Insect AI & Cyborg Astronauts

Discovery News has two interesting articles. First, insect AI:

But a small organism doesn’t have so many cells to control and can fit some very elaborate mental circuitry in a pinhead-sized brain.

Several hundred neurons give the ability to count. A few thousand create sentient, and perhaps even sapient, thought. If that’s really the case, then it seems that we’re barking up the wrong tree with cognitive computing concepts and AI projects.

Instead of trying to simulate huge numbers of neurons, then bragging about it as a step towards emulating real brainpower, we should focus on those individual circuits and model the brains of insects rather than mammals.

Second, cyborg astronauts. The pros are interesting, but the hearing the cons aired are a breath of fresh air:

Of course there’s a catch. Each of the procedures that would make all this possible would be a) incredibly invasive, b) exorbitantly expensive and c) require decades of highly focused research projects to make it all possible. While the benefits to those who suffered serious trauma to the brain, limbs and spine, or suffering from organ failure would be immense, there may be some serious pause about healthy individuals undergoing this sort of modification for the sake of traveling to other worlds. People who may never walk again without a prosthetic spine or mechanical legs would certainly volunteer for such procedures because being confined to a bed or a wheelchair for the rest of their lives is a far higher cost than the risks involved with the surgery.

NASA and Jobs

The government has decided to stop doing something that it does badly.

That’s a rare occurrence, so pause to savor it.

That is how Katherine Mangu-Ward opens her piece on Obama’s revision of the NASA budget. Delicious. The piece itself is more focused on the confused logic of government’s role in “job creation,” but there is one excellent paragraph that can stand on its own. A rep from Utah worried that the loss of NASA jobs would mean the skills of those workers would be lost to the country; Mangu-Ward rebuts him:

Luckily, we are not living in the 17th century Mughal empire of Shah Jahan, of whom it is rumored that to protect the secrets of the Taj Mahal and guarantee that it remain unique he cut off the hands of the architect who designed it. For good measure, he killed, maimed, or blinded the builders as well. Nor are we in the second century B.C. under the reign of Qin Shi Huang, who had his now-famous tomb stocked with thousands of life-sized terra cotta warriors—and then proceeded to kill all of the workers on the project.

The point being those expert workers will likely go on to work for a private company and/or start their own, not sit around moping that they lost their NASA job. If their expertise is truly unique – remember, these people are literally rocket scientists – they should have no trouble at all.

Obama, NASA, and the Commercial Future of Space

The Obama administration recently released its NASA budget with the expected, but still surprising intention to end the Constellation program and increase funding for developing commercial space flight. I must admit, I am very excited about the prospects here. The Ansari X prize managed to get over 100 million dollars in development in five years with just a 10 million dollar prize. Private companies, as Phil Plait noted in his excellent post on the topic, have still not put a person into orbit, but some are close. Another X Prize, this time funded by NASA with some “we get to rent seats on your tech when we need them” strings attached, could revitalize orbital space travel. It currently costs half a billion dollars per launch of the shuttle, a forty year-old piece of technology that has proven fatally unsafe two times too many.

Reactions have been mixed. I found it hilarious that the British Times would get so up-in-arms over the situation, given that the UK’s contributions to space exploration hover somewhere between diddly-squat and Moonraker. But therein is one of the problems with space exploration as it is. It has to be defended on the grounds of “science for science’s sake” which is never really the reason something is done. Most of the technological development of the past century has been spurred on by either commercial or military need. Very few advances have been “because it is there” sort of events. CERN and the LHC are perhaps the single best examples of truly science for science’s sake research. But the LHC is an enormous international project, which leads us to the next point: space will become international.

As it is, the US has near total dominance in terms of space exploration. This dominance is due both to its superior technology and that it is one of the only entities in the world that is exploring space. The proliferation of other countries and, hopefully, companies exploring space means one very important thing: more exciting jobs for scientists and thinkers. Right now, if you want to study space, say by sending a robot to Mars, you have to team up with NASA. They are literally your only option. There are only so many jobs at NASA, and they only have so many missions a year. If you don’t get in with them, you can maybe try the Russians, but even still, that’s only two choices.

Now imagine if there were ten major space companies, one of which was the Google or Apple or Honda of space travel. Reliable, high quality, high value, and constantly on the cutting edge at a price within your range. Imagine if universities could easily afford to send satellites into orbit or rovers to other planets. Instead of the impact of putting another set of people on the Moon, imagine the influence of having classmates building and controlling robots on other planets would have on our culture. Think about how much news the Ansari X prize generated for Branson and Rutan when they won. How much more are they going to have with their first commercial flight? Or when their business becomes regular, and they launch two or three flights a week? What about when they get a competitor who takes the customer higher, farther, longer?

Some may argue, “but Branson’s commercialized space flight means only the wealthy get to go to space.” Right now, only the super-ultra wealthy get to go. Of the over six billion people currently alive on the planet, only about 500 people have been to space. If Virgin Galactic becomes successful, it may only cost a quarter of a million dollars to go to space. At that price, there could be game shows where top prize is a flight on Virgin Space Ship. Millions of people would have the opportunity to go. By the time “Space Vacation” is a prize on Wheel of Fortune, Virgin will probably be competing for the next X prize, something like building a spaceport on the Moon and universities will be regularly sending graduate students into space. Commercialization has me very excited.

