Time to terraform Mars?

[Paul M]

We already have a beautiful habitat, perfectly suited to our species.

If we were  serious about prolonging our existence it would make more sense for us to simply stop destroying it. Then it should last us a few more billion years.

It would also be really nice if could learn to live alongside our cohabitants  in the animal kingdom.  Sadly it looks like we'll continue to destroy them as we carry on regardless  

If there were any Cosmic Police they'd likely give us prohibition notice regarding any ideas for Mars. 

[DRT]

1 hour ago, Paul M said:

It would also be really nice if could learn to live alongside our cohabitants  in the animal kingdom.  

That touches on the fundamental problem - we can't live peacefully and co-operatively amongst our own species let alone others. 

Unfortunately, our species did not evolve to a state where we no longer had or needed the instinctive desire to protect our tribe at the expense of others. Selfishness is in our genes and is only suppressed through generations of not needing to worry about where our next meal is coming from or the wolf at the door, be that a wolf or another tribe of humans with a different idea of how to live than our own. 

If we found a way to eradicate selfishness and greed and then waited a few dozen generations we might be a species that can make rational decisions for the good of everyone. 

I cant see us getting there before the Sun gobbles us up. 

[pipnina]

32 minutes ago, Alien 13 said:

I expect every advanced civilization is superseded by artificial machines eventually, technology being just a step in natural selection.

Alan

"Organic life is nothing but a genetic mutation. An accident. Your lives are measured in years and decades, you wither and die. We are eternal, the pinnacle of evolution and existence. Before us, you are nothing" -Sovereign, Mass Effect

[ollypenrice]

I think that both selfishness and altruism can be traced back to our and other animal genes. (BTW we must be careful not attribute to Richard Dawkins the idea of a gene for selfishness. That is absolutely not what his famous title proposes.) In many ways humans have done well to rise above the crudest of selfishness, invent morality and, in many ways but not all, live by it. We just haven't done well enough so far, it seems, to optimize our tenure as a living species.

As I've argued before on here, I think the assumptioon that intelligence will always lead to technology is utterly anthropomorphic and that anthropomorphism has led to more errors in human thought than any other intellectual impulse in our history. The latest fashionable idea, that we are part of a simulation, is yet another example of anthropomorphism leading us up a gum tree.

Olly

[wimvb]

I don't know about terraforming Mars, but I'm pretty sure we are on our way to marsaform Terra. So, if we keep at it for a while longer, we can just ship ourselves to that planet and breath in the fresh air.

[Shibby]

A few doubters here, but the fact is that nobody can predict the future. Yes, Earth is our current home, but once the continent of Africa was our home. As a race we have a history of colonising and I see no reason to doubt that, some day, in the distant future, we could colonise the galaxy.

[ollypenrice]

7 minutes ago, Shibby said:

A few doubters here, but the fact is that nobody can predict the future. Yes, Earth is our current home, but once the continent of Africa was our home. As a race we have a history of colonising and I see no reason to doubt that, some day, in the distant future, we could colonise the galaxy.

This would require our present high tech culture to have a very distant future. We don't know much about the long term prospects of high tech cultures because we've only seen our own and it's not very old. My own grandmother was born before the first motor car appeared on British roads. She was 13 when the Wright brothers made the first powered flight. You can't put a firm data on when we became 'high tech,' of course, but the motor car and aeroplane might do as indicators. That means we have just over a hundred years' experience of being high tech and plenty of people are pessimistic about the prospects. Given our inexperience I think it's very hard to guess where we are going with all this technology but I regard it as more of a manace than a source of salvation. The population is too large, the food chain too extended, the environmental damage too extreme and the weapons too powerful. So I think technology is more likely to kill us than save us but, as you say, who knows?

Olly

 

[pipnina]

15 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

So I think technology is more likely to kill us than save us but, as you say, who knows?

I'm now reminded of a game I play a lot of at the moment called Stellaris. You play as a species that has just developed faster than light travel and explore and colonize the galaxy, eventually meeting other species who have just done the same. Depending on their "ethos" they may like you, or be "fanatic purifiers" who you would rather avoid.

