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To Boldly Go Nowhere, For Now
An anonymous reader writes "A recent Slate article makes the argument that manned space exploration is not useful and we should concentrate on Robots. The article makes the claim that manned space exploration was never popular and by diverting money to robotic space exploration we can get more bang for the buck. From the article: 'Most of the arguments in favor of manned space exploration boil down to the following: a) We need to explore space using people since keeping the entire human race on a single piece of rock is a bad strategy, and even if we send robots first, people would have to make the journey eventually; and b) humans can explore much better than robots. Both these arguments are very near-sighted—in large part because they assume that robots aren’t going to get any better. They also fail to recognize that technology may radically change humans in the next century or so.'"
Yes, it's true, sending humans in little cans around to the moon or low earth orbit is not directly valuable in any short to medium term way.
But it's valuable in ways that matter if you're not an MBA.
It gets a new generation of children enthused about math, science, and engineering.
It instills a sense of curiosity and a desire to explore in the next generation.
How do I know? Because I grew up watching the Apollo program, and probably would not have gone into a STEM field if not for that. It kept me dreaming when the schools failed to do so. This is true of friends my age too. We didn't become astronauts, but we DID watch one of the most amazing feats undertaken by humanity, and grew up with desired formed by that experience. Arguably, it influenced the entire US culture for a generation, and gave a "can do" attitude that seems almost extinct now.
It's worth it for that alone. If you get some nice spinoffs from it, hey, bonus!
The engineering problem of sending a human to another planet is very different from that of sending a robot. And the resulting knowledge will be different too. Why not do both?
Intense radiation levels alone during Solar storms & extra-solar Gamma rays along with normal human frailties in health will doom long extended space voyages in any near term.
Way in the future, extra-long multiple lifespan voyages at super-high speeds will also be futile as "space" is note "empty space" but full, chocked full of ions and molecules which spacecraft will hit at these projected "hyper-velocities". This effect on metals and other surfaces is similar to what is experienced on earth in plasma cutting now: See Wikipedia on "plasma cutting"
People think "space" is automatically 'cold'. That may be true in most places, but if you get into high velocities and run into a string of hot gas, you may find your spacecraft melts surprisingly fast. True, it is not likely as sensors should let spacecraft avoid these areas, but we simply don't know. Our own Sun throws out these super-hot plasmas, so it is not uncommon.
Robotics seems to have great advantages the minute you leave immediate Earth orbit.
Were you being sarcastic? I have compiled thousands of pieces of code in the last 30 years. None of them have magically transformed into anything other than what I compiled. AI is not voodoo, magic, or anything else.
It's not magic. Neither is cognition. Your big ass-brain is highly inefficient, it's a poor standard to gauge others' sentience against. Did you know the machines are exploring Mars all by themselves now? Curiosity has a machine learning system, for navigation, among other things.
It only takes a few cyberneticists being a bit disenchanted with humanity's forty years of failure to realize the spark of life must spread to the galaxy by another means... I'm getting ahead of myself. It only takes one learning program and a super computer's worth of power and a bit of time to create a learning machine system as complex as your mind is.
Check out my little AI children. (up/down arrow to change sim speed). Click one and you can see the neurons firing. Aren't they cute? It takes about 300 lines of code (mostly boilerplate and environment sim) to create programs (plural) that can learn (there are 20 here, learning). It really only takes 4 neurons to get them to collect dots. However, I added a hidden layer and some extra input about their neighbors energy status and location. Neurons Left to Right: [leftness of food], [forwardness of food], [other's energy - my energy], [leftness of other AI], [rightness of other AI]. There are enough neurons in the hidden layer to allow each input to be considered against all the other inputs. The outputs work like tank treads, or thrusters in space, sans inertia. Their "eye" neurons are like simple directional antennae, with only two neurons required to pick up a full 360 direction AND distance due to fall-off (inverse square of distance law).
This environment applies natural selection to the brains. The only selection criteria is those that have more energy get chosen to breed more often. This results in various strategies for movement in different runs of the sim: slow, fast, forward, backwards, spiraling, aiming just past the target, then stopping and reversing into the target. Different social behaviors: Bumping to share energy among a group of possibly like minded individuals, or avoiding each-other to save energy, sometimes switching between the strategies depending on the neighbor's energy level vs one's own... Their brains start blank, and in only a few generations movement is emerged via selection. Steering towards dots comes next, then avoidance or collision, Usually a hundred or so generations the social status becomes a factor to compete via.
Such variation from so minimal input. Intelligence is an emergent property of complexity, you see. Tailor the complexity such that the information is self reflective, and self improving and you get intelligence. Instincts are basic intelligence encoded in genes, expressed as brain structure (firmware), culture is your software, and evolves much faster. Unfettered from a life cycle of years natural selection can be very powerful, with a bit of guidance it could blow your mind...
So, Just create a problem space, and goal. Connect a few dozen neurons, and without any guided training a good solution can be arrived at given a bit of time. This is how a machine learning system could come up with ideas and solutions. Consider the sim not many smaller AIs but one AI made of 320 neurons solving the problem of most efficiently collecting dots via swarm of bodies.
Each brain is 32 neurons, there are 8bits worth of strengths (weights) for each neuron, so 256 bits in the genome (though note: I could make them evolve to move towards dots with only 32bits in their heads). Machine intelligence is efficient. It can do far more with much less. The barrier for sentience is far lower than you think.
Your brain is 100 billion neurons, but is VERY inefficient, and mostly not concerned