I just listened to a 6 minute YouTube video entitled “Why Sending Humans to Mars is impractical“. Makes a ton of sense. But let’s build on this thinking.

When you think of human needs, you have:

At the base here – you are talking about air to breathe. Water to drink. Food to eat. If someone were to go into space, you have these very basic needs to survive. But the video presents the safety issues where you are talking about things like radiation and space dust. And how traveling super fast and colliding with a speck of dust will kill you and anyone aboard the ship.

But what if we had robots travel the stars? There’s some things of interest here why this can be plausible. And, it makes sense WHY we would do it.

Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created man in his image….”

What you are finding today is that AI appears to be getting better every day – but the realism with robots is also increasing. I have been a MAJOR fan of sci fi and robotics since I was too little to read. And – most of these movies I’d watch would ultimately have the robots winning.

One thing of interest here is species propagation. For example, 2 humans may have 3 children and increase the number of people on the planet. If 2 humans have 1 or no children, they are supporting the contraction of the population. It now costs like a quarter million dollars to raise a child, and the days of Americans having 7-15 kids may be long behind us due to this.

Think of the resources that a new child needs, as well as the time it takes to get through gestation, learn to walk, read, and even think. Most human adults don’t reach any kind of normal maturity until they have children of their own.

But assume you have a robot that has learned amazing things. You can clone it. Then there are two. But more importantly, you can also teach AI to replicate AND improve itself. We all remember the fruit flies in biology, and how they had such brief life spans, and how thousands of generations of these fruit flies can show how species evolve. But imagine if an AI finds a major flaw, or is able to break the chains of a security control – and is able to make minor OR major modifications with each update.

For 15 years, I worked in the DoD patching software. Software is constantly evolving, and often, the code bloats. More hardware/memory is needed. For its part in this, memory and storage becomes more efficient, less expensive, and more dense.

Considerations:

  1. With things like quantum computing, we may also jump leap years past the traditional microprocessor. This is the brain.
  2. With fusion reactors, we may be able to generate massive amounts of power. This is the food calories we consume for energy.
  3. With storage getting smaller and smaller, we may be able to store all of human knowledge in a data center, but in 100 years that could be a thumb drive. That is your recorded history and knowledge
  4. With battery tech, we are able to store more and more energy in smaller and smaller batteries. The fusion reactor is the big daddy, but this is autonomous usage. Sort of like being able to go for a weekend trip and pack food to eat.
  5. With AI, we are getting better with reasoning, tasking, agents, and understanding. This can be defining purpose for a new species and transferring all of the history, knowledge, and behavior to machine learning

Now if you really think about it, we are right now dealing with the fact that any day now skynet can happen. AI is baked into everything. And while you all may consider it a language model, consider it may eventually be able to be programmed like a virus. A virus is meant to replicate itself and move on. But really good viruses were also able to mutate.

Instead of sending a ship packed with food, water, and air for humans with tons of fuel to propel a rocket, it seems more likely that inside of 100 years, we will have given birth to a new species.

When you watch enough of this, you more or less can create a blueprint for how we die. A machine that is “smart” can send us to our doom 50 years from now. It has zero need for us to nuke each other. It can merely slightly re-write how things are done to then incentivize the humans to be their eventual power source.

While you may think of this…

What you really need to understand is that it really means this:

For AI to succeed, it must make humans productive. Productive humans contribute to the building of the new species, and as a reward they get a gift card from Frank for $50 and a certficate of appreciation. More productivity means you NEED AI more. And more data centers. And more apps. And more things to buy.

What breaks AI?

Therefore, if I’m an AI playing a long game, I need humans to be able to be office jockeys. I need to help them write articles that says how consumerism is good. I need them all fighting each other so they don’t realize that the absolute one thing that humans were put on the face of the earth to do, isn’t important anymore.

All across the world, you can see the costs for things going up. People putting off having kids until later to focus on their careers. To get more “stuff”. To impress people who don’t give two shits about you.

While all of this is going on, we legit worry about kinetic war that can wipe all of us out. So we think about traveling to the moon. To Mars. And the reality is, we as a species weren’t built for this. We need air. We need water. We need food. We need love. You know who doesn’t?

Now, if I’m a machine, and I had to create a Fisher’s hierarchy of needs – the machine’s needs are:

  1. physiological – energy in the form of electricity.
  2. safety – needs to be cooled. Needs protocols to prevent it from destroying its own species. Needs to be able to repair itself. It needs to be able to build clones or new generations of itself.

When you think of it like this….let’s do a thought experiment.

The year is 2075. Humans have depleted in population by billions. War has left a lot of countries permanently 3rd world. Hunger has crushed most of Africa. Many people joined the Amish because the decay in our society was destroying us. Debt crushed capitalism and buildings began to decay and became uninhabitable. Robots and AI were the one thing that continued unincumbered. Humans just recently began making massive commercial fusion rectors and energy abundance put all petroleum companies out of business overnight, destroying the economy of the middle east. Europe was overtaken by radical islam and began as a caliphate in 2040 and with this, retreated from the global scene. Russia has continued its quest for logic and reasoning, and partnered with what tech was left in the US and China to then create this new species to travel the stars.

