more complex when the brain became larger as the body became larger. Who we *really* are is the parallel processing computer that doesn't use language at all, but the part of us that uses words, logic, etc. is evolved from this rudimentary memory manager. Of course, as it bacame more useful, it evolved to become more powerful, but it's still a quite minor part of the whole. And it's basic function limits it to (essentially) serial operation.

Unfortunately, it's mainly the serialization that I more or less understand how to build. The scheduler isn't a solved problem. It may not be soluble. (I.e., I suspect that like much of the rest of our body, it's a sub-optimal solution. One that just "works good enough". And that the real problem is NP-hard, and a propsed answer can't even be checked in polynomial time.) But we are currently working on schedulers for multi-processor systems, and we may some have a better solution than is implemented by our brain. (My language choice is "implemented by our brain" or "used by our mind",) That this is the case is hinted at by the number of specialized areas in the brain that essentially cut themselves off from the global scheduler. This reduction of the number of connections that need to be scheduled wouldn't be as important if the algorithm were less sensitive to the number of processes that it needed to schedule. (OTOH, do note that the structure of the brain is significantly different from that of a multi-core CPU. It's slower to move signals, so there's a greater gain in localizing the processing. This is an alternative explanation, so perhaps the problem isn't NP-hard except in special cases. We do lots of things by heuristics which work "most of the time". If the situations where they fail are rare enough, we won't evolve away from that choice.)

But please note, using genetic programming to select actions of a strong AI could be a very bad decision. This will inherently evolve in the direction of choices benefiting the AI, and ignoring whether or not they benefit humans.

ISRU...

[taiwanjohn]

FTFA: "There’s bugger all worth mining on the moon."

Well, yes, there's nothing there worth bringing back to earth, but that doesn't mean there's nothing of value. Regolith contains several useful elements, such as oxygen, iron, aluminum, titanium. These are all fairly plentiful on earth, but in space they're worth a small fortune.

Re:ISRU...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Tell me again why you wouldn't mine this stuff in the asteroid belt where it isn't at the bottom of a gravity well and then use it to manufacture stuff in space?

Re:ISRU...

[taiwanjohn]

Well, I never said I wouldn't mine the asteroid belt, but the moon has the advantage of proximity. You can get to the moon in a few days, the asteroid belt is farther away than Mars. Also, the moon's gravity well is conveniently shallow enough to escape with a rail-gun (see: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress), and most of the stuff you need to build and power your rail-gun is available in the regolith.

So, first you go to the moon, and start mining the resources: oxygen for propellant and life support; iron, aluminum, magnesium, and titanium for building things. Once you can deliver these goods to lunar orbit, you start building the habitats and cargo ships you'll need in order to mine the asteroids. In the meantime, you can do a more close-up assay of the moon's resources. Given the number of asteroids that have impacted on the moon over billions of years, there's a good chance you could find some major sources of platinum, palladium, nickel, etc..

In this scenario, the main things you'll need to import to the moon will be carbon and ammonia. Carbon is essential to life, and useful for making high-grade steel; ammonia gives you nitrogen and hydrogen, both of which are scarce on the moon, but necessary for human settlement.

Re:ISRU...

[flyingsquid]

The math suggests we're a long way off. According to Wikipedia, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers together cost about 1 billion to build, launch and operate. According to a quick Google search, gold currently costs 56,000 dollars per kilo. Imagine we had somehow managed to include the ability to mine and return metals into the mission at no additional cost, and that Spirit and Opportunity ran into some rich gold deposits. They would together have to send back 16,800 kilograms worth of pure gold, or roughly 100 times the weight of a rover in gold, for the mission to start turning a profit.

Let's imagine we set them to mining some less valuable stuff. Even valuable rare earths cost in the hundreds of dollars per kilo, not thousands, so if you're mining coltan or whatever, you'd need to bring thousands of times more of the stuff back to turn a profit. Now, if you're mining nickel, at 23$ a kilo, Spirit and Opportunity would have to mine 40,000,000 kilos of the stuff to run a profit. 40,000 metric tons, or the equivalent of 200,000 rovers worth of metal. Keep in mind that this is all wildly speculative and hypothetical, since neither robot has the ability to mine or return anything.

For mining in space to be profitable, you'd have to see dramatic improvements of our ability to work in space, and at the same time, cut costs by literally orders of magnitude. It would require that our ability to build and launch would improve in a Moore's Law like fashion. That is, we would have to get to the point where we could bring the cost of putting a robot or human in space down by 50% every 18 months, for two, three, four decades. Companies like SpaceX are making progress in bringing down launch costs, but it's not happening at a Moore's Law like rate. Unless we see some fundamental changes in space technology- not just better rockets, but a truly transformative technology (like a space elevator or some exotic new Star-Trek technology that makes 20th century rocket science look like paleolithic hand axes) mining and colonization in space are going to remain generations away.

