Machines, not Meat, to the Moon

MoonMachines


I'm keen to adapt how we think about space to the realities and opportunities of the 21st century. Putting more astronauts on the moon seems pointless; using the same resources, and modern technology, we can put a thousand virtual researchers on the Moon with robotics and terabit laser telemetry.

We do not have the capabilities that put Apollo on the moon, nor do we have the geopolitical justification. Before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, a cash-strapped NASA had shut down the Saturn V assembly lines; their political purposes had been achieved. We got the glory, the Soviets got infrastructure that is still usable today.

Nonetheless, we live in exciting times, The Curiosity landing demonstrated what modern technology can do in space today, and on the battlefield soon (sadly). Among many achievements, Curiosity landed within 1.5 miles of target center, three times as accurate as Apollo 11 after travelling 1000 times the distance. Modern space missions succeed because they replicate physics-accurate missions that have already occured countless times inside supercomputers; add humans, and accurate simulation becomes impossible.

We do not need to send such large, autonomous machines to the moon. We can flashlight-sized remote controlled tools, connected through predictive-adaptive telepresence to trained operators and researchers on earth. No team of ten mission specialists will ever be smart enough or have enough time to match all those researchers - indeed, they will be so busy surviving that they may not have as much research time as one researcher on earth. Would you rather stand in a crowd waving goodbye to ten brave astronauts - or bicycle to work, put on a haptic suit, and spend the day manipulating lunar materials 400,000 kilometers away, looking for world-changing discoveries?

The moon is dead. The rocks aren't going anywhere, there is no changing weather or plants or animals. Few unpredictable events will occur during the three second speed-of-light round trip. With good physics models and abundant powerful computation (server sky!), dropping a rock will have the same same simulated results as it will three seconds later when the telemetry arrives. If it does behave surprisingly differently, we will discover something very important and probably very profitable.

We explore space to find surprises, which lead to scientific advances. Surprise can be antithetical to human survival; we learned far less about the moon using astronauts than we can today using expendable machines. We can send LOTS of machines, design them for perfection, then plan to lose half or more due to the unexpected. We should avidly seek the unexpected, the bizarre, the dangerous; take risks that we would never take with human lives in the balance. Astronauts are hostages, not pioneers. Failure must be an option, as it was during the age of exploration. Many proto-Polynesians died before they learned the ways of the Pacific.

Transistors are a billion times cheaper than they were in 1969. While we are far from the artificial intelligence necessary to replace a human brain, that brain comes in a very fragile package, quite incompatible with the space environment. Electronics may be stupid, but it is far more reprogrammable than the human mind, and it will tolerate much worse conditions. There are many places on earth where brainless bacteria can survive, and humans cannot. We send our robots there.

Space will still be very much a human activity - but discovery requires improvisation, not a rehearsed performance from a checklist. Human improvisation is creative, adaptive, and unpredictable, exemplified by the Skylab rescue mission of Nay 1973, when Conrad, Kerwin, and Weitz travelled to the crippled space station with a rapidly cobbled-together toolkit, and improvised when they got there. Robots, controlled by humans on earth, can now do the same. A moon base operated by remote-controlled robots will have many failures - though none so perilous as a wounded astronaut three days and 10 gees from a modern hospital. We can turn off a damaged robot and ship up exotic repair parts on the next supply mission; we can keep most spare parts on site.

Someday, when we drive launch costs below $10/kg (see http://launchloop.com ), and it is affordable to launch and maintain thousands of tons of infrastructure per person, we can recreate self-supporting human-compatible environments far from mission control. These will be robot-rich artificial ecosystems. The best way to develop that capability is to create opportunities that generate vast wealth per launched kilogram at very large scale, and drive down the cost of launch through automation and volume pricing.

Server sky will make this happen. When we can deliver gigabit internet to millions of habitations in mid-ocean, we can colonize our seas the way we will later colonize space. We must broaden our capabilities, adaptively and productively, and expand our imaginations to match.