The Russians are planning an unmanned, round-trip mission to the larger of the two Martian moons:
If the mission is successful, Fobos-Grunt will be the first probe to explore the Earth-Phobos-Earth space highway. The one-ton probe will enter orbit around Mars in August or September 2010 (assuming Russia’s schedule does not slip) and begin studying Phobos remotely. Once the mission scientists have selected a good landing spot, the spacecraft will touch down on the satellite’s surface sometime in March or April 2011. Then Fobos-Grunt will extend a robot arm and start collecting samples of regolith—surface soil and rocks—for return to Earth. The main body of the probe will serve as a launchpad for the small return module and remain permanently on Phobos. When the 233-pound return module reaches Earth in June or July 2012, it will drop off a soccer-ball-size capsule containing a thumb-size canister of precious Phobos soil; finally, the canister will make a hard landing in a remote region of Kazakhstan.
Why go to Phobos? Well, hey, it’s there. We know that the moons of Mars are on our long-range itinerary for exploring the solar system, anyway, so why wait? A scoop of Phobos soil can teach us a lot. Plus, as the linked article points out, this handily placed moon might prove very useful in eventual settlement of the planet below, so we might as well get acquainted.
Plus there’s this: thanks to Phobos’ low gravity, a round trip to the Martian satellite can be achieved using only about 80% of the thrust required for a round trip to the moon. Imagine being in Kansas City and you want to take an exotic vacation. Airfare to Indianapolis is $1000, but it costs only $800 to go to Istanbul!
A new science of cooperation is arising out of recent research in biology and economics. Biology once focused on competitive concepts like “Survival of the Fittest” and “Selfish Genes”. More recent work has uncovered powerful forces that drive the evolution of increasing levels of cooperation. In the history of life, molecular hypercycles joined into prokaryotic cells which merged into eukaryotic cells which came together into multi-cellular organisms which formed hives, tribes, and countries. Many believe that a kind of “global brain” is currently emerging.
Humanity’s success was due to cooperation on an unprecedented scale. And we could eliminate much waste and human suffering by cooperating even more effectively. Economics once focused on concepts like “Competitive Markets” but more recently has begun to study the interaction of cooperation and competition in complex networks of “co-opetition”. Cooperation between two entities can result if there are synergies in their goals, if they can avoid dysergies, or if one or both of them is compassionate toward the other. Each new level of organization creates structures that foster cooperation at lower levels.
I’m guessing that there needs to be some tension between these two factors. Each might have a role to play. Competition is useful for making selections, for settling which of two alternatives will succeed. Cooperation is useful for getting things done once the alternatives are selected.
I noted recently that — not that long ago — the human race consisted of small bands of two dozen or so people, each of which was essentially at war with the rest of humanity. Civilization enabled us to coalesce into larger groups, which were sustained by cooperation.
Likewise, at one point humanity was pitted competitively against many of the other species on this planet. Today, no other species is a real competitive threat. Although we have probably not done as well by other species as we should have, we now live somewhat cooperatively with many of them. Domesticating other species for food is an example of a kind of rough cooperation. But that’s an earlier model. In recent years we have taken to trying to protect the habitat of animals with whom we once competed fiercely for resources, and others who viewed us as a resource to be consumed.
That’s a pretty amazing transition. And it makes me wonder… If we observe human beings ultimately becoming friends and advocates of lions, wolves, and crocodiles, can we really believe that cooperation is impossible between any two human beings?
Cooperation requires developing compassion for others and trying to find common goals with them. A much more cooperative future sounds like an excellent idea to me.
The Daily Galaxy gives us (compliments of Mike Treder) three possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox, the apparent absence of advanced civilizations in a universe that should be teaming with them:
We are (A) the first intelligent beings ever to become capable of making our presence known, and leaving our planet. At this point, there are no other life forms out there as advanced as us. Or perhaps extraterrestrial life does exists, but for some reason extraterrestrial life is so very rare and so very far away we’ll never make contact anyway—making extraterrestrial life nonexistent in a practical sense at least.
Or is it (B) that many advanced civilizations have existed before us, but without exception, they have for some unknown reason, existed and/or expanded in such a way that they are completely undetectable by our instruments.
Or is it (C) There have been others, but they have all run into some sort of “cosmic roadblock†that eventually destroys them, or at least prevents their expansion beyond a small area.
