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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.
I think AI maybe not 2027, but certainly before 2032, is the much surer bet, not because AI is that much closer, but because Mars Base requires not only an upfront investment of decades and billions but also probably another billion in upkeep. Unless you have a very very good reason to build a base on another planet (or to be fair, faster rockets) it’s just not something people or governments are going to spend 1% of global GDP on. If it’s 10% of global GDP and might well take a generation or two (my thinking is probably two as you’d need to be able to grow substantial amounts of food, produce substantial amounts of water, extract minerals and metals, and so on) it’s just too expensive to consider. Keep in mind that until you are self sustaining, you are a net drain unless you send the amount of resources back to Earth to cover materials sent plus the fuel needed to get them to the base. Are there 15% of global GDP in minerals and metals on mars in such a way that it could be extracted with low enough cost to make this work? I honestly doubt it. Once you factor in the cost of extraction and refining and launching the material earth-ward and sustaining the crew to do the work, plus the crew to support the miners, it’s pretty expensive to even attempt it.
AI, even if it takes a bit longer to get there is a self-sustaining effort. The partially automated systems are useful tge minute they’re trained. As such, unlike Mars Base, it’s going to be something that people and governments are going to want to put money in. They’re almost guaranteed to get their money back plus interest in a couple of years when the next Gen AI rolls out and businesses and governments buy it.
I’ll be honest, I really wish space exploration was viable, but more than likely, humans will not leave earth and roam much farther than our nearest neighbors. Everything else is going to be robots and telescopes because traveling the stars is risky and expensive.
Humans were once bold enough that the first Polynesians set sail into the open Pacific with presumably no knowledge of what they'd find over the horizon several thousand years ago (Tonga, Samoa), and then, after several thousand years of a gap -- honestly, an interesting historical question -- as far as Hawaii and Easter Island. I don't think I can even really comprehend what would drive people to set sail in wooden ships without a well-defined destination, or how many anonymous brave souls likely disappeared into deep blue waters without a trace in the process.
Space exploration is, as is often observed, immensely more difficult given the lack of breathable air and such, but I can't help but feel that it sounds more technologically comparable with sailing the open Pacific before the Latins even moved into Italy. God-willing, maybe my descendants will look back upon us comparably while they board the equivalent of scheduled cruise ships, or even whatever analog the of air travel that fits into this.
EDIT: I'm not at all certain how I ended up responding to your comment twice. I must be done for the day.
There's no "there", there, though. The Polynesians were looking for more nesos where they could live, and they found them. We know what's in interplanetary space, and it's all worse than Antarctica. Interstellar space might have something but it's just too damn far away; like the Polynesians shooting for the moon.
The typical retort is that what there is, is a chance of survival for the human race in the event of total catastrophe befalling the Earth, albeit in reduced circumstances. Now sure, this is such a remote concern that it would be unlikely to motivate nations to make the expense. But that may say more about nations than about the soundness of the idea (depending on how much you value the survival of the human race).
This idea seems to come from scifi geeks thinking space is really cool, and trying to come up with some sort of justification for exploring it.
It's not hard to think of a catastrophe that would make the Earth unlivable, but space is already unlivable, unless you can terraform something, and that's a generations long project. Going into space won't be any better than going to Antarctica or the sea floor, or underground.
I don't understand this perspective. I'm not an astronomy or physics expert, but I did study it in school, and as best as I can tell, there is a scientific consensus that the Earth will become uninhabitable to humans due to the Sun expanding within the next 5 billion years. Which means that, if we want humanity to survive beyond that, we will have to figure out some way to sustainably live off of Earth (and likely off of the Solar System) between now and then. This, to me, has always been the justification for figuring out space exploration.
I'm partial to the argument that undertaking this project in the year 10^9 AD or even 10^6 AD might be a better use of resources than in the year 2025 AD. But I'm also partial to the argument that technology doesn't just progress through time alone, that we can always come up with excuses for why this would be easier or more efficient to tackle later, and as such, we might as well start working on it now.
Self-sustaining habitats in Antarctica or the sea floor or underground seem like decent short-term projects for catastrophes in the short term (as well as good settings for steampunk-inspired video games), but I don't see any way around space exploration for long term human survival, outside of even more outlandish things like time travel or portals.
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