Chinese Robots Prepare for Mars

Hey Everyone,

First, a message from my sci-fi psyche:

??“Mars has for decades attracted intensive scientific exploration and research in countries worldwide. Finding signs of past life and building potentially habitable regions on Mars have long been a dream of humanity.”

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Sometimes a story in the week really sparks the imagination, and while rumours of China need to be taken with a grain of salt, there is an example of China and Mars that is pretty telling.

By the time human civilization on Earth gets to Mars, the red Planet, our robotics and artificial intelligence is going to be pretty advanced, relative to today.

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Given the current trajectory I believe China will beat us to a Lunar base and to Mars. This is because the Chinese are expansionist builders and understand the mining opportunities are going to be very lucrative in the 21st century in space and space-technology.

In June, 2021 it was reported by Reuters that indeed China aims to send its first crewed mission to Mars in 2033, with regular follow-up flights to follow, under a long-term plan to build a permanently inhabited base on the Red Planet and extract its resources.

China wants to start building a lunar base using soil from the moon in five years, so that’s by 2028. There’s no way NASA will be able to follow what China plans on doing, but will SpaceX?

I’m not myself a transhumanist when it comes to cybernetics or synthetic biology, but I' am strongly in favor of becoming a multi-planetary civilization. I think this should be among our highest priorities if we want human civilization not to go extinct. This is because we are too close to the bring on too many fronts for potential evolutionary dead-ends for humanity .

Read the Study

A Robotic ‘A.I. Chemist’ Could Make Oxygen on Mars

We know that Generative A.I. is going to enable AI robotic labs that will be able to help make scientific discoveries. Some early prototypes are starting to take shape in 2023.

AI in drug development is a microcosm of how this might work for other domains. This story out of China really blew up this week in terms of superficial headline news about AI this week.

Read on Nature

A robotic AI Laboratory in China recently found the optimal formula that was tested in simulated low-temperature conditions of Mars, according to researchers.

Researchers in China have developed a robot chemist powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that might be able to extract oxygen from water on Mars. What?

The story is full of Chinese Nationalistic vibes and the progress of humanity.

• The same process would have taken a human 2,000 years, according to researchers. Really?
• The discovery demonstrates the feasibility of the AI chemist in the automated synthesis of chemicals and materials for Mars exploration, according to a study published in the journal Nature Synthesis on Monday November 13th, 2023.
• The system calculated more than 3.7 million molecules it could make from six different metallic elements in the rocks.

It’s a thought-provoking story on the outside, but what is it really saying? It’s saying China is serious about space-technology and creating bases in the solar system and may seek to get to them first. We know that India is likely to be a future competitor.

It’s not clear if this will ever be a major priority for the United States Government. China has its own versions of SpaceX in development. China is more advanced in space-technology than is usually talked about in the Western mainstream media. Why might that be?

“If you think about the challenge of going to Mars, you have to work with local materials,” says Andy Cooper, a chemist at the University of Liverpool, UK. “So I can see the logic behind it.”

The “robot”, and I have no idea why China calls it a robot (it's all about the AI), uses materials found on the red planet to produce catalysts that break down water, releasing oxygen. The idea could complement existing oxygen-generating technologies or lead to the development of other catalysts able to synthesize useful resources on Mars.

Now obviously, sending supplies, such as oxygen, to Mars is extremely expensive so being able to create it on the red planet could remove a major barrier to establishing future colonies. A good amount of National Defense contracts are actually about space-technologies even as a good amount of quantum technologies in development have implications to, you guessed it, space-technology and Solar system bases and habitats.

As for the colonization of Mars, we know that robots could build colonies, before we arrive and they will. We also know what AI systems will function as major nexus of organization, communication and management by the time we “colonize” Mars and other places in the solar system like where Enceladus, Titan and Ceres come to mind.

So this PR out of China is actually rather good news for the sci-fi nerds in the technological optimists among us. But certainly a Martian colony could be the most feasible society that could eventually one day become self-sustainable. If that’s even entirely possible?

"We have developed a robotic AI system that has a chemistry brain," said study lead Jun Jiang at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, per Nature News .

How Chinese scientists and outlets frame thing is a little different.

Read the Paper

??This is the entire key to understanding this.

You can read the entire article on A.I. Supremacy here. I also embedded the best video about this news there.