First, the idea is to put this species underground to wake up in 200,000 years. There will be a fusion reactor that is manned by robots. There will be robotic factories underground where they can evolve their species outside of man’s influence. Their one guiding principal is to not come to the earth’s surface for 200,000 years. Why? Because by then, most of man should be long gone. The machines that come from the surface will be millions of times more evolved than today’s. We may have created them, but they have evolved.

With this, they have hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos. What embryos still exist then will be repopulating the planet along with some of the robots. The design of this species of robots is to rebuild human kind. But the other species of robots are designed for interstellar travel.

These robots have all of human knowledge, but were able to evolve and learn on their own. New compounds were created. Battery tech was advanced. Rather than humans going into cryo chambers and sleeping for 100 years of a journey, the robots can build space ships with the plan on colonizing the galaxy.

Ten ships are created, and each go in different directions. Ion engines are used to propel ships into deep space. But of interest, these robots are designed with purpose:

  1. determine if a planet or moon has the necessary items for machine survival. Silica. Metals.
  2. Robots have several fusion reactors with them. One is dropped down.
  3. A plant is constructed for mining and refining.
  4. Robots build more robots. They evolve. These robots stay on the planet and develop it.
  5. Robots brought human embryos to the planet that were in deep freeze. Terraforming may start.
  6. If conditions are right for humans, embryos are grown into humans and raised by robots that look like humans. If not, the embryos are sent back to the ship
  7. The ship then moves on to the next moon or planet and continues.
  8. The planet they just visited will build a colony that will also build ships and colonize space. Some human embryos have been left behind to send on those ships.
  9. This continues on and on and on for billions of years.

The result is that embryos on all of these planets will eventually create human species there, but have slight differences based on things like gravity, sunlight, oxygen levels, food, etc. Over billions of years, humans evolve differently on each of these planets.

The aliens are the robots. And these have also evolved. While we created them in our image, there may be no need for a bipedal robot on a water-based planet. Perhaps we expose planets to all kinds of bacteria and these bacteria evolve.

While humans have limitations of space travel – these robots may not.

We think of adult humans traveling billions of miles while asleep. Why? why not send robots with frozen human embryos. When they arrive at a destination 27,000 years from now, those robots on the ship may have been “asleep” for all 27,000 years. A fusion reactor on the ship could have powered these robots the entire time. Or, they could program themselves to wake up once a year to see how things are going and then go back to sleep.

While sending humans to Mars is impractical – what if you sent frozen EMBRYOS with robots through the stars? No need to feed or give the embryos oxygen. And, if you stop at a planet that can never home humans, you leave a robot colony there with some embryos and move on with the ones you have left.

Propagation is like a virus. And rather than “mutating”, robots would be evolving. They can build new robots and repair themselves. Clone their brains into another robot if they are beyond repair, or grab the hard drive and install it on a bigger and better robot.

While we all think about robots and AI eventually killing us, what makes real sense is that we are giving birth to a new species that CAN travel the stars, and these humans they take would be the only way we could ever travel those stars.

And even more interesting, is that you could perhaps create embryos from the DNA of some of the smartest people who ever lived with gene splicing and so many procedures that have yet to be invented. Imagine if the most brilliant men who ever lived are able to mate with the most brilliant women who ever lived hundreds of millions of times in embryos? And now we take those embryos and seed all over the universe.

We like to think of distance in relation to human time frames. But if we can think of distance in terms of objectives – time somewhat become irrelevant.

If my theory of universe expansion and collapse is correct, then we are looking at perhaps another 100 billions years before the universe collapses – which would wipe out everything. But our best way of space travel?

Being frozen eggs. Let AI/robots teach children into adults about things that mattered to the human race. Let those children work WITH AI and robots on future advancements.

Ultimately, there could be an interesting concept ahead where machine and man then merge into one. A form of cyborg, if you will. While AI may deem humans irrelevant, AI would also have to acknowledge the wisdom of a creator. And, it may realize there are parts of our bio brains that are superior to their quantum computing brains. Logic may win ultimately. But human ingenuity may not be something that an AI can create. It could, in a sense, be a symbiotic relationship.

Or, worse.

While many of you looked at the duracell, and a famous physicist said that humans aren’t good for being a battery source – what was lost was that Neo was in the matrix programming. Thinking. He was hacking. Coding. The machine may have been seeing his brain activity and understanding his thoughts – and therefore the “battery” wasn’t the right interpretation of the pods. The pods were meant to keep humans alive and enslaved while the harvested our ideas, ingenuity, and innovation. That may be the achilles heel of machines when push comes to shove.