Sometimes you encounter a "pre-FTL species" which lives on a single planet, like yours did before the game started. You get to build "observation posts" above their worlds to monitor their progress and you receive updates on changes in their society. Quite often they reach "early space age" or "atomic age" and nuke themselves, which turns their planet into a "barren world" with 0% habitability. There is even an event where one of your science ships can study a barren world, and discover that it was once home to a pre-FTL species which suffered such a fate in the "early space age". It mentions the logs from one of their rudimentary space stations, saying "The communications from the  astronauts became more and more frantic as the days passed, slowly realizing that nobody was left to save them."

The best we can do is hope our own astronauts don't have to face a similar demise because of stupidity down here on earth.

A cone, about my height and width, is capable of leveling a small city and making the area around it uninhabitable for decades. But don't worry, international treaties only allow countries to put up to ten on a single rocket.

[saac]

On 16/07/2017 at 23:05, Ags said:

Mars has sufficient gravity to hold on to an atmosphere, the problem is the lack of magnetic field leading to atmospheric erosion by the solar wind. This can be solved by engineering (latitudinal superconducting coils) and is obviously a big job but the task can be completed on a geological timescale. At a time when the solar wind was orders of magnitude more powerful, the young Mars held on to a thick atmosphere for a billion years.

 

Like the notion of so called Dyson spheres, terra forming in my humble opinion belongs to the realms of science fiction. From an engineering perspective the challenges are insurmountable. I'm not convinced that our planet is broken either, yes we have caused damage/change but it is recoverable with the  appropriate will and commitment. What is worrying though are the growing number of species that are being edged towards extinction in our time due to our activity.  Quite thought provoking that our grandchildren may not share a world with the likes of the White Rhino or Siberian tiger. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangered_species

 

Jim

[101nut]

I'm not sure why there's even a discussion about terraforming mars. It is patently obvious that man is unable to control the environment on the Earth - its temperature or CO2  concentration - so how is man supposed to make significant but controlled driving change to an alien environment on a planetary scale? 

AndyG

[Floater]

2 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

... So I think technology is more likely to kill us than save us but, as you say, who knows?

And those last two words, Olly, represent what helps pessimists like me hang on. I share your near-despair at the state of our jewel of a planet and the effect this present plague of humans (copyright David Attenborough) continues to inflict upon it.

The mismatch between our technological advance and our moral, spiritual (non-religious) and holistic senses seems insurmountable. But advance we will. Discovering or, even, imagining what might be done - and then working out how to do it - is something we humans have proved we can do. This type of advance seems to be exponential: witness the almost daily discoveries in astronomy alone, and just about every other area of scientific endeavour. The more we learn the more we seek to know; to probe ever deeper; to find a source. The Point.

Meanwhile, our advance on a moral and societal plane has risen barely (some would argue not at all) above that of an amoeba.

It's against my nature to be optimistic but we can only hope that humankind, like photons finding their way from the core of the star, may take a long, long time and have a difficult journey ... but they will, eventually, break through and shine. ☀️☀️?

 

[pipnina]

Just think, when true artificial intelligence is created, what will happen to our expectations of other humans.

An artificial intelligence that needs no food, no entertainment, no space. Just routine servicing (which would be less expensive than medical costs for a human) and electricity. It could take every single factory job, every single warehouse job, every single job involving manual labor would be cheaper & more effective to use a robot.

The only jobs that will be safe in the early days are creative jobs (art, film, games etc) and perhaps scientific jobs (I also debut we would elect "mindless robots" as leaders of our countries).

But 80%+ of jobs in the modern world would be gone as far as humans are concerned, and with a growing population how will we provide work for everyone? Not everyone is fit to be an intellectual, and unless we adapt QUICKLY universities are not equipped to provide the entire population with doctorates and professorships. Unemployment would skyrocket.

The only option would be to have CRISPR babies born with extraordinary intelligence: Something only a small portion of the would would be able to access & can be abused. But that won't save us when the artificial intelligence manages to become better at even scientific & creative work than us. Even if it has no emotions it would still be able to understand ours better than we do, and make better creative work as a result. No jobs would be left that humans can compete in.

