91-01/Mars.VR.story From: scarlson@csa1.lbl.gov (Shawn Carlson) Subject: Virtual Mars Date: Tue, 15 Jan 91 01:52:36 GMT Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley CA What follows is an article I wrote for "the Humanist" magazine. I'm posting it here to hopefully spark discussion about using Virtual Worlds techniques for extraterrestrial exploration. (Expected publication date - March 1991.) What do you think about the idea? How should such a mission be designed? -- S.C. ========================================================= Virtual Mars? Shawn Carlson, Ph.D. January 1st, 1991 Exploration is the hallmark of humanity- the great shaper of our history, the great motivater of our kind. I don't have to imagine the excitement most Spaniards felt when Columbus returned with a cargo hold full of exotic treasures from the New World. Although I was only nine, I remember vividly the awesome exhilaration I felt while staring into a black and white picture tube and watching as Neil Armstrong took control from a faltering guidance computer and coolly landed the Eagle on the surface of a new world. Perhaps the noblest thing about our species, the most uniquely "human" quality of our experience, is the purity of our lusts; for life, for knowledge, and for challenges that force us to go beyond ourselves. We thrive on- we need great adventures. But since our technology opened up the frontier of space, adventures in the grand tradition have been harder to get off the ground; sadly, there have been damn few since NASA's finest hour. Recently there has been a push to make a mission to Mars humankind's next great voyage. This effort has gained the administration's favor.President Bush has personally called for the creation of a manned Mars program. However, Congress has been skeptical of, if not hostile to, the plan. NASA's sterling image, so magnificently polished in the Apollo days, has been tarnished by the Challenger disaster, the Hubble Telescope debacle,and a crippling sequence of design errors uncovered in the plans of the proposed space station. This combined with the attached $500 billion price tag has made Congress reluctant to loosen the nation's purse strings for putting people on Mars. However, despite NASA's (I hope) transitory incompetence and Congress's typical recalcitrance, I believe that Mars looms too big in our imaginations for the human odyssey not to draw us there. It is the next logical great space adventure. The question then is not so much when are we going, but how should such a mission be designed to best serve humanity? Many space advocates assert that a Mars mission should be manned and give noble reasons for why we should commit the lives of an international crew to the two to four year journey. They argue that the huge international collaboration of talented technologists needed to land 30 folks on Mars for 40 days (the typical scenario) would help bring the world together, open vistas of multinational cooperation and foster transcultural understanding. Further,they hope that seeing Soviets and Americans working glove in glove on Mars would so inflate the world with the spirit of cooperation that it would never again flatten into war. Other exploration enthusiasts prefer sending robots in lieu of people. They believe the political benefits of a manned mission have been oversold and point out that any mission would itself be only a symbol. Real political progress, they argue, must be made on the ground by international cooperation. However, such cooperation could head-up either a human or mechanized mission equally well. Further, they maintain that robot reconnaissance of Mars is a better option because it's much cheaper and far safer than sending people. Indeed, robots could explore Mars for far less money because they don't need any of the myriad of environmental supports we require to sustain our biological frailties. Most of the money for a human mission would go just into keeping the astronauts alive. Every dollar so spent would be a dollar not used on science, every kilogram of payload so dedicated would be a kilogram taken from sophisticated instruments of exploration. In short, astronauts would only get in the way of the science- we would learn more for a lot less money without them. A robot mission would safeguard more than just astronauts. After all,if a Mars bound robot "bought it" the nation would cross its arms and cock a collective eyebrow at NASA. But if people died in space the whole Mars program would likely die with them. And this, I fear, would be a very real possibility. Despite extensive ground maintenance between each flight, the multi- billion dollar space shuttles routinely break down in orbit- toilets clog, cooling vents fail, computers burn out. . . In a mission lasting just a week or so, and which can be aborted with a few hours notice, these failures are merely annoying. However, a series of uncorrectable annoyances appearing throughout a two to four year voyage, which cannot be aborted and from which there is no hope of rescue, could well cascade into a fatal catastrophe before the astronauts could get home. Also, the fragments of Challenger now littering the ocean floor don't exactly inspire confidence in NASA's talents in safety engineering either. However, there is one crucial place where astronauts totally outshine their mechanical competition- public thrills. Even if our robot alternates were as cute as R2-D2 they just wouldn't have the same public appeal as an international gaggle of scruffy space-suited ruffians toasting marshmallows on the Martian outback. And let's face it, while every epic voyage throughout history has been justified with copious platitudes about the innate nobility of the human spirit that's not why they happened. Adventures have never been primarily moral- they have been sensual! The discovery, the achievement, mastering the unexpected, risking and winning- these are the psychological primers of the experience, but it is the thrill we seek. To put it crassly,we are willing to