Re:ISRU...

[taiwanjohn]

Where to start... I guess the most crucial factor is launch costs, both from Earth and from Luna.

Earth: Our gravity well is so steep that you really need a chemical rocket to escape. There are some promising experiments with lasers and such, but that's a good 10 years in the future. (Sky-hooks and space elevators are probably more like 30~50yrs away, at least.) The real trick with chemical rockets is to make one that's reusable. You wanna launch your satellite on a Delta rocket? No problem... that'll be $100M for the rocket and $150K for the fuel. SpaceX has already cut that price in half, but their goal is a rocket that's as reusable as a Boeing 747. That alone would bring launch cost to LEO down below $1000/lb..

Moon: The energy needed to escape Luna's gravity is a tiny fraction of that for Earth. It can be done with electric power (no chemical rockets needed) for less than $1/lb. That may not be profitable for iron or nickel, but what about platinum or palladium? More to the point, what's the cost of iron or oxygen in orbit around the earth or moon? Even if SpaceX succeeds with their reusable-rocket plans, such things will cost hundreds of dollars per pound if launched from the earth, so there's a huge incentive to loft those resources from the moon instead.

As for the Mars rovers... not sure how that got into the discussion. We're talking about the moon here, which is closer than Mars by at least a couple orders of magnitude.

It all comes down to that reusable rocket. If SpaceX can crack that nut, it will be a game-changer on the scale of discovering the new world. If it cost less than $1M for a ticket to the moon, how long do you think the waiting list would be?

 

Celebrity journalism redux

[DerekLyons]

I almost gave up on the second question - because it by then it was already clear he was pretty much clueless. (Though most people won't realize it, because they've grown up on the same fairy tales about the Shuttle.) The third cinched it, and I did give up with his nonsense about the Saturn V. He's just another fanboy pining for the glory days.

This is a prime example of celebrity journalism - his words are only considered as being valuable because he's famous (at least in a narrow circle). What's next Slashdot? Interviewing Clint Eastwood for his opinions because he's played an astronaut?

Re:Celebrity journalism redux

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you enlighten the rest of us and explain what's wrong with his answers, you arrogant elitist?

Re:Celebrity journalism redux

[dbIII]

Yes, you could probably get better answers on the technology side from just about any engineering student a few months into their course or anyone that bothered to read the news clippings from Apollo onwards, but it does give us a different perspective.
It's no less irrelevant than Newt running at all. I'm not from the USA but aren't you guys worried about the FBI arms deal sting and the possibility that the guy was willing to turn traitor? Surely any other possible candidate is a better choice.

Re:Celebrity journalism redux

[bzipitidoo]

He's just another fanboy pining for the glory days.

That's not how I read him. Now Zubrin, who he mentioned, is unreasonably anxious to get out there. Why should we visit Mars? To show the world it's possible? To research the place? And if the latter, why send people instead of more robots? Only reason to send people is as a prelude to the ultimate goal of colonization, which we're a long ways from being able to do. If we can't colonize Antarctica, which at least has breathable air, we sure can't colonize Mars. We have plenty of deserts we are currently unable to utilize much. At this point, we really cannot even just visit Mars, as we did the moon. It's a nice dream, but it is just a dream. And I see that he realizes all this.

I've spoken with Zubrin, and I asked him why the rush, why not wait 50 years or a century for technological improvements to make a Mars visit easier? He didn't want to wait, he felt our current capabilities were enough that we could do it now. And therefore we should. We should go "while we are young" is what he said. How romantic. But romance won't get us to Mars, and sure isn't a justification for trying.

Re:Celebrity journalism redux

[tragedy]

Why is it that people always think that Antarctica is more hospitable than Mars? You can get stuff to Antarctica more easily, but, as far as habitability of enclosed structures, it's not as clear cut as you think. For starters, the sunlight on Mars is pretty much guaranteed. At is distance from the sun, only 44% of the amount of sunlight that hits Earth's atmosphere hits the atmosphere of Mars. However, since Mars has such a thin atmosphere, more of it gets through, especially at glancing angles. Also, the only weather that Mars gets that blocks sunlight is dust storms, and our Mars probes have shown that they diffuse the light, but barely block it at all. Also, at the equator on Mars, you don't get 3 months of darkness like you do in Antarctica.

Air temperatures on Mars can get colder than Antarctica, but, since the atmosphere is virtually a vacuum, that's essentially meaningless. Less insulation is actually needed on Mars than Antarctica. The wind speeds on Mars can get higher than those in Antarctica, but, once again,it's a virtual vacuum, so high wind speeds don't mean as much, because there's correspondingly less energy involved.