The scary thing is, this is already happening. Computers can analyze images and pick out things humans couldn't. Computers are better at CAPTCHA than we are already. Computers can tell if a human is lying better than a human can. Computers can figure out which images of hotel rooms look more attractive to humans than humans. Artificial intelligence has no attention span, doesn't suffer for boredom, doesn't need to socialize or learn. It can just copy knowledge and experience from it's brothers and perform a job instantly.

 

Call be a pessimist, but anyone born today may not be able to find a job at all by the time they are 25.

[Erla]

10 minutes ago, pipnina said:

Just think, when true artificial intelligence is created, what will happen to our expectations of other humans.

An artificial intelligence that needs no food, no entertainment, no space. Just routine servicing (which would be less expensive than medical costs for a human) and electricity. It could take every single factory job, every single warehouse job, every single job involving manual labor would be cheaper & more effective to use a robot.

The only jobs that will be safe in the early days are creative jobs (art, film, games etc) and perhaps scientific jobs (I also debut we would elect "mindless robots" as leaders of our countries).

But 80%+ of jobs in the modern world would be gone as far as humans are concerned, and with a growing population how will we provide work for everyone? Not everyone is fit to be an intellectual, and unless we adapt QUICKLY universities are not equipped to provide the entire population with doctorates and professorships. Unemployment would skyrocket.

The only option would be to have CRISPR babies born with extraordinary intelligence: Something only a small portion of the would would be able to access & can be abused. But that won't save us when the artificial intelligence manages to become better at even scientific & creative work than us. Even if it has no emotions it would still be able to understand ours better than we do, and make better creative work as a result. No jobs would be left that humans can compete in.

The scary thing is, this is already happening. Computers can analyze images and pick out things humans couldn't. Computers are better at CAPTCHA than we are already. Computers can tell if a human is lying better than a human can. Computers can figure out which images of hotel rooms look more attractive to humans than humans. Artificial intelligence has no attention span, doesn't suffer for boredom, doesn't need to socialize or learn. It can just copy knowledge and experience from it's brothers and perform a job instantly.

 

Call be a pessimist, but anyone born today may not be able to find a job at all by the time they are 25.

Wasn't this told at the start of industrial revolution? We don't use horses for travel, sure, lots of professions became obsolete, but we employ people in IT sector etc., in areas that simply didn't exist. The AI has no reason to compete with humans, and someone will have to pay for it to produce. It will have to cover the cost, the production for the sake of production is illogical, and to mass produce you need masses of consumers. Our society will change, as it always has been changing, but it is not necessarily an apocalyptic future. Rome had much more unemployed, if we had robotic "slaves", maybe society would go for new sort of "games and bread" model? There's already Jeremy Kyle and young daytime TV watchers  With this I'll have to admit - we are probably doomed.

 

[Floater]

Oh I'm revelling in this thread! My own, dear, precious cynical pessimism, laced with just a hint of hope and light.

But to return to the OP, perhaps successful terraforming of Mars is a possibility. We have been very clever in the past. However, creating a harmonious civilisation on the terraformed planet is probably even more challenging.

At least, as far as we know, there are no other animals on Mars that we can usurp/eradicate/exploit/etc., ad nauseum.

[saac]

2 hours ago, pipnina said:

Just think, when true artificial intelligence is created, what will happen to our expectations of other humans.

An artificial intelligence that needs no food, no entertainment, no space. Just routine servicing (which would be less expensive than medical costs for a human) and electricity. It could take every single factory job, every single warehouse job, every single job involving manual labor would be cheaper & more effective to use a robot.

The only jobs that will be safe in the early days are creative jobs (art, film, games etc) and perhaps scientific jobs (I also debut we would elect "mindless robots" as leaders of our countries).

Call be a pessimist, but anyone born today may not be able to find a job at all by the time they are 25.

