Our Coming Space Odyssey
Our Avatars in Space
The human body was not selected by Darwinian evolution to survive long-duration space travel. What form should our avatars in space take?
THE NEW HORIZONS SPACE PROBE carried 30 grams of Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes to commemorate Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto in 1930. The package is no different in its information content than 30 grams of cigarette ashes, since Tombaugh’s unique genetic information was burnt up and never loaded on board. A proper celebration of Tombaugh’s historic contribution could have taken the form of an electronic record of his DNA. The Principal Investigator of the mission, Alan Stern, told me that sending a stem cell with Tombaugh’s genetic making would have triggered a bureaucratic nightmare at NASA.
The challenge is even bigger for launching a complete human being in the form of an astronaut to a journey in space that lasts more than a few years. The human body was selected by Darwinian evolution to thrive on Earth and it would be fatally damaged by energetic cosmic-rays over decades without heavy protection.
Given these concerns, what would be the best physical representation of humans in space?
The recent approach taken by the Mars 2020 mission is to operate robotic devices, such as the Perseverance rover and the helicopter Ingenuity, under the control of humans in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A robot is a physical representation of its remote operators, namely an “avatar”. This concept is borrowed from Hinduism where it literally means “descent” in Sanskrit, signifying the material appearance of a god on Earth.
The mission of NASA’s robots is so narrowly defined that the operators have limited maneuvering margins left for their personal preferences. But cheaper commercial robots planted on the Moon or Mars could potentially serve as avatars that follow the free will of their owners on Earth, allowing them to take supervised trips to remote locations — in analogy with the early explorers who surveyed exotic destinations on Earth. Miniaturized avatars on the surface of celestial bodies can be sold to wealthy individuals on Earth as extensions of their body, namely as physical objects that follow their will in space. The use of robots reduces the immense cost and risk associated with sending these individuals as space tourists.
A more sophisticated strategy is to develop artificial intelligence (AI) systems that will operate autonomously after an early training phase on Earth. The resulting AI astronauts will carry our agenda to space without requiring remote control, as if they were independent kids that do not need supervision from helicopter parents. Coping with the world on their own, these AI astronauts could embark on long trips to other stars across the Milky Way galaxy — where the communication delays could last tens of millennia and guidance from Earth is not practical.
Nevertheless, future generations of humans on Earth could monitor and take pride of our avatars in space. These AI ambassadors could shape our cosmic neighborhood in the future, serving as durable monuments for our technological civilization.
The telescope systems of the recently-announced Galileo Project will search the sky for similar systems , sent by other civilizations that predated us.
Improvements in propulsion technology for interstellar travel, such as Breakthrough Starshot, would enable future AI astronauts to overtake the five interstellar probes launched so far — including New Horizons. Here’s hoping that extraterrestrial scientists will discover our AI astronauts before noticing Tombaugh’s ashes, which could be interpreted as an irrational ritual of destroying the genetic information of a person we wish to commemorate. These ashes, like our self-inflicted climate change and wars, might be counterproductive for our claim to be counted as an intelligent species in our Milky Way galaxy.
Avi Loeb is the founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos.”
Trail of the Saucers is edited by writer/producer Bryce Zabel and published by Stellar