There certainly are challenges in colonizing Mars. The lack of free oxygen certainly is a problem that needs to be solved. Perchlorates have been found in Martian soil and could serve as a ready source of oxygen or, with sufficient electrical power, electrolysis of water could work too. It's pretty clear now that there's plenty of Water on Mars, so that's pretty viable. With the inexhaustible supply of CO2, and readily available water, Zubrin's plan of making methane and oxygen from the atmosphere and a small amount of hydrogen as both rocket fuel and as the power source for vehicles and other equipment using pretty standard internal combustion engines and 4 parts oxygen to 1 part methane as fuel seems even more workable.

You say: "At this point, we really cannot even just visit Mars, as we did the moon". Guys like Zubrin and Ellis, even if they don't agree on everything, agree for certain on this. I agree with them too. We could just visit Mars like we did the moon. Energy wise it's actually easier to get there since you can aerobrake at the other end. The atmosphere means you can also use a parachute to slow descent, although you still need rockets to slow down enough to land. The long trip is an issue, but the radiation fears are overblown and, as a million experiments in space and isolation chambers on earth, in submarines and remote weather stations, etc. have shown, so are the fears of isolation induced space madness. The visit has to be a long visit, but the same technology from the sixties that got humans to the moon and back could be used for a Mars mission as well. If it really has become impossible for us to recreate that technology today... well, then we're pretty much doomed. If we're actually becoming less capable moving into the future, how long until we lose mastery over fire?

Personally, I think romance all by itself is justification for going to mars and, in fact, for all sorts of endeavours. Anyway, if not now, then when? Your attitude that we can try in 50 years, why not now is the same reason that my kitchen still needs repainting. I could have done it by now. I could be working on it right now instead of reading Slashdot, but I'm not, because I can always do it later. I know from experience that this attitude could lead to it being years before I do it. Chances are, in fact, pretty high that I'll never do it because I'll move first. It's called procrastination.

Re:All the Republicans are Loony Tunes

[dragonsomnolent]

Rick Santorum: "our civil laws have to comport with a higher law: God's law." So no, technically not "handing control over the government" to the church, but....

Look, space travel has to *do* something...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Something practical, like provide electricity to earth, or a ubiquitous free satellite internet, or something besides, "It's really cool!" That's not going to go any further than revolutionary fervor did in sustaining communism. In the near to medium term, if you talk space, you'd better talk money. Mars and the moon have no profit possibilities. Near earth orbit, which is affordable, more easily achievable and potentially profitable needs to be our next focus. I'm sure this is what the Chinese will do, and what we in the USA no longer have the common sense to see.

Re:All the Republicans are Loony Tunes

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you provide no concrete reasons/facts for your comments, one is left to surmise that your a bigoted raciest like the rest of your GOP brethren that spew similar hate speech.

Re:All the Republicans are Loony Tunes

[thrich81]

I agree with you 100% but Slashdot is at its worst (and that is saying a lot) when it devolves into a USA Republican vs Democrat debate except in the very rare occasions where there is a clear policy difference between the two which concerns a technical subject (maybe climate change, too). I'd suggest to ignore the partisan trolls and maybe they will go away and infest some other sites.

Re:All the Republicans are Loony Tunes

[Muros]

I thought the theist versus atheist debates were usually worse, although they seem to be the same groups of people. After all, from an outside perspective, religion appears to be the defining difference between the two parties. I know there must be more, since polls say most Americans are theists, but that is the only difference I see.

They're both delusional

[Wannabe Code Monkey]

I'm sorry, I've had enough of this crap from science fiction writers about space flight. I don't want them, (or crony politicians promising money for votes) to be guiding our government's decisions. Just because space flight is romantic and awe-inspiring doesn't mean we should do it. There's only one good reason for the kind of space travel they're advocating and it's the old don't-put-all-your-eggs-in-one-basket idea. But if the Earth were destroyed I don't have a lot of hope for people making it on the Moon or Mars. They'd still be completely dependent on resources from back home. Just try running a self sufficient society in the middle of the Sahara and see how long it lasts. At lest in the desert you still have oxygen to breathe and the temperatures are in the realm of habitable. Neither of which are true for the Moon or Mars.

They're also completely ignoring the fact that technology has become completely unpredictable for anything over 20 years from now. They have no idea what new things we'll discover in the next 100 years that could have profound impacts on space travel. Impacts that would make their current proposals completely meaningless. They sound like a salesman in the late 70s telling his company that they need to make their mainframes bigger and add more tape drives.

Our space-tech is either going to advance at a humdrum, linear pace, in which case we're never getting out of this solar system. Or it'll advance by leaps and bounds in which case just going back to the Moon, or building a rocket capable of going to Mars is pointless in the long run.

