As well all know, Elon Musk is getting ready to go to Mars and establish a colony there. Why? Because we need to become a cosmic civilization if we are to survive and that’s a step in that direction.
We all know that Neil deGrasse Tyson is skeptical. Terraform Mars so we’ve got a place to go when Earth becomes uninhabitable as a result of our activities? Are YOU kidding me? If we’ve got the power to terraform Mars, which is far away and unhospitable, then surely we’ve got the power to Make Earth Great Again! Putting that aside, colonizing Mars would be enormously expensive. It’s not going to be funded as a commercial venture because chance of a profit are nil. That leaves the government. Governments will undertake big projects when they feel threated, that’s why we went to the moon, to beat the Russkies. When the Chinese announce that they’re going to Mars, we’ll race them. Until then, no way Jose!
OK, OK! Let’s set all that aside. Would you like to go to Mars? Would I like to go to Mars?
That depends. If the probability of dying is over, say, 1% or 2%, I’m not doing it. If the probability of dying us under 1%, we can talk.
How long is it going to take? Given current propulsion systems it would take 7 to 9 months to get there. Would you do during that time? You can read, play chess with your cabin mates, look out the window – for nine whole months? At some point you’re going to be too far from earth to cruise the internet conveniently, so that’s out. Once you get there you’re going to be there awhile. Why? Because you have to wait until Earth and Mars are in proper alignment for the shortest possible trip back. What are you going to do when you get there? How much red desert do you want to see? And how much is it going to cost?
No, that all seems very doubtful to me.
Now, if $10,000 gets me there and back in a month, hmmmm. Even if I’m only on the surface for a few hours or maybe a day, it would be worth it. But a week would be better. I could spend a week contemplating the red desert, especially if I could get out and walk around and maybe even drive around a bit.
Yep, that’s it, ten-thousand bucks for around trip. Sign me up.
That people will travel to Mars, and soon, is a widely accepted conviction within NASA. The target date for the initial human mission has drifted slightly — in a 2018 report commissioned by Congress, NASA estimated that the first human beings would land on Mars “no later than the late 2020s” — but the certainty has not wavered, even if technical hurdles remain. Rachel McCauley, until recently the acting deputy director of NASA’s Mars campaign, had, as of July, a punch list of 800 problems that must be solved before the first human mission launches. Many of these concern the mechanical difficulties of transporting people to a planet that is never closer than 33.9 million miles away; keeping them alive on poisonous soil in unbreathable air, bombarded by solar radiation and galactic cosmic rays, without access to immediate communication; and returning them safely to Earth, more than a year and half later. Many other problems involve technical details so arcane that McCauley wouldn’t even know how to begin explaining them to a well-intentioned journalist lacking an advanced engineering degree. But McCauley does not doubt that NASA will overcome these challenges. What NASA does not yet know — what nobody can know — is whether humanity can overcome the psychological torment of Martian life.
Enter CHAPEA. Instead of asking questions about aeroshell sensor design and terrain-relative navigation, it promised to ask questions about people. For 378 days, four ordinary people would enact, as closely as possible, the lives of Martian colonists, receiving directives, feedback and near-total surveillance from mission control. They would eat astronaut food, conduct basic experiments, perform maintenance duties, respond to endless surveys and enjoy highly structured down time. This level of extreme verisimilitude is necessary to ensure that the experiment accurately determines whether human beings can thrive while living millions of miles from everybody they’ve ever known.
This is just a quick note: Away is a new Netflix series about a manned mission to Mars. The first season has ten episodes and takes us from launch to touch-down. I enjoyed it for its mixture of high-tech adventure, interpersonal drama, and political maneuvering. The high-tech adventure is standard stuff, things don’t work and so the crew must cope; the mission almost falls apart two or three times, maybe four – I wasn’t counting.
There are five in the crew: an American, Emma Green (Hilary Swank); a Chinese, Lu Wang (Vivian Wu); a Russian, Misha Popov (Mark Ivanir); Ram Arya (Ray Panthaki), from India; and Kwesi Weisberg-Abban (Ato Essandoh), British-Ghanaian and Jewish. As you might imagine, tensions between nations show up in relations among the crew. That’s what makes this interesting. We are implicitly asked to read interactions between crew members as a metonymy for relationships between nations. Spoiler: when they touch down on Mars, the crew presents a united front.