The rise of AI and the demise of all "human" employment is a popular story but again one that I don't buy.  So in the future the robots and their AI are making my BMW, designing, maintaining the power stations to provide electricity, staffing our hospitals and caring for our sick, designing, manufacturing and distributing the medical supplies used in the hospitals, they are  teaching our future kids in schools (what for I don't know because there are no jobs), they are even designing making and selling the latest fidget spinner. Thing is with all of these pesky humans out of a job, who is buying the stuff the robots are making - say goodbye to my BMW a robot took my job at the BMW factory, tried to get a start in the fidget spinner factory but hey what do you know it's staffed by robots with AI - even the AI robots are playing with the fidget spinner , they must be bored!  I wouldn't be basing my pension on stocks held in AI companies - they aren't going to be selling much because everybody is unemployed.  I think I will do better holding out for my anti gravity boots  

Jim

[saac]

1 hour ago, Floater said:

But to return to the OP, perhaps successful terraforming of Mars is a possibility.

As possible as 3 consecutive nights of clear sky in Scotland this winter

 

Jim

[pipnina]

4 minutes ago, saac said:

The rise of AI and the demise of all "human" employment is a popular story but again one that I don't buy.  So in the future the robots and their AI are making my BMW, designing, maintaining the power stations to provide electricity, staffing our hospitals and caring for our sick, designing, manufacturing and distributing the medical supplies used in the hospitals, they are  teaching our future kids in schools (what for I don't know because there are no jobs), they are even designing making and selling the latest fidget spinner. Thing is with all of these pesky humans out of a job, who is buying the stuff the robots are making - say goodbye to my BMW a robot took my job at the BMW factory, tried to get a start in the fidget spinner factory but hey what do you know it's staffed by robots with AI - even the AI robots are playing with the fidget spinner , they must be bored!  I wouldn't be basing my pension on stocks held in AI companies - they aren't going to be selling much because everybody is unemployed.  I think I will do better holding out for my anti gravity boots  

Jim

And yet it becomes harder and harder for university graduates to get jobs, and graduate job pay has decreased significantly since the 90s. All at a time when robots were able to automate many aspects of production (e.g. the robotic arms in car factories which do all the welding 5x as fast as humans, and seldom make a mistake).

Also, you can now run a business on a fraction of the staff you could previously. Google hires 60'000 people, and makes about 50BN$ a year. They earn 840'000$ per year per employee. That's insane.

The thing is: an economy uses money as a method of distributing effort. If you have money, you have what is basically an "effort token" which you can give to someone else in exchange for them putting effort into something. They then use the same effort token in an exchange for someone else's effort (i.e. food, a house).

If humans don't have to put in effort, money becomes useless. Money is a measure of effort and will, and if the machines do all the willing, no human needs money. If the machines reach the point where they're making our films, they have reached the point where they can maintain themselves without human effort, where the machines design & build their successors. No human needs money because no human need put effort into anything. In fact, even if a human were to spend its whole life trying to beat a robot at something, it couldn't. So why bother? Just ask the robots what you want done and they'll do it all for you.

No human could buy a company's product, but no company would need to pay for anything after a while because the machines maintain themselves, with their own collective effort.

[saac]

2 minutes ago, pipnina said:

And yet it becomes harder and harder for university graduates to get jobs, and graduate job pay has decreased significantly since the 90s. All at a time when robots were able to automate many aspects of production (e.g. the robotic arms in car factories which do all the welding 5x as fast as humans, and seldom make a mistake).

Also, you can now run a business on a fraction of the staff you could previously. Google hires 60'000 people, and makes about 50BN$ a year. They earn 840'000$ per year per employee. That's insane.

The thing is: an economy uses money as a method of distributing effort. If you have money, you have what is basically an "effort token" which you can give to someone else in exchange for them putting effort into something. They then use the same effort token in an exchange for someone else's effort (i.e. food, a house).

If humans don't have to put in effort, money becomes useless. Money is a measure of effort and will, and if the machines do all the willing, no human needs money. If the machines reach the point where they're making our films, they have reached the point where they can maintain themselves without human effort, where the machines design & build their successors. No human needs money because no human need put effort into anything. In fact, even if a human were to spend its whole life trying to beat a robot at something, it couldn't. So why bother? Just ask the robots what you want done and they'll do it all for you.

