Finding ET may require giant robotic leap
April 24, 2012
NGC 3949 lies about 50 million light-years from Earth. It is a member of a loose cluster of some six or seven dozens of galaxies located in the direction of the Big Dipper, in the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear). It is one of the larger galaxies of this cluster (credit: Penn State)
Autonomous, self-replicating robots — exobots — are the way to explore the universe, find and identify extraterrestrial life and perhaps clean up space debris in the process, according to John D. Mathews, professor of electrical engineering at Penn State.
“The basic premise is that human space exploration must be highly efficient, cost effective, and autonomous as placing humans beyond low Earth orbit is fraught with political economic, and technical difficulties,”reported
If aliens are out there, they have the same problems we do, they need to conserve resources, are limited by the laws of physics and they may not even be eager to meet us, according to Mathews.
He suggests that “only by developing and deploying self-replicating robotic spacecraft — and the incumbent communications systems — can the human race efficiently explore even the asteroid belt, let alone the vast reaches of the Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud, and beyond.”
Mathews assumes that any extraterrestrial would need to follow a similar path to the stars, sending robots rather than living beings, which would explain why SETI has not succeeded to date.
“If they are like us, they too have a dysfunctional government and all the other problems plaguing us,” said Mathews. “They won’t want to spend a lot to communicate with us.”
It is extremely difficult to broadcast into the galaxy and requires vast resources. Radio signals need to emanate in every direction to fill the sky, and the energy requirement to broadcast throughout space is quite high.
“Current infrared lasers can communicate across our solar system,” said Mathews. “The problem in terms of SETI is they are highly directed beams.”
Point-to-point communications using infrared signaling requires less power, but the signals are extremely directional. If extraterrestrial beings are using laser-generated infrared signaling, we would never notice their signals because they are so tightly targeted to their destinations.
Mathews suggests that if human exploration is not possible, robots could go where many people do not want to go and do what many do not want to do, not only on Earth, but also in space.
Moon robots
To minimize the cost, he suggests that the initial robots be manufactured on the Moon to take advantage of the resources and the one-sixth gravity. He notes that we have the technology to create these exobots now, except for a compact power source.
To create a network of autonomous robots capable of passing information to each other and back to earth, the vehicles must be able to identify their exact location and determine the time. With these two bits of knowledge, they should be able to determine where all the other robots near them are and target them with an infrared laser beam carrying data.
“The expensive part of launching anything is escaping the surface of Earth and its gravity well,” said Mathews. “It would also be easier to target the space debris in near Earth orbit and in geosynchronous orbit and even recycle it.”
Exobots monitoring asteroids
Initially, the exobots would serve two purposes: clear existing debris and monitor the more than 1,200 near-Earth asteroids that are particularly hazardous in that they closely approach Earth during their orbits.
“As a first step, we really should launch robot vehicles to learn something about these asteroids and to place beacons on them for identification and tracking,” said Mathews.
Ultimately, the network of exobots — self-replicating, autonomous and capable of learning — will spread through the solar system and into the galaxy, using the resources they find there to continue their mission. Communicating with infrared lasers is communicating at the speed of light, which is the fastest we can hope to achieve.
“Our assumption in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that ET wants to be found,” said Mathews. “But who has energy resources to spend trying to wave their metaphorical hand across the galaxy?”
He said it is more likely that one of our exobots will intercept a signal from one of theirs if we are to make first contact.
Ref.: John D. Mathews, From Here to ET, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol. 64, pp. 234–241, 2011
Also see: Communicating with the universe
Successive generations of EBs and the incumbent communications links that are established. As all of these locations continually evolve, each EB must maintain an ephemeris of all network participants. That ephemeris is, in turn, dependent on the network for time and frequency keeping (credit: John D. Mathews/JBIS)
Comments (16)
by Daniel
This is just one invention away and it would enable us to ascend into space of unlimited resources relieving this planet and our selves of the struggle of competing of the recourses.
If just someone could invent a solar powered robot, combined with a 3d printer, made out nothing but lunar dust.
The robot should collect the lunar dust as the raw material for the printer.
It needs to be able to run on solar power and the entire robot with solar cells, processors and circuits should be made out of lunar dust.
I don’t think it is completely unrealistic. It’s not like we’re trying to invent warp drives or stargates or anything. Just a robot made out of lunar dust that can reproduce.
Arrange a completion. The first group that invents this should win a money prize.
by seeker
There are planty of autonomous robots in Japan, they were used in Fukushim, there are two models – “GrAndPa 1.0″ and “OldMaN 2.0″, unfortunately they can’t salf-replicate, but we going to have them a lot due to aging population. We can have two birds with one stone – universe exploration done by those robots and improving demographic structure of our societies.
by seeker
question from sceptic : what is the size of subsystem of economic system which allows us to replicate tracks ?