At the same time crew members have their own problems with family and friends on the ground. While we get personal background on all the crew, current day interactions center on Emma Green, Misha Popov, and Lu Wang. Of those three, Emma Green, who is also the mission commander, has the most complex situation. And those are the ones representing the most powerful nations.
It will be interesting to see how this develops in subsequent seasons, assuming the series gets renewed.
For reasons I’m about to explain, I’m pretty sure about that. What I’m wondering is how Musk himself compares the two. He has declared publicly that he’s going after both goals and is sure of reaching them, though he’s talked considerably more about Mars than about the mind, but what does he think privately? I haven’t got the foggiest idea. But I do believe that if he had a more realistic understanding of what’s involved in direct brain-to-brain (B2B) thought transmission he would not be espousing it as the ultimate goal of Neuralink.
To Mars
We have a very rich framework in which to think about manned missions to Mars. We’ve already landed men on the moon and returned them to earth. Astronauts have spent weeks and months, even a year, living in low-earth orbit in the International Space Station. We’ve landed robots on Mars and gotten useful information back. All of that experience is relevant to sending humans to Mars and – here’s the point – we’ve got frameworks in which we can evaluate that experience against the requirements of a manned mission to Mars. We have a rich understanding of the mechanical, kinematic, chemical, thermodynamic, electrical, and electronic principles involved in building the devices needed to perform the mission. We also know quite a bit about the biological and psychological requirements of supporting human life for such a mission.
Musk knows all that, certainly better than I do and perhaps as well as if not even better than any other single human currently alive. He’s trained in science and engineering and has experience in both arenas. While I have reservations about the business case for going to Mars (see Steve Rosenbaum’s remarks in the video below), the technical case seems reasonable to me.
B2B thought transmission
But he has little or no training in neuroscience (full disclosure, neither do I), though he has hired specialists for Neuralink. Of course, one doesn’t have to have formal training in an area in order to develop expertise in it. Just how much expertise Musk has developed, I don’t know.
I see two kinds of issues in developing technology for B2B thought transmission: 1) matters of principle, and 2) the technology itself. If I am right about the principle, then it doesn’t matter what kind of technology Musk, or anyone else, develops. It won’t work. But let’s set that aside for the moment.
The basic problem with developing technology is that, 1) the brain is relatively inaccessible beneath the skill, 2) neurons are very small, and 3) we don’t understand how neurons and the brain work. In contrast to, say, the physics and mechanics of rocket technology, our knowledge of basic principles is still poor.
I believe that there has been a fair amount of work on brain implants of one kind or another going back to the 1950s with the work of Jose Delgado. As far as know I we have yet to see the full-time routine implantation of a device in the brain that either controls motor activity or provides sensory input. There have been limited laboratory experiments with animals and medical experiments, but no permanent clinical use.
There are various problems. The brain is a hostile environment for anything we implant. Neurons are very small, so accurate targeting is extremely difficult. Moreover, interpreting neural impulses is difficult, as is generating artificial impulses to the muscles. And then there is the problem of numbers: The brain has roughly 86 billion neurons, each of then connected to 10,000 neurons on average. How many neurons are we going to have to tap for B2B thought transmission? 100 million? A billion? All of them? What kind of hardware would allow us to do this without shredding the brain? Neuralink’s current interface has 1000 electrodes, which is far from a million, let alone a billion.
That’s one problem. But let us assume we can link however many neurons are necessary for B2B communication without in any way harming the brain. It’s not at all clear to me that this would work. Why?
When the interface is activated, both brains will be receiving millions upon millions of impulses they had never before received. If thoughts are to be exchanged, then each brain must be able to tell which impulses are its own and which are coming from the other brain? How are the brains going to do that? If they can’t then how can they exchange thoughts? The idea doesn’t make any sense. As far as I can tell, the most likely result of such an interface would be confusion and perhaps, over time, the two individuals would learn how to function under these conditions, but this is by no means certain. I discuss this issue at greater length here, Why we'll never be able to build technology for Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication.
As far as I know, neither Musk, nor anyone else in this arena, such as Christof Koch or Rodolfo Llinás, has addressed this issue. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them.
What does Elon believe?