No human could buy a company's product, but no company would need to pay for anything after a while because the machines maintain themselves, with their own collective effort.

No money is not an effort token, money is a "promise", it's a mechanism that allows for the exchange of goods and services. If holds value because we believe in the promise that it will be redeemed should we cheque it in at the Bank of England.  Loose faith in that promise and it becomes worthless.

"No human could buy a company's product, but no company would need to pay for anything after a while because the machines maintain themselves, with their own collective effort."

Not sure what Adam Smith would make of that!   Mmm, I can see a sub culture developing in this AI utopia of the future - humans get bored of robots doing everything, making goods they cannot afford. The hitherto indolent humans start to make and sell things under the unique selling point of "made by human hand" - the badge starts to gather a premium and a sub culture currency develops which gradually grows to become mainstream. Nobody is interested in what the robots do anymore because you cannot buy what they produce.  Humans rediscover the benefit of work goes far beyond the acquisition of wealth as they regain a sense of purpose and society benefits from social cohesion. Robots are overthrown  and AI is consigned to Cortana and Siri telling us not very funny jokes on our mobile phones - they just don't have that human touch.  

 

Jim 

[pipnina]

1 minute ago, saac said:

No money is not an effort token, money is a "promise", it's a mechanism that allows for the exchange of goods and services. If holds value because we believe in the promise that it will be redeemed should we cheque it in at the Bank of England.  Loose faith in that promise and it becomes worthless.

"No human could buy a company's product, but no company would need to pay for anything after a while because the machines maintain themselves, with their own collective effort."

Not sure what Adam Smith would make of that!   Mmm, I can see a sub culture developing in this AI utopia of the future - humans get bored of robots doing everything, making goods they cannot afford. The hitherto indolent humans start to make and sell things under the unique selling point of "made by human hand" - the badge starts to gather a premium and a sub culture currency develops which gradually grows to become mainstream. Nobody is interested in what the robots do anymore because you cannot buy what they produce.  Humans rediscover the benefit of work goes far beyond the acquisition of wealth as they regain a sense of purpose and society benefits from social cohesion. Robots are overthrown  and AI is consigned to Cortana and Siri telling us not very funny jokes on our mobile phones - they just don't have that human touch.  

 

Jim 

Well yes, standard currency as a concept exists because trading chickens and cows isn't exactly ideal. But the concept is sound in what I said.

Because humans cannot do everything, we decide to specialize. Humans also cannot live off their sole section of work. Someone who knits all day relies on farmers for food & wool, a farmer relies on someone who can build & maintain buildings. As such, all core aspects of human effort are interconnected and interdependent.

A farmer is rewarded for their effort because by giving away milk from their cows, they can stay warm or have a house to live in. In effect, standard currency is a measure of how much someone's effort is worth. Currency maintains value because it is a promise, but it is merely a convenience to avoid trading an endless stream of goods for goods.

If I am being paid 25'000£ per year, that means the company employing me thinks my effort is worth that much to them.

Without effort there is no value, without value no-one would use effort.

[N3ptune]

The governments act has if it's useless to live on earth but do we need to leave that bad?  If we don't need to leave, I would stop investments on Mars and invest in developing cleaner energies on earth, like the ITER project and studying to create new and incredible elements to help us explore space.

If it could be easy like this (:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaVgRj2e5_s

[ollypenrice]

I've never liked the term 'artificial intelligence' and still don't, because I think it's a lazy term and at best an analogy, probably not a very precise one. About thirty years ago I had a heated argument with an early IE believer who said, 'Your trouble is that you don't know enough about computers.' I replied, 'And yours is that you don't know enough about intelligence.' I think this is still our problem. We find it very difficult to define intelligence, making it near impossible to define 'artificial intelligence.'

We have an anthropomorphic view of computers, exaggerated by our sloppy readiness to use anthropmorphic terms like 'memory.' Pehaps the most anthropomorphic term in the IT world is 'it' used as the subject of a verb. 'It remembers, it searches, it compares, it scans...' But does it? Does a sheet of paper remember what's written on it?