This is a pretty good breakdown, but I see no reason why options B and C should be exclusive. What if it’s a 50-50 split? Half of the civilizations that come along wipe themselves out; half become so advanced that they are beyond what we can detect. Or maybe it’s 90-10 in favor of civilzational extinction, or 70-30 in favor of civilizational advancement beyond detection.
Whatever the relationship between the numbers, if such a mix is true — if a civilization inevitably meets one fate or the other — the implication is that continual advancement is the only option. We can’t stop where we are, building skyscrapers and computer networks; neither can our descendants, building Dyson Spheres and the like. We have to keep pushing on until we either shrink out of site or exit this universe altogether…or are destroyed in the process of trying.
In that case, the Fermi Paradox is really just the observation that nobody stops in the middle, and there probably aren’t very many civilizations “in the middle” within detectable range of each other at any given time.
So how do we proceed? Should we assume the odds are 50-50? Maybe we should assume the odds are 80-20 against us. That would require us to use a good deal of caution, but would still offer us a fighting chance for pushing on.
Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon talked about the future of the Internet, the future of human aging, and the future of FastForward Radio.
Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon welcomed J. Storrs Hall back to FastForward Radio.
Recently named president of the Foresight Institute, Dr. Hall is a scientist, entrepreneur, and prolific writer on nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, machine ethics, and other social impacts of technology.
I rarely open, much less read, much less blog about spam e-mails but this one really got my attention:
This was an article from the St. Petersburg Times Newspaper on Sunday. The Business Section asked readers for ideas on “How Would You Fix the Economy?”
This article was one of the ideas submitted…
This guy nailed it!
Dear Mr. President:
Please find below my suggestion for fixing America’s economy.
Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan.
You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:
There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force.
Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the following stipulations:
1) They have to retire.
· Forty million job openings.
o Unemployment fixed.
2) They have to buy a new American CAR.
· Forty million cars ordered.
o Auto Industry fixed.
3) They have to either buy a house or pay off their mortgage.
· Housing Crisis fixed.
It can’t get any easier than that!
If more money is needed, have all members of Congress and their constituents pay their taxes… If you think this would work, please forward to everyone you know.
I’m not interested in getting into a political discussion about the merits of different approaches to stimulating the economy. What interests me about this is that its price — I’m reading it as four trillion dollars — is a lot of money, but within an order of magnitude of the kind of money we’re spending on the economy anyhow.
That such an idea is even something that could be entertained — only for entertainment! — is a signpost that we truly are on our way to the end of scarcity. A country that can afford to give a million dollars to 40 million people (which we could do, irrespective of whether we should do it) is a country that enjoys significant abundance.
Now all we need to do is figure out a way to give a billion dollars to each of six billion people. But we’re on our way!
At H+, Ben Goertzel has a review of the new Ray Kurzweil bio documentary Transcendent Man. Ben’s review makes me all the more eager to see the film. I’m hoping there’s a screening in the Denver area soon. Here’ the trailer:
This section of the review particularly caught my attention:
“Ray, as you know, I’m involved in a project oriented toward creating a powerful AI system, and if it works as well as I hope, I think it may lead to a Singularity well before your projected date of 2045. And my goal in doing this isn’t just to create an artificial supermind to end scarcity and bring immortality and all that good stuff, it’s also to become one with that supermind. I don’t just want us to build gods, I want us to become gods. But there’s one doubt that often vexes me, and I’d like to know what you think about it. I wonder if there will come a point, when we’ve enhanced our brains enough with advanced technology, when we’ll have to stop and say: OK, that’s all I can do and still remain myself. If I add anything more – if I up my IQ from 500 to 510 – I’ll lose the self-structure and the illusion of will and all the other things that make me Ben Goertzel. I’ll just become some other, godlike mind whose origin in the human ‘Ben Goertzel’ is pretty much irrelevant.”
Ray responded by stating that he felt it would be possible to achieve basically arbitrarily high levels of intelligence while still retaining individuality.
But the moderator of the Q&A session, NPR Correspondent Robert Krulwich (who did an absolutely wonderful job), took up my side. He posited a future scenario where Robert enhanced his brain with the UltimateBrain brain-computer plug-in, and Ray enhanced his brain with the SuperiorBrain brain-computer plug-in. If Robert is 700 part Ultimate Brain and 1 part Robert; and Ray is 700 parts SuperiorBrain and 1 part Ray … i.e., if the human portions of the post-Singularity cyborg beings are minimal and relatively un-utilized … then, in what sense will these creatures really be human? In what sense will they really be Robert and Ray?