Here then is my question: Does Musk think these two challenges, manned missions to Mars and direct B2B communication, are of roughly equivalent difficulty? It’s one thing to pursue both believing that one is merely of moon-shot difficulty while the other is out there beyond the twilight zone. That seems risky and foolish, but at least Musk knows it’s risky and foolish.
It’s quite something else to believe they are on roughly the same footing or that B2B communication is perhaps more difficult than going to Mars, but not THAT much more difficult. If THAT is what Musk believes, why? In one case, Mars, he can spell out the technical challenges in great detail and list possible solutions. In the other case, B2B thought transfer, there’s a whole lot of nothing that he’s overlooking. The list of potential problems is long and open-ended and the list of potential solutions is, at best, a work of fiction.
A few years ago physicist David Deutsch mused on the possibility of fully general artificial intelligence. The bottom line: We don't know what we're doing. Though he takes a round about way to get there.
In 1950, Turing expected that by the year 2000, ‘one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.’ In 1968, Arthur C. Clarke expected it by 2001. Yet today in 2012 no one is any better at programming an AGI than Turing himself would have been.
This does not surprise people in the first camp, the dwindling band of opponents of the very possibility of AGI. But for the people in the other camp (the AGI-is-imminent one) such a history of failure cries out to be explained — or, at least, to be rationalised away. And indeed, unfazed by the fact that they could never induce such rationalisations from experience as they expect their AGIs to do, they have thought of many.
It certainly seems that way, that we're no closer than we were 50 years ago. At least we've managed to toss out a lot of ideas that won't work. Or have we?
Deutsch thinks the problem is philosophical: "I am convinced that the whole problem of developing AGIs is a matter of philosophy, not computer science or neurophysiology, and that the philosophical progress that is essential to their future integration is also a prerequisite for developing them in the first place."
He places great emphasis on the ideas of Karl Popper, whom I admire, but I don't quite see what Deutsch sees in Popper. Still, he manages to marshall an interesting quote:
As Popper wrote (in the context of scientific discovery, but it applies equally to the programming of AGIs and the education of children): ‘there is no such thing as instruction from without … We do not discover new facts or new effects by copying them, or by inferring them inductively from observation, or by any other method of instruction by the environment. We use, rather, the method of trial and the elimination of error.’ That is to say, conjecture and criticism. Learning must be something that newly created intelligences do, and control, for themselves.
That is to say, minds are built from within. And the building is done by fundamental units that are themselves alive and so trying achieve something, if only the minimal something of remaining alive. Those fundamental units are, of course, cells.
I don’t support going to Mars for practical reasons at all. I think we should plan to go to Mars because it would be a healthy sign that we, as a civilization, are still planning for a future — that we intend to live. Because right now, frankly, we’re not acting as though we do. We’re acting more the way a friend of mine did in the last year of his life: letting the mail pile up unopened, heaping garbage in the house, littering the floor with detritus, no longer bothering to turn over the calendar pages. He’d clearly decided, on some level, to die.
We’re mostly hiding from the horrifying facts mounting ever more unavoidably around us, keeping ourselves zonked out on anything from Xanax to Oxy, immersed in the worlds of Warcraft or Westeros while the actual world is burning. Billionaires are building sumptuous bunkers instead of doing anything that would forestall the deluge or revolution they’re barricading against. Mounting a mission to Mars would be bold and hopeful, a gesture of faith, like planning a vacation to Bali next year when you’re battling cancer.
Ray Bradbury, author of another famous Mars book, called space travel our modern version of cathedral building: a vast, ambitious, multigenerational undertaking, a shared vision to work toward together as a culture. Right now, we don’t have such a vision, or even a culture, for that matter — just a degrading, every-man-for-himself scramble for the last scraps of cash the 1 percent have overlooked, like one of those parking-lot contests where you have to keep your hand on a truck until everyone faints from exhaustion. We could use a worthier project.
WASHINGTON — At a time when China is working on an ambitious lunar program, President Donald Trump vowed on Monday that the United States will remain the leader in space exploration as he began a process to return Americans to the moon.
"We are the leader and we're going to stay the leader, and we're going to increase it many fold," Trump said in signing "Space Policy Directive 1" that establishes a foundation for a mission to the moon with an eye on going to Mars.
"This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprint, we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars," Trump said. "And perhaps, someday, to many worlds beyond."
Back in June, China's space official said the country was making “preliminary” preparations to send a man to the moon, the latest goal in China’s ambitious lunar exploration program.
