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Notes -
On the plausibility of Mars Bases vs that of AI
Responding to @FeepingCreature from last week:
That was a continuation of this discussion in which I say of AI 2027:
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.
People who want to colonize Mars really need to think smaller first.
They should start by trying to build pleasant domed habitats somewhere marginally habitable like northern Minnesota first.
Then a resort hotel near the peak of Mount Whitney where people can take in amazing views.
Thirdly I'd go for a resort hotel on Mount Foster in Antarctica.
Really if a comfortable enclave in Minnesota for remote tech workers isn't practical, I don't see how we're remotely ready to go to Mars.
Biosphere 2 was a pretty notable boondoggle back in the 1990s (notably involving one Steve Bannon, later famous for other work): they failed to make their "separate biosphere" really work in practice, suffering a bunch of ecosystem imbalances and ultimately having to inject external oxygen. Now, their project was pretty ambitious, and I'm not going to completely fault them for the outcome there, but I do think it's necessary to revisit at perhaps slightly more modest scales to prove out long-term independent habitats elsewhere in the solar system. Other than that, there are a handful of Russian experiments I don't know many details of, the ISS (which sources water from the ground for oxygen, vents CO2, and isn't really "closed") and submarines (which have some documentation, but are "sensitive" for probably-good reasons, and aren't really intended as indefinite habitats WRT food and consumables) and at least one YouTuber trying to demonstrate viability.
Honestly, it's a good place to start. And I'm not sure you need a dome either: in theory your long-term space habitat should probably survive with just electrical power. It's really not clear what the smallest "functional" biosphere is, especially once you start leveraging technology ("why yes, we do pump all the CO2 out of the habitat and into the greenhouse to improve plant growth"). There is some fuzziness about "fully closed-loop" too, but let's assume you don't need to maintain the tools themselves indefinitely to start with. I can't imagine $BILLIONAIRE (or NASA, even) couldn't fund a serious project with some graduate students, equipment, and sealed space the size of maybe a studio apartment.
A Martian settlement would not be a sealed system without inputs or outputs, so the example of the biosphere projects is less relevant than, say, the ISS.
There is presumably some point, which admittedly might be beyond Mars settlement, but I suspect isn't fully, at which a fully closed system becomes viable. For the ISS, it's easy enough to ship up food, oxygen (water) and replacement parts with a couple of months notice. For Mars, those timelines get longer and it is at least worth considering whether you need a full set of replacement parts, or the equivalent of raw materials and a machine shop (common on larger oceangoing ships), or whether a closed-loop environmental system (CO2->oxygen + calories->CO2) makes sense. I'll acknowledge it might not, but a Mars settlement needs to be self-sufficient for at least a few years without Earthside supplies.
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