“We chose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our skills and talents, because that challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone and one we intend to win, and the others, too.” Address at Rice University, Space Needs, Houston, Texas, September 1962 JFK.

My main concern is not that it won’t be something that we’ll want to do sometime this century (actually probably by 2050), but that it may be just a bit premature to do it before 2025.

I have never said that we should not explore the space, on the contrary – I am all for exploration – but with robotic probes. And I personally do not believe the biological humans will ever be doing any serious space exploration. This is just a puerile fantasy and a throwback to linear thinking of sci-fi writers of the yesteryear. Space exploration is the job for machines. Astronauts today wear nappies (what could be more undignified!) and need a massively costly life support. The fact that we have human astronauts at all shows that the state of the robotics is still quite unsophisticated. I would be really, really disappointed if this remained the case by 2023.

The current prediction is that by 2045 there will be no difference between man and machine, and well before that there should be robots capable of doing any job a human can do – be it brain surgery, sending invoices, or installing antennae on space stations. And no, the strong general AI is not required to drive a car or fly a plane (or spaceship). Humans will never mine asteroids – the machines will. There will never be any terraforming of Mars, machines need no air. In fact oxygen and water are somewhat corrosive.

I can see it now – we do not explore, we do not dare but we all live forever and we’ll all be alive to share the cataclysm that destroys the earth because we did not have the tech to get us all (GET US ***ALL*** not just some) off the planet.

We must do both. Where I disagree is the idea that costs must be the overriding concern here. I do not agree that an accountant should determine my fate.

But I am, for one, delighted that the NASA is stopping sending humans into space. When I read of proposed human colonies on the Moon or Mars; when I read people dreaming of giant space ships hundreds of miles long, or of terra-forming other planets, or of finding habitable words suitable for human colonisation, this all sounds to me like a prime example of linear thinking and a pitiful lack of imagination.

To me a [b]human[/b] colony on Mars would signify a profound failure of the robotics and of the AI; no automatic manufacturing, and farm bots, no prospect of technological Singularity, no post-scarcity world of leisure and good health, no intelligence amplification, no mind-uploading, and obviously no transcendence and eternal life.

A human colony of Mars would mean that I, and everybody I love will die, (of old age if we are lucky), because that would mean that the mind-machine interface and robotics have failed!

The only redeeming feature of such dreams of space exploration in biological bodies is that anybody with common sense would see that going to Mars for biological creatures is only possible (in a sensible economical way) if they are in suspended animation, transported there as cargo in heavily shielded boxes, with no air, water, food or in-flight entertainment required.

Hopefully the Mars colony projects could spur research into controlled hypothermia, suspended animation and cryonics. Decades ago I saw a documentary of a dog being chilled for hours (no I don’t have a link, that was well before the Internet) re-animated and apparently suffering no ill-effects, as it still recognised it’s owners and behaved the same. I have also read of animals, and even humans being revived after drowning in icy water by falling through the ice, sometimes hours later. Only last year I read in a newspaper of a diver on a North Sea oil platform suffering some kind of equipment malfunction and surviving for 15 minutes with no air, due to cold water. In some clinics cooling of the body and brain is used during surgery, and I want to see more research into this.

I want this to be standard procedure, when a patient has an option that in the case of a terminal illness, or injury, instead of being kept in a coma for months and years, to have a choice to be cryonicly preserved instead. It might even be cheaper than spending resources on palliative care.

And yes, I would like to see colonies on Mars, but robotic ones, with no nonsense like growing food in domes, air support etc.

Anybody who understands the exponential nature of technological evolution would see that the future is non-biological. We are destined to become machines, and I want it to happen within my life-time because I (like most people) don’t want to die. Therefore resources should be spend on programs to make this happen sooner, to extend the maximum human lifespan, so more people can benefit; on cryonics for everyone, as part of the standard health care, rather than wasting billions on building agricultural domes on Mars, and human space flights.

(that’s the best hemisphere)

TV show will need some good editing, but I think this goes beyond just a basic reality show that would appeal to the geeks or science nuts. This project is a change the universe level (if they actually go through with it).

Most likely this will require major commitment from one or more governments – most likely for the science, since there’s not a whole lot of reason to go there for anything else because the costs are just too high for normal commerce. But we should also start to see much better AI for more advanced Mars rovers within the next 10-20 years, so I’m not sure that there will be very much appetite in government to help fund this.

This might have made more sense 20-30 years ago, if we could have jump-started rocket technology then; at that time there was less likelihood that manned science missions would be quickly overtaken by robotics, and more chance of finding government funding. And it might make more sense in another 20-30 years, when nanotechnology and AI may allow for a significant amount of a Mars base to be constructed fairly inexpensively before sending up any colonists. But right now we’re in an awkward intermediate spot where manned science missions don’t make as much sense as they once did, and our AI and nanotech are not quite up to snuff for preparing the way for human colonists.