Trump's signing ceremony for the directive included former lunar astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Harrison Schmitt and current astronaut Peggy Whitson, whose 665 days in orbit is more time in space than any other American and any other woman worldwide. [...]
"And space has so much to do with so many other applications, including a military application," he said without elaboration.
The militarization of space? No. Though obviously that's already started with spy satellites in earth orbit.
Space exploration is expensive, and Trump wants to give a big fat tax break to his wealthy buddies. No.
And space ought to belong to all humankind and not be the object of nationalist competition.
Scott Kelly had spent 520 continuous days in earth orbit, the longest of any NASA astronaut. He's a guinea pig in an experiment to test human ability to live in space in preparation for a trip to Mars. It's not looking good.
I've spent 340 days alongside Russian astronaut Mikhail "Misha" Kornienko on the International Space Station (ISS). As part of NASA's planned journey to Mars, we're members of a program designed to discover what effect such long-term time in space has on human beings. This was my fourth trip to space, and by the end of the mission I'd spent 520 days up there, more than any other NASA astronaut. Amiko has gone through the whole process with me as my main support once before, when I spent 159 days on the ISS in 2010-11. I had a reaction to coming back from space that time, but it was nothing like this.
I struggle to get up. Find the edge of the bed. Feet down. Sit up. Stand up. At every stage I feel like I'm fighting through quicksand. When I'm finally vertical, the pain in my legs is awful, and on top of that pain I feel a sensation that's even more alarming: it feels as though all the blood in my body is rushing to my legs, like the sensation of the blood rushing to your head when you do a handstand, but in reverse.
I can feel the tissue in my legs swelling. I shuffle my way to the bath room, moving my weight from one foot to the other with deliberate effort. Left. Right. Left. Right. I make it to the bathroom, flip on the light, and look down at my legs. They are swollen and alien stumps, not legs at all. "Oh shit," I say. "Amiko, come look at this." She kneels down and squeezes one ankle, and it squishes like a water balloon. She looks up at me with worried eyes. "I can't even feel your ankle bones," she says.
"My skin is burning, too," I tell her. Amiko frantically examines me. I have a strange rash all over my back, the backs of my legs, the back of my head and neck – everywhere I was in contact with the bed. I can feel her cool hands moving over my inflamed skin. "It looks like an allergic rash," she says. "Like hives."
I use the bathroom and shuffle back to bed, wondering what I should do. Normally if I woke up feeling like this, I would go to the emergency room. But no one at the hospital will have seen symptoms of having been in space for a year. I crawl back into bed, trying to find a way to lie down without touching my rash.
I can hear Amiko rummaging in the medicine cabinet. She returns with two ibuprofen and a glass of water. As she settles down, I can tell from her every movement, every breath, that she is worried about me. We both knew the risks of the mission I signed on for. After six years together, I can understand her perfectly, even in the wordless dark.
Walking in space:
I didn't get to spend time outside the station until my first of two planned space walks, which was almost seven months in. This was one of the things that some people found difficult to imagine about living on the space station, the fact that I couldn't step outside when I felt like it. Putting on a spacesuit and leaving the station for a space walk was an hours-long process that required the full attention of at least three people on station and dozens more on the ground.
Space walks were the most dangerous thing we did in orbit. Even if the station was on fire, even if it was filling up with poison gas, even if a meteoroid had crashed through a module and outer space was rushing in, the only way to escape the station was in a Soyuz capsule, which also needed preparation and planning to depart safely. We practised dealing with emergency scenarios regularly, and in many of these drills we raced to prepare the Soyuz as quickly as we could. No one had ever had to use the Soyuz as a lifeboat, and no one hoped to.
Back on earth:
I tell my flight surgeon, Steve, that I feel well enough to get right to work immediately upon returning from space, and I do, but within a few days I feel much worse. This is what it means to have allowed my body to be used for science. I will be a test subject for the rest of my life. A few months after arriving back on Earth, though, I feel distinctly better. I've been travelling the country and the world talking about my experiences in space. It's gratifying to see how curious people are about my mission, how much children instinctively feel the excitement and wonder of space flight, and how many people think, as I do, that Mars is the next step.
I also know that if we want to go to Mars, it will be very, very difficult, it will cost a great deal of money and it may likely cost human lives. But I know now that if we decide to do it, we can.
