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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13359 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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On the plausibility of Mars Bases vs that of AI

Responding to @FeepingCreature from last week:

Out of interest, do you think that a mars base is sci-fi? It's been discussed in science fiction for a long time.

I think any predictions about the future that assume new technology are "science fiction" p much by definition of the genre, and will resemble it for the same reason: it's the same occupation. Sci-fi that isn't just space opera ie. "fantasy in space", is inherently just prognostication with plot. Note stuff like Star Trek predicting mobile phones, or Snowcrash predicting Google Earth: "if you could do it, you would, we just can't yet."

That was a continuation of this discussion in which I say of AI 2027:

It is possible that AGI happens soon, from LLMs? Sure, grudgingly, I guess. Is it likely? No. Science-fiction raving nonsense. (My favorite genre! Of fiction!)

As to Mars:

Most of what I know here comes from reading Zach Wiener-Smith (of SMBC)'s A City on Mars. It was wildly pessimistic. For a taste, see Gemini chapter summaries and an answer to:

"Given an enormous budget (10% of global GDP) and current tech, how realistic is a 1 year duration mars base? an indefinite one? what about with highly plausible 2035 tech?"

I agree with the basic take there, both as a summary of the book and as a reflection of my broader (but poorly researched) understanding/intuition of the area: Mars is not practical. We could probably do the 1 year base if we don't mind serious risk of killing the astronauts (which, politically, probably rules it out. Maybe Musk will offer it as a Voluntary Exit Program for soon-to-be-ex X SWEs?)

My main interesting/controversial (?) take: there is an important sense in which Mars bases are much less of baseless scifi nonsense than AI 2027.

Mars is a question of logistics: on the one hand, building a self-contained, O2 recycling, radiation hardened, etc, base requires tech we may (?) not quite have yet. On the other hand, it strikes me as closer to refinements of existing tech than to entirely new concepts. Note that "enormous budget" is doing a lot of work in here. I am not saying it is practical to expect we will pay to ship all of this to Mars, or risk the lives, just that there is good reason to believe we could.

AI is a question of fundamental possibility: by contrast, with AI, there is no good reason to think we can create AI sufficient to replace OpenAI-grade researchers with forseeable timelines/tech. Junior SWEs, maybe, but it's not even clear they're on average positive-value beyond the investment in their future (see my previous rant about firing one of ours).

I don't understand how anyone can in good faith believe that even with an arbitrary amount of effort and funding, AGI, let alone ASI, is coming in the next few years. Any projection out decades is almost definitionally in the realm of speculative science-fiction here. Even mundane tech can't be predicted decades out, and AI has higher ceilings/variance than most things.

And yet, I am sensitive to my use of the phrase "I don't understand." People often unwittingly use it intending to mean "I am sure I understand." For example: "I don't understand how $OTHER_PARTY can think $THING." This is intended to convey "$OTHER_PARTY thinks $THING because they are evil/nazis/stupid/brainwashed." But, the truth of their cognitive state is closer to the literal usage: they do not understand.

So, in largely the literal sense of the phrase: I do not understand the belief in and fear of AI progress I see around me, in people I largely respect on both politics and engineering.

Everyone thinks about Mars wrong. I can be done in record time and on a shoestring budget if we think about terraforming and then move the meatware there. Same with the moon. We are almost at the technological level in which we can build almost self replicating something if we put our minds to it.

Terraforming being "almost" within reach is quite some statement. We can't even terraform Earth beyond very slightly changing the composition of a preexisting atmosphere under ideal planetological and logistical conditions. But we're almost ready to go creating and maintaining a human-breathable atmosphere and temperature and radiation levels on a deep-frozen desert like Mars, a tiny pebble like the Moon or a comically uninhabitable hellhole like Venus? Using chemical rocketry that barely makes it viable to put communications sattelites into low Earth orbit and can sling tiny little probes to other planets for mere billions apiece?

Space colonization will be done, if at all, in sealed habitats. Terraforming is wishful thinking.

Isn't the easiest terraforming actually Venus, and that's still a century's long process with some steps we haven't quite figured out?

The problem with Venus is the initial cooling of it. Any kind of shade generating device will be blown away from the solar wind.

I don't see any way to do Venus faster than Mars. Even if you cooled it down very quickly with orbital mirrors it would take a long time for the atmosphere to condense out. You can get Mars to a partially terraformed state i.e. stable bodies of water on the surface much faster, although if you wanted to bring in enough nitrogen for an earthlike atmosphere and surface pressure it would take you a lot longer.

I might be wrong, but my understanding of Venus colonisation is actually to terraform it enough so that it’s possible to live high up in the atmosphere rather than on the hellish surface.

How do you propose to “terraform” magnetospheres into the moon or Mars? Terraforming in general is extremely sci-fi on the tech tree: we might have the resources within the next half-millennium, but even that’s unsure. The most realistic terraforming proposal I’ve seen for Mars is to basically melt the entire surface to release gasses, and even then that won’t be enough by itself to get the job done.

We don't need magnetospheres. Living under the surface is totally fine. The idea is to have massive energy producing and material harvesting operations ready on the surface and underneath it, so we can synthesize the organics humans need. We will never have green Mars - too little sunlight there. So no need bothering.

You could stick a giant shield at the L1 point and call it a day.

What I've read is that the magnetosphere doesn't matter because the atmosphere blows off very slowly (millions of years) so if you can create a new one in the first place you're fine.

The surface is still going to be hit pretty hard with radiation if you don’t have a magnetosphere, atmosphere or no.

Atmosphere does actually absorb a lot of radiation.

It provides moderate shielding against Sun radiation and minimal against cosmic rays, but overall it's not enough to be safe for humans, you still need fairly large radiation shielding for dwellings. Especially if you want to compensate getting dosed if you're out and about.

How do you propose to “terraform” magnetospheres into the moon or Mars

The most viable proposal I've seen involves satellites orbiting various lagrange points around Mars that could generate a magnetosphere for the planet. Power requirements are extremely high (something in the giga or terawatt range IIRC) but not outright impossible.

How would you terraform the moon even in principle? There's not enough gravity there to hold on to an atmosphere.

put solar on top of everything outside, bolted, dig big climate controlled caverns inside, massive production facilities to launch what is needed to other planets from the moon instead of the earth.

I'm under the impression that terraforming is much more scifi than most approaches. Is that not the case?

I'd still bet it's easier to achieve than AGI, let alone ASI, but I think it's more in the "speculative sci-fi" bucket with them, not in the "expensive and economically disincentivized" bucket with "radiation hardened dome with a year worth of Soylent powder on Mars" one.

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