Ray responded that they would be human because the UltimateBrain and SuperiorBrain would be built by humans … or built by robots built by humans … so in a sense they would still be human, since they’d be human technology.
Yes, noted Robert, they would still be human in that sense – but that didn’t mean they’d still be Robert and Ray.
I stated my own view, that a point probably will be reached where to progress further, we’ll have to give up our human selves and accept that the role of our human selves has been to give rise to smarter, wiser, greater minds, more capable of creative activity, positive emotion and connection with the universe.
Ray’s (grinning) answer: “And would that be so bad?”
My (smiling) reply: “No.”
I’m having a hard time with Ben’s argument. I don’t see how increasing intelligence can possibly reduce or eliminate individuality. If the UltimateBrain or SuperiorBrain really are “ultimate” or “superior” versions of what we have, then they would have to be much more complex than the brains we have. They might all start out the same, but wouldn’t each instantiation of these programs quickly diversify based on the experiences and preferences of the individual intelligences which “runs its personality” in that environment? And wouldn’t that environment be not just smarter than we are, but massively more complex? And isn’t complexity one of the key contributors to, if not the defining factor behind, individuality?
I consider myself to be much more of an individual today than I was when I was, say, five years old. There’s just a lot more to me that’s different, and that can be different, from other people than there was back then. In some ways, I can comprehend all the motivations and feelings that five-year-old me had. This isn’t exactly the same as Ben’s idea of seeing through the “self- structure and illusion of will,” but I think it’s in the same ball park. I don’t understand why a personality that transcends to a new level of organization would lose individuality in the process. Of course, a new concept of the self — the more sophisticated self — would have to come into play, and I’m not sure what to do with the “Illusion of will.” It’s hard to imagine a meaningful existence without this particular illusion in place. Could intelligent beings can have a meaningful existence without any notion of the reality of their own will? I suppose they could. Could such beings continue to be individual and distinct from each other? I see no reason why they wouldn’t be.
It seems to me that Ben’s argument rests on the notion that individuality is some kind of limitation inherent in our current form. I think not; rather, it is the manifestation of our complexity. A more intelligent and more complex being has the capacity to be more of an individual than would a simpler and slower being.
As to the question of whether a massively intelligent version of me would still be me, going back to the five-year-old example, I am already arguably no longer the same person I used to be. (And in fact you don’t have to go all the way back to age five. I’m pretty different from what I was like at 25. Or even 35.) The real question is one of continuous experience. Even if “I” am no longer anything like what I used to be, it’s still “me” if there is a continuous experience of selfhood. Or even, possibly, if there is a discontinuous experience of selfhood. Before I was a five year old, I was a two year old, and before that a fetus, and before that a zygote. Yet I consider all of these phases to have been “me,” even if I carry forward no conscious memories of those phases they don’t drive my current behavior.
Finally, on the question of whether the superintelligence is “human.” I would just want to know if it is intelligent, curious, humane, joyful, artistic, empathetic — or does it have some transcendent version of each of these qualities? If not, then no, it isn’t human. And I’m not even sure why we would want to head in that direction. But if it does posses those qualities, then it’s human enough for me — and as human as anybody needs to be.
>p> NOTE: The audio problem has been fixed, and this show is back up. You can find it here.
Phil Bowermaster discusses the role that the human imagination plays in bringing about the future.
What is the relationship between the limits of human imagination and the limits of potential human accomplishment? Put another way — is our imagination adequate to the task of describing the future we have in store?
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you perhaps the greatest single piece of machinery ever built: the Saturn V rocket. Standing 111 meters (363 feet) tall and weighing a massive 3 million kilos (6.7 million pounds), this was the vehicle that took human beings from the earth to the moon.
Just before 1 p.m. on Saturday April 25, a Saturn V rocket carried one more man into history. Steve Eves broke two world records Saturday, when his 1/10th scale model of the historic rocket built in his garage near Akron, Ohio lifted off from a field on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The 36-ft.-tall rocket was the largest amateur rocket ever launched and recovered successfully and at 1648 pounds, also the heaviest.