I think computers are machines. We designed them to perform operations in our service. It is hardly surprising, then, that we find they do things that we used to do in a way that is superficially analogous with the way we would do them. They would. We made them that way.

This doesn't mean we can't lose control of them. We may already have done so. Possibly no banker on earth now understands all the algorithms used to analyse and exploit the markets. We asked the machine itself to design new algorithms which we may not understand or even be properly aware of. But that doesn't make the machine intelligent. It remains a machine.

Olly

[Dave Lloyd]

I agree Olly, no matter how able a machine appears at interaction, unless it is self aware it is not intelligent. 

[Dave In Vermont]

I have believed that everything we get a computer to do is an externalized reflection of an internal process of our own mind. But when the computer starts behaving in seemingly strange ways, like doing things we don't recall programming it to do, then it gets all the more fascinating to me. I view such events as possibly teaching us more than we may have bargained for, and about the most important bits of information about ourselves we didn't consciously know of.

Dave

[saac]

9 hours ago, pipnina said:

Well yes, standard currency as a concept exists because trading chickens and cows isn't exactly ideal. But the concept is sound in what I said.

Because humans cannot do everything, we decide to specialize. Humans also cannot live off their sole section of work. Someone who knits all day relies on farmers for food & wool, a farmer relies on someone who can build & maintain buildings. As such, all core aspects of human effort are interconnected and interdependent.

A farmer is rewarded for their effort because by giving away milk from their cows, they can stay warm or have a house to live in. In effect, standard currency is a measure of how much someone's effort is worth. Currency maintains value because it is a promise, but it is merely a convenience to avoid trading an endless stream of goods for goods.

If I am being paid 25'000£ per year, that means the company employing me thinks my effort is worth that much to them.

Without effort there is no value, without value no-one would use effort.

I don't believe we view the value of money in relation to "effort" rather we see it as an intrinsic value underwritten by the promise that it holds in its redeemable value by the issuer (the BoE). Historically the value was underwritten by the gold standard but over the last decade or so most countries now use the "fiat" system (the promise or order) to support their currencies.

I have no visibility or understanding of the "effort" expended in manufacturing say an Apple iphone subsequently selling for £500 nor do I have the same for a similar unbranded phone that retails for say £50 in Tesco. The effort may well be the same or even greater to bring the Tesco phone to the market but I have no visibility or understanding of it. Personally, I don't consider the Apple iPhone to hold the value it commands on the market, I place a higher value on the Tesco phone.  The value in goods and services at the end of the day is determined by the value placed upon those services and goods by those who seek them. A plumber stemming a leaking tap will expend the same effort whether he fixes the leak on a weekday or a weekend; he knows the customer will pay a premium for weekend work and the customer places a higher value on that work at that time so is happy to accept the higher value. My wife certainly doesn't see the value of my latest Astro gear no matter how much I explain the effort expended by Meade, Mesu, Losmandy or SBIG; I certainly don't see the value of my wife's iPhone no matter how much she talks about the effort of Apple to bring it to the market. The value of either product is not invariant yet the effort to conceive and make them remains unchanged.  Their value is fixed by the prospective purchaser. Removing employment from society, paying every citizen for doing nothing holds far more challenge than development of AI.  Only a few months ago we saw Switzerland reject in a referendum the proposal to pay every citizen a living wage. The rise of the robots will have to wait a while, which is good as it means I may yet be in with a chance of a Mesu  if I save my beer tokens

Jim 

 

 

[saac]

Before we go terraforming Mars we had better get a grip of the waste we are generating here. This article on plastic waste brings me close to tears; it looks like we are on an exponential growth rate in the amount of plastic waste we are generating.  At a personal level I see this in our own domestic recycling - it's the plastic bin that overflows before the end of the week. Every trip to the supermarket just brings more of the stuff home.  If progress is to be made on the issue then manufacturers and the retailers need to be forced to take action.

9 Billion Elephants

Jim