Where To Look?

A few scientists are trying to pin down where the best places for life might be elsewhere in the universe:

“When people talk about ‘habitable zones,’ they mean where there’s liquid water on the surface. But there’s liquid water elsewhere in the solar system; it’s buried under thick sheets of ice on moons,” Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist with the University of California at Santa Cruz, told Discovery News.

Nimmo is among a growing cadre of scientists who believe the search for life beyond Earth should be focused on selected moons of Jupiter and Saturn, where liquid oceans or lakes are believed to exist beneath the frozen ground.

Large bodies of liquid water with geothermal activity? Sounds like a good bet.

["'Goldilocks' Zone Bigger than Once Thought" - Discovery News]

International Marine Station

Why don’t we have as much funding for underwater exploration as we do space exploration?

That question has haunted me since I was a little kid who wanted to be a marine biologist. The ocean is unbelievable: two-thirds of the planet, millions of species undiscovered, some 95% simply unexplored. It’s so big that after making the Planet Earth series, which had multiple segments on the oceans as it was, Discovery and BBC put together Blue Planet, there was just so much to talk about and to show us. Over and over the message of Blue Planet is: there is so much yet to learn about our own world.

Jacques Rougerie’s concept for a marine equivalent of the space station, called appropriately the SeaOrbiter, is one of those ideas that makes me not just wonder why no one thought of it before, but why it doesn’t already exist.

There are lots of reasons to explore the oceans and, given our current Earth bound problems, further travel into space seems best something left to Richard Branson and John Carmack. Where is the X Prize for a new paradigm shifting submersible? We fret about the rain forests while our plankton and algae populations, not to mention the marine ecosystems that depend upon them, go relatively unlamented. It’s a very strange blind spot for our society to have.

Perhaps what shocks me most about this situation is the amount of interest and love people have for the ocean is enormous. Snorkeling, sailing, scuba diving, aquariums, and beach holidays all put us in contact with the ocean every day. Science and nature programs constantly portray the wonderful weirdness of creatures from the deep, the potential value of understanding non-sunlight based ecosystems, and the intelligence and majesty of dolphins and whales. There are no bottle-nose dolphins in space.

Space exploration and space travel is exceedingly dangerous, difficult and expensive. So is deep-sea exploration. Yet one of the two requires hundreds of thousands of pounds of thrust generated by enormous, controlled explosions, the other requires tens of pounds of thrust generated by fans and a few ballast tanks; yet we choose the latter. It’s difficult to know if Kennedy, H.G. Wells, or Von Braun is to blame for biasing us towards space, or we are to blame for not treating Jacques Cousteau and James Cameron with the same degree of awe.

What I simply do not understand is why we are biased towards space as a culture and society. Military and national interest might have initially driven the development of N.A.S.A., and no one can doubt the amazing feat of putting men on the moon, but that was forty years ago. The international space station does amazing research and I believe is as much a symbolic gesture of post-cold war unity and human scientific progress as it is a practical and useful endeavor, but I do not see why it need carry on that task alone. More so than gorillas, dolphins demonstrate intelligence, social behavior, and linguistic abilities that begin to parallel humanity’s, yet we desperately scrape at the ice of Mars hoping for a trace of a sign of what once might have been life. In a strange turn of Orwell’s classic phrase, “it is a constant struggle to see what is in front of one’s nose” it seems it is equally difficult to remember the marvels and mysteries of our own backyard.

I don’t have an answer or solution. At this point, I’m merely confused. I hope Rougerie’s idea comes to fruition in some shape or form, because I believe it will serve us better than we can possible imagine. Perhaps some combination of scientific grants, X prizes, and seasteading experimenters will make it happen. Or maybe some wonderful discovery about the fauna of the deep or the intelligence of sea creatures will inspire a Mariana Trench equivalent of the moon shot. Or maybe necessity will force innovation.

All I know is I get the same feeling looking up at the stars from the wilds of Idaho as I do looking down into the ever blue depths off the coast of Hawai’i and cannot understand why the more distant of the two is more fully explored.

Update: I wrote this post yesterday and, an hour or so after as I was eating lunch, I found the answer to the central question “why space and not the oceans” in Tarnas’ The Passion of the Western Mind. The long version I’ll leave to Tarnas, but the short version is that the entire scientific revolution was kicked off by astronomy. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton, all working on the problem of the movement of the planets in their own way, fundamentally altered the cosmology of the Western mind by positing, proving, defending, and explaining a moving earth rotating a central, material sun with other, material planets. When we think about space, we’re reminded of science as a whole, our thoughts are literally universal, thanks to this heritage.

Space may lay bare the marvels of physics, but I suspect the oceans may still hide the central secrets of life. Methinks it’s now time for some planetary introspection.

[Times Online via io9 via Geekologie]

The Future of Space Travel

Brought to you by private industry and capitalism, no thanks to NASA. [via boingboing]

Quote of the Day

“While NASA frets over a looming hiatus in its ability to launch people into space, a commercial company is poised to unveil the first spaceship for private passenger travel.” - Irene Klotz, Discovery News

Space Project

[via Mr. Imma Let You Finish]