Eves’ single-stage behemoth was powered by nine motors eight 13,000 Newton-second N-Class motors and a 77,000 Newton-second P-Class motor. (Five Newton-seconds is equivalent to about a pound of thrust.) All told, the array generated enough force to chuck a Volkswagen more than a half-mile and sent the Saturn V more than 4440 feet straight up. It was arguably the most audacious display of raw power ever generated by an amateur rocket. “I didn’t start out to break records,” the soft-spoken 50-year-old says. “I had just been working away, building it and then one day I realized no one’s ever pulled this off before.”
When SpaceshipOne made history a few years back, we noted that in a matter of a few decades, a feat that once only the wealthiest and most powerful governments on earth could accomplish — a basic sub-orbital flight — was now achievable by a committed and well-funded private group. And now here comes Steve Eves with an accomplishment that is, in some ways, even more extraordinary than SpaceShipOne. Eves has no government or corporate sponsors. He’s just a guy. And while his Saturn V replica falls well short of making it into space — much less taking a crew of three to the moon and back — I think it is safe to say that it’s a bigger and more powerful rocket than any in existence 80 years ago. In fact, 75 years ago, the cutting edge of rocket technology was Wernher von Braun’s A2, puny in both height and weight compared to Eves’ rocket, although the A2 did have a somewhat greater range — but then it didn’t have to push nearly the weight. If we look just at size, Eves’ rocket is about 80% as long as a V2, which was the state of the art of rocketry until the post-war Americans and Russians started building the space programs pretty much on top of it.
The hand-off of technological capability from the wealthy and powerful to the average person is a familiar theme. By now, we’re all pretty much used to hearing how there’s more computing power in our cars (or coffee makers or washing machines) than was used on an Apollo spacecraft. In fact, the laptop I’m typing on right now probably has more computing power than was available to all of NASA during the Apollo program. We’re used to this trope when it deals with computing power, and we’re even pretty familiar with it when it comes to communication technology. One of the reasons the mainstream media is having so much trouble these days is that much of their ability to disseminate information has fallen into the hands of smaller, much leaner, organizations…and to individuals.
But when we get into the world of stuff, that’s a whole different ball game. Or at least we expect it to be.
At the Speculist, we’ve written a lot lately about the end of scarcity. When we had Joseph Jackson on FastForward Radio a while back discussing what a world of true abundance might be like, one of the seemingly fanciful examples mentioned was the ability — of anyone who is inspired to do so — to construct their own full-size replica of the Titanic. (That’s over and above having food, shelter, clothing for everyone on earth, of course.)
With that in mind, Eves’ accomplishment begins to look like a signpost on the road to abundance. It’s interesting to note that what he has done, he did without nanotechnology or a fab lab. Even without using any of the disruptive technologies that promise to utterly transform the way in which individuals are able to produce material goods, one man — a skilled hobbyist, an amateur in the truest sense of the word — is the technological equal of one of the greatest industrial powers on the planet 75 years earlier.
I’m not a fan of linear projections because they don’t take into consideration the complex and reiterative way that change actually occurs. So let’s not make a prediction; let’s just ask a question. Even without the widespread implementation of disruptive materials technology, is it possible that the technological capability of a skilled and devoted individual will trail that of powerful nation-states by 75 years or so?
If so (keeping in mind that the real Saturn V is more than 40 years old), 35 years from now, Steve Eves or someone like him will have true Saturn V capability at his disposal. Moon missions will be the stuff of hobbyists, perhaps comparable to participation in extreme sports today.
And remember — that’s where we can expect to be if the really magical technology doesn’t show up as expected. With widespread nano-replication technology, 35 years from now is indescribable: a future obscured by a singularity of material capability. Perhaps by then devoted individuals can each have their own space elevator or orbiting city or working replica of the Starship Enterprise — without the warp drive, of course.
Or maybe with the warp drive. Who knows? A lot can happen in 35 years.
Recently named president of the Foresight Institute, Dr. Hall is a scientist, entrepreneur, and prolific writer on nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, machine ethics, and other social impacts of technology.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you perhaps the greatest single piece of machinery ever built: the Saturn V rocket. Standing 111 meters (363 feet) tall and weighing a massive 3 million kilos (6.7 million pounds), this was the vehicle that took human beings from the earth to the moon.