There's also no reason to have people on these flights other than to have a good old fashion feel-good PR story. You can have robots do anything you'd want a human to do and more. And you don't have to waste any money on food, oxygen, extra fuel, extra space, waste expulsion, and a return trip.

But what I love most about the interview is this quote:

I tentatively suspect that if President Obama gets his second term, and loosens up some cash...

You know, we must have already perfected space travel because I have no clue what planet Warren Ellis currently inhabits, but it's certainly not ours. Yeah, Obama has a whole bunch of cash lying around that he can just 'loosen up' at any given moment. It's not like we're running a huge deficit with programs and funding being cut left and right.

Re:They're both delusional

[joe_frisch]

The decision to go into space depends entirely on your goals. It is easy to imagine a stable, sustainable, happy human population on earth. We are no where close to that yet, but it is a goal that we can reach for, and I think achieve.

I can also imagine a goal of human expansion into space. The solar system is with reach of easily foreseeable technology. It might take centuries to ready fully self-sufficient colonies, but again they don't require impossible technology. Interstellar is more difficult, but speeds of a reasonable fraction of C are imaginable with nuclear propulsion or laser driven sails. This is too slow, but not a lot too slow, and maybe practical if we can extend human lifetimes.

There is no question that an expanding human race is a much more difficult goal, and a much more dangerous one: It will involve the development of technologies that could wipe out humanity, and even if we succeed we might meet something dangerous out there.

Technology only develops if it is needed: if we want improved space technology we need to work on space travel, just waiting for something to develop isn't likely to succeed. Compare the progress from 1950-1970 when we were actively developing space to the almost complete lack of progress from 1990 to 2010.

We have a choice: stay here where it is safe and comfortable, or see what wonders and horrors are waiting on a billion billion worlds throughout the universe.

Re:All the Republicans are Loony Tunes

[__aaltlg1547]

I think Republicans would like religion to be the defining difference between the two parties. They have certainly pulled out all the stops in pandering to know-nothing theocrats, but in fact the great majority of Democrats as well as independents and Republicans profess religion and for the most part the religion they profess is some form of Christianity.

The difference on religion is mainly between Republicans who see nothing wrong with the government promoting their religion and most everybody else who think the government should be restricted from involving itself with religious belief.

To me, the more defining issue is economic. Republicans want an unregulated market and don't tax the rich. Democrats want the government to make everybody play nice and use taxes to help poor people get a leg up.

Independents apparently can't decide or worse can't distinguish between those approaches.

Re:Summary

[ColdWetDog]

So, what do you think of Gingrich, who you describe as King, criminal, mental patient, and "historian", and his plan to return to the Moon and go to mars?

FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU.......!!!!

Why the angst? He was only being polite.

Re:Nobody's ever gonna stand on Mars

[phantomfive]

John Michael Greer's post on the end of the space age confirmed for me what I'd concluded myself: the stars are not for us.

His post is fine, but it doesn't show that we won't make it to the stars.

The question of the stars revolves around one point: is it technologically feasible to reach the stars?

If there are discoveries waiting for us, like hyperspace, wormholes, FTL or some other unfathomable principle of physics, then we will make it to the stars. Maybe not in this generation, or as the United States, maybe it will be by whomever succeeds the US. Technology moves forward beyond generations and empires, it doesn't need to be the US. If some future enlightened society discovers how to make fusion work, then the world will be a better place.

Newton thought that it would be impossible to escape the earth's gravity well, because of the large acceleration necessary. Newton didn't realize that chemical propellants were waiting to be discovered. Is there another thing out there, waiting to be discovered? Maybe.

Re:Nobody's ever gonna stand on Mars

[Roderic9]

I sort of understand where IcyHando'Death is coming from - I was 10 when I woke up to the real world and realised that the flying cars and spaceships I had been reading about in comics didn't actually exist. But I got over it and I am not as depressed about the lack of progress since 1969 as he is.
However, I do agree with his last few sentences, including "This last one has reached higher than any other, boosted by an enormous non-renewable energy supply, but that supply is now in decline and so are we, like all the others." Our global civilisation is using up all of the resources that were needed to start the industrial and technological revolutions. If we miss this chance and civilisation declines too far, the possibility is that we may never be able to rise to this level again.
For that reason I don't give a damn who promotes expansion into space, or the politics of it all. As long as someone does it.

Re:All the Republicans are Loony Tunes

[turgid]

As a token non-American reading this thread, I'd just like to say, that of all the candidates running, the rest of the world would much prefer Obama to get in for a second term.

There's a reason Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize: it was to say thank you to America for at last no electing a foaming-at-the-mouth isolationist war-monger.