Futurist: Space Travel and Machine Intelligence

For those who have read my last few columns here on LinkedIn, I have focused predominantly on machine intelligence. Today, there is a slight divergence, but gonna end up on the same topic again. On October 14, the Europa Clipper mission was launched by NASA from Cape Kennedy in Florida. What is the Europa Clipper? It is a spacecraft designed to orbit Saturn and do a series of flybys from the moon Europa. Europa is one of the icy water worlds in the Jupiter and Saturn system. If you read the Decadal surveys, a group of scientists is getting together to share their thoughts on what NASA should look at and what the European space agency should look at, Europa Ganymede, and sell these three top mark moon destinations. We've seen plumes of water on in solidus. Europa has a hard ice shell on the planet's surface. We know there's liquid water underneath a shell because there is no permanent crater when an asteroid or space debris strikes the surface. They leave a crater initially, but eventually, water rushes in and freezes, and you once again have a solid service.

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So, as we consider this, it brings to bear the concept of NASA generating a series of machine intelligence-driven missions with its space partners, including the Japanese space agency, the European space agency, and others. Today, the Martian Rovers utilize machine intelligence. There is a delay between Mars and Earth, and the Rover needs to be able to make some decisions on it all. So today, we already have machine intelligence in the solar system outside Earth's gravity well. But what I am speaking of or thinking of talking about is our extended missions well beyond the limits of our solar system, utilizing machine intelligence to gather data, information, and so on, and return that to Earth. Missions that can adjust on the fly to avoid issues and problems and deliver that data more efficiently.

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From my perspective, the rise of machine intelligence, and eventually, when we get to that place where we have artificial intelligence, will become a boon for space exploration. We will no longer be solely limited to the desire to send humans into space. We will be able to send Systems capable of operating without human intervention. Several interesting missions have been discussed. Several have been proposed in several NASA forums, TSA forums, and many other nations. It examines what is possible and what will be the best and most efficient missions as NASA goes forward. I keep saying NASA, but I mean all the human space agencies. NASA is simply the US agency responsible for the US approach.

There are several missions that I suspect would be of extremely high value. One of them would be the interesting missions focused on Venus. Venus has a very interesting and very toxic environment. But it is conceivable that, like Mars, Venus once had oceans with liquid water. What happened to that planet that made that liquid water disappear? Venus is also extremely volcanically active and has several other interesting impacts in the study of life. Still, it also has a significant impact on the formation and aging of the planet. It brings to mind several questions. What caused Venus to lose its water, or perhaps its water went underground and instead turned into a much more hospitable planet for humans? Cause Mars to lose its oceans? It still has water. Scientists have detected water beneath the surface of Mars, but it's very deep, and one has to wonder what caused Mars to lose its water.

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These questions are many others that lie open in front of us. A machine intelligence-driven mission can collect data and utilize its instrumentation in a variable way to produce the data that will answer. Those questions will be critical going forward. The thing I guess I will leave with is the concept of information. Gathering and utilizing information makes us smarter. The computers that most of us use daily or the cell phones we use daily are derived from tech technologies generated to support space travel, a number of the problems space agencies are considering today. Include energy production and more efficient use of available energy resources. The advancements and available technological improvements in energy production will benefit humanity. Understanding our solar system and our universe will greatly benefit humanity.

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I will add a reminder from a speech by the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald. Kennedy, more commonly called JFK JFK, talked about going to space. He famously once said we would put he said a man, I'm gonna replace that with a human being. We will put a human being on the moon and return them safely to Earth within the next decade. He made that speech in 1963. Six years later, Armstrong stepped out of the lunar module of the Apollo 11 mission and walked on the moon's surface. His footprints are the first footprints of a human, not on planet Earth, that dream of what is possible and what we could do as a species is still alive. Once again, the time has come to band together as a species and seek beyond the edges of the atmosphere of the pale blue dot we live on.