Robots are harder to eat…

Space: The Final Frontier

Once strictly dedicated to pure research, exploration, and tinged with hidden military objectives, space is now an irresistible place claimed by both international governments and corporate interests as it’s become more accessible, available, and akin to the early days of the Wild Wild West.

Where once, after America won the moon race and then left its lunar surface ignored for more than 50 years, agencies such as NASA, the European Space Agency (EAS), the Russian Federal Space Agency (now known as Roscosmos), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA), all focused their energies on other far-off planetary robotic explorations and missions, but things have now changed.

The New Moon Race: Lunar Neglect to Renewed Interest

On January 2^nd, 2019, China announced its lunar presence when they soft-landed an unmanned space ship and its robotic packages on the dark side of the moon.

This put the world on notice and sparked a renewed interest, especially in America, of the urgent need to put boots back on the lunar surface.

Reminiscent of the space race of the 1960’s, only now with China charging forward, America’s new push to reclaim its human presence on the moon is targeted for 2024.

Through its Artemis program, a combined robotic and human exploration mission, NASA along with four other agencies including the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, intend to lay the foundations for permanent settlements.

But does the conquest of the moon or really any other part of space really need to involve actual humans anymore?

Have a look at Boston Robotics’ most advanced robot, Atlas, and then ask yourself if this is even the most advanced robot in the company’s repertoire, or just the one it’s willing to show the public? Either way, it already begs the question, what can a human do that it can’t.

Visionaries In Space

For some people, like Elon Musk, with his near obsessive drive to make humans a multi-planetary species, he sees establishing settlements with actual humans on Mars to be an absolute imperative, especially if the human species is to survive, or at the very least have an insurance policy against earthy extinction events such as asteroids, super-volcanoes, plagues, or any number of other species ending events.

And, as we look at the series of seemingly never-ending crisis on the planet, he may very well have a point.

Even Jeff Bezos’ through his company, Blue Origin, is looking to take humans off-world by building a private space station called, Orbital Reef, and partnering with Boeing and Lockheed Martin to build bases on the moon.

The Time Realities of Space Travel

They’re both grand visions, but here’s the thing, space is really, really tough and it’s really, really big. And that’s both a challenge and an impediment to humans and our ability to cope in places that are both foreign and lethal.

We’ve all seen Star Trek and Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica and any number of other science fiction shows that have humans hopping across the universe using warp drive or other means of propulsion that make going from one end of the galaxy to the other of no more effort than flipping a switch and taking a quick trip through hyperspace. It works fine in a movie or a television show where time is of the essence, and audiences have the attention span of gnats, and directors need to quickly move the plot and story forward.

I’d be willing to bet, that if anyone took the time to watch 1968’s movie, “2001, A Space Odyssey,” one of the greatest and most photo-realistic space movies of all time whose cinematography rivals even the best technologies currently available, that after being so used to zipping through the universe in today’s film and televised quests, that most people would bust a mental gasket just travelling along with Dr. Haywood Floyd as he moved from the lunar space station to the lunar Monolith starting at 45:38 and ending at 54:41 and having to bear witness to the seemingly incredible amount of time that it took to go a couple of miles across the moon’s surface.

Now consider the minimum time of 9 months, and a return trip time of 21 months, that NASA estimates that it would take to get to Mars, and that Musk hopes to reduce to 6 months just getting there using his SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy rocket (collectively known as the Starship), but that he’ll still have to wait on the planet for a few extra months for an alignment window to open to allow for a return voyage.

Space is large, the distances between celestial bodies is vast, and aside from the unimaginable dangers of many months and even years that long trips to even our closest neighbours will take, the vast sums of money and new technologies required to get actual people there is astronomical.

So, what we really need to be asking is, should we be sending human explorers out into space in the first place, or just leave it up to robotics and our surging AI?

So let’s put a little thought into this.

To Boldly Go – Or Not

For example there are some places that humans are obviously never going to go to.

Places like the surface of Venus where the Russian robot Venera once lived for a grand total of 127 minutes before it succumbed to the heat and intense pressures of the planet  – although there are some NASA designers that think we could survive amongst the Venusian clouds on giant rafts, but the technology to do this is merely speculative and in the early drawing stages at best.

Or, close-up orbits around the sun – where humans would never survive the exceptional levels of radiation.

Or, even to the Kuiper belt, the donut shaped region of icy bodies way out beyond the orbit of Neptune, and where Pluto resides on its fringes, but that is realistically simply too far to get to with today’s technology, as a round trip would take more than 20 years, and that’s only if the destination was perfectly aligned and everything went right.

Then there are some places where actual humans probably should go, like Europa. If you’re an Arthur C. Clarke fan or just playing the odds, the fourth biggest moon orbiting Jupiter is probably the best place in the solar system to search for extraterrestrial life. It’s likely home to a subsurface ocean of liquid water, kept warm through tidal forces, and although Europa would still be a very volatile world, it might well host life in the same way that hydrothermal vents in Earth’s deep oceans do.

When it comes to other potentially life-harbouring moons, the runner-up to Europa is Titan, Saturn’s largest moon and the second-largest moon in the solar system. It’s the only moon near us with a dense nitrogen-rich atmosphere like Earth’s, and the only place besides Earth where we’ve seen clear evidence of lakes on the surface. The problem is that these lakes aren’t made of water, they’re made of methane. But it’s possible that primitive life might be able to thrive in these environments just as they would in our bodies of liquid water, so Titan holds out another place of hope for life on a moon’s surface where actual humans might realistically have a reason to visit.

With all of this said though, to put actual humans on these surfaces would require the combined wealth and determination of dozens of nations united in a common cause. So I’m going to put my money on the fact that, especially given all the technologies now available at our fingertips, that the only place where our species will ever head out, in my lifetime, and eventually create a settlement, besides the moon, will be Mars.

Settlements on Mars

I believe that through technologies like those of Elon Musk’s The Boring Company, that underground settlements will be able to be created on the red planet, and that through sub-surface environments and habitats that our species will be able to gain a foothold on another planet.

Musk thinks it will take about 6 more years to land there. My guess is that it’ll be closer to 10. Most likely it’ll be somewhere in between and only as the two planets align.

Robotic Explorations of Space

I also think that not only will Mars be the next goal for humans to achieve in space, but that it will be, at least in our physical form, the last place that we’ll ever go to.

I believe that humans will, of course, venture out further from Mars, but that once we become a multi-planet species, that all further exploration will be done by A.I., robotics, or even pulsed light.

As an interesting aside, my fellow co-founder at Phantom Space worked on both LightSail 1 and LightSail 2 along with Bill Nye at the Planetary Society.

Given the miniaturization that will be made possible, the abilities for the development of super small vehicles to be propelled at near light speeds, and the intensification of robotic intelligence supported and augmented by advanced AI, with payloads specifically designed for information processing and communication, that until humans learn how to warp space and shield ourselves from the vast cosmic forces that opened wormholes might create, that we’ll need to create artificial emissaries to carry both our research and invitations to other planets and star systems.

I know that we’re on the cusp of great explorations.

The challenge ahead is to determine whether our emotions and our egos will allow the machines that we design and make to be allowed to be the ones that make first contact.

On the bright side, if we do encounter aliens, robots are harder to eat…

– Written by a human.

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Michal Prywata: Inventor, entrepreneur, and multidisciplinary engineer with a focus on frontier technologies. Founder of ventures in healthcare, agriculture, space, and AI. On a relentless quest to solve complex problems and extend the boundaries of human potential.