spend billions to indulge in a few rounds of orgiastic self congratulatory backslapping. If going to the Moon didn't make people feel good we never would have done it. Indeed, history shows that the greatness of any "great adventure" is set by how deeply and completely it thrills the masses who bankrolled the damn thing, and that the money keeps coming only so long as people get their dollar's worth of excitement. Therefore, the ideal mission would blend the thrill of human exploration with the safety and cost effectiveness of robot surrogates. Impossible? Not anymore. In fact, I believe that now maturing technologies make it inevitable. Suppose we begin our Martian adventure by deploying a few satellites to take high resolution pictures of the entire surface of Mars. The second part begins when a mother craft carrying a brood of sophisticated robot explorers is launched. Upon arrival, the mother settles into orbit and, as ordered from the earth, dispatches her children to perform many missions each featuring the landing of a laboratory craft and several reconnaissance vehicles at some particularly interesting place. The laboratory's computer controls the collection and analysis of its rovers' booty and transmits the results to the mother ship which in turn relays it to a gang of a hand wringing gray-beardsback on earth. So far it sounds just like a robot mission, right? Here's the new idea.Even though people would have never physically been there, the sites for robot exploration would have been chosen by direct human exploration of Mars! Here's how. Imagine you've completed one week of training in geology and planet morphology at NASA. You're not an astronaut, just an intelligent someone with a compulsion for adventure. You've have been assigned to explore sector 15A027PC- about a thousand square miles of Mars. You strap yourself into a remarkable vehicle and take a breath as you push the button marked"Launch Sequence Initializer". The belly of the mother craft opens up and you see Mars beneath you for the first time. Your rockets kick in, thrusting you back into your chair as you descend rapidly. Your position appears on the overhead monitor as your approach vector hones you in on your assigned area. Once there, you float 500 meters above the surface buzzing over breathtaking terrain never before seen. Your mind and your sensual experience glides above Mars, yet your body is actually still on earth. You are flying a simulator and exploring a computer generated "virtual world" that blends those high resolution satellite photos into moving 3-D images and is therefore identical in every detail to the real Martian surface. You look out of your port window to see Phobos, Mars' largest moon, just peeking over the horizon. You hear the Martian wind blowing over your cockpit. You feel your craft move, bank and roll as you change course and speed. You see an ancient and now barren river bed cutting through the valley below you. To your left you spot a fascinating possibility. There, about 1000 meters away, is a large rocky overhang which completely shields part of the river bed from the sun. Could some ancient form of life have once clung to those rocks when the river coursed though this valley? Could that overhang have protected the evidence of that life until now? You log your discovery and fly on. Later, NASA scientists will confirm it and send their intrepid robots to investigate. This Virtual World technology exist to impressive extent already. The Mars simulator I'm postulating is likely only a few years away. Human exploration of a virtual Mars has important advantages over human exploration of the real one. Yes, it's safer and much less costly, but it's also a much more efficient. By breaking up the surface into a thousands of pieces the whole of Mars could be searched by an army of volunteer explorers at our leisure. Important sites could be carefully selected and scrutinized, instead of having to do everything with 30 over worked space- suited explorers in only 40 days. But what's most important about all this is how it opens extraterrestrial exploration to all of us, and that is very exciting! You won't have to be physically perfect with a lifetime of dedicated training to explore strange new worlds. Any intelligent person would be able to do it. When teenagers and grandparents, waitresses and executives, the poor, the handicapped and the advantaged can queue up to make original discoveries about the earth's red sister the dividends to science and society will be incalculable. When we take space exploration out of the theoretical and make it part of peoples lives, let them "touch the magic", we will turn kids on to scientific carriers and generate a new public enthusiasm for the powers of technology which will benefit humanity far into the future. How naive, wasteful and even useless it seems to send a few people to Mars when we can in a real way bring the entire planet home to everyone. Let's liberate ourselves from the medieval notions of chivalry that have guided our explorations for a thousand years. Exploration, the experience of some new place, no longer requires the explorer to physically travel there. It's time to bring our fantastic technological prowess to bear on opening up the cosmos to all of us, to turn kids on to science as never before possible and instill in humanity a sense of the true majesty of space exploration. So keep your fingers crossed and your flight suit pressed. The next "new world" adventures just might be waiting for you. END "Never attribute to malice what incompetence is sufficient to explain." Shawn Carlson 50/232 Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Berkeley, CA 94720 (415) 486-7433 scarlson@csa1.lbl.gov [Moderator's note: Mike McGreevy of NASA Ames Research Center has also touted the ability of virtual worlds to deliver experiences not available to manned spaceflight, or inappropriate for it (like extreme environments). If someone would get Mike on here, we could have a swell dialogue. Thanks. -- Bob]