(tracks are definitly a part of system of making tracks)
I’ve heard that Someone have counted number of firms involved in that process, and on average, is about 10,000 frims (to the level of electrical plants, mines, processors)
by Guillermo
Well I dont see why we couldnt create a group of robots that could work together to create a mining station in a nearby asteroid to get metals and water. They will work together to create a temporary smelting and asembling system and then use then use the water as the fuel for the next generation. BTW this is the actual plan by Planetary Resources and current advances in autonomy will most probably allow for this in a few decades. It’s hard but very possible!
by george
i have a simple question, is self-replication controllable at any point..? of course it will be an exponential process we will pollute the galaxy and maybe just maybe bring microbes and viruses to fresh fragile ecosystems.
by John
It’s called “seeding the galaxy”. It might be that there is very little number of(or none at all) fragile ecosystems in the universe. A expansive technological civilization will have to go build them in the first place.
by Snaz
The universe is 13.7 billion years old. A von Neuman machine sweep would take less than a million years for the Milky Way. The odds that no other race has done it, and then that there would be multiple waves in a single million year time period? Trivial. There are a lot of things that it turns out we had to have or had to have happen in order to be here. No single one may be a showstopper but like grains of rice doubling across a chessboard, they grow exponentially. True that each of them might have workarounds, theoretically, but those I’ve seen are orders of magnitude less likely still. Figured this way it is easy to get odds of one race, as far as long as we are, arising once every 750,000 galaxies or so. Even if it is not that unlikely, there is also starting to be strong evidence, based on relative metallicity and placement in the galaxy, that we were already on the fast track to get here and have a gotten as much as a two billion year headstart on any potential neighbors. If it seems unlikely that we are the only or the first race in our galaxy, perhaps that is because there never is a second once the first has arisen and expanded.
by Jacko
By extension, the probability is that there is a near-lightspeed wave coming at us from each and every technologically evolved civilization in the universe. Each of these waves is evolving at a dizzying rate as it rolls outward from home, consuming resources along the way, programmed to evolve as quickly as possible. Each wave will very likely view any other wave it encounters as competitive (because they WILL be), and so every wave will represent a weapons system. It then stands to reason that any early technologies encountered will be spontaneously assimilated into the technology matrix of the first wave to encounter them. Our only chance of survival is to be the first wave. Any other precept on the matter is foolhardy. But technology emanating from us in our wave will be of the same will to survive, and so will have to be designed to be as aggressive as possible. It’ll come down to resources for technological development. The strongest technology will generally want to consume everything in its path to assure its own survival. To borrow a pretty good movie out-take, “There can be only one…”
by Anonymous
“Autonomous, self-replicating robots — exobots — are the way to explore the universe. … Mathews … notes that we have the technology to create these exobots now, except for a compact power source.”
Mathews must be living on that ET planet he’s looking to find. Since when do we have the technology to launch an “exobot” that is self-replicating and autonomous? Able to do such things as to create new CPUs, memory chips, etc.; mine and smelt raw materials? Refine the materials to required specs for use in making another such “exobot”?
And then what of replicative failure? Copies won’t be exact, meaning successive generations are increasingly likely to fail – the same problem we allegedly face with cloning ad infinitum.
Let’s not forget that getting the first one of these things on its way to begin with isn’t going to be cheap and probably would dwarf the annual budgets of most if not all countries of the world.
Show me a design for a portable mining/smelting/materials preparation facility smaller than a small city and we can talk. But that is just the starting point. Every one of those “replicants” will need their own power source to continue. Or will the first one be carrying all the spares in its back pocket?
by Ralph
Self-replication will not be feasible until robots can be at least partially grown rather than manufactured. Otherwise, are the fleets of exobots going to prospect for minerals and develop mines to obtain the necessary ores to build automated systems? Will they smelt these ores and bring them to the high levels of purity required to build electronic circuits? But of course you cannot smelt ores without a lot of high-energy fuel. The difficulties just go on and on.
Unless the robots are actually in some sense alive, they will never be able to reproduce themselves in distant places without human help. Even then it is going to be very tough, because conditions that can support any sort of life — even artificial life — are very rare.
A better method might be to send out something like a series of cluster bombs, each one being a large already “pregnant” mother-robot pre-loaded with daughter robots that can be released along the way. Additional generations of even tinier granddaughter and great-granddaughter machines would be built into the daughters so the process could be extended. The final generation might consist of nanobots. If the shelf-life of these successively smaller machines can be assured, generations of offspring could continue exploration for many centuries without additional material assistance. Human help via communication channels would probably continue to be useful.
In fact, this kind of technology is already being developed and tested on our own planet. Within a few months or years, autonomous unmanned vehicles will surely be releasing daughter generations in large quantities all over the world. Extreme levels of electronic miniaturization and high-volume production, coupled with the availability of inexpensive solar power cells, make this scenario inevitable.
For perspective, consider that silicon integrated circuits are already being manufactured with line widths so small that an ordinary rod-shaped bacterium, say one micron wide by two microns long, accidentally dropped onto a chip, would cover thousands of memory cells.
by Richard Sittel
OK, if the other civilizations are in the same predicament we are, needing robots to explore space, etc. Then why aren’t some of their robots visiting us here? It would be easy for another civilization to be just 10,000 years ahead of us in technology, they would have reached singularity 9,970 years ago and should have been here by now. Unless we are the very first in the galaxy? I doubt that. All this means that space travel is very difficult over long distances and there are no short cuts.
by Tuco
Yeah, well, chances are that interstellar space travel could even turn out as being impossible, actually.
We all hope that’s not the case, sure, but let’s face it, that’s what physics suggest so far.
by Ken
Fermi paradox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
by Roland Lemmers
If there are other civilizations and they are advanced enough to do interstellar travel they most likely can build with individual atoms and molecules. It just might be that they are in the dust in your livingroom. :)
by Kyle Rybski
Granted, but then they all choose to be remain covert?
by Scott Smith
Von Neumann Machines. Not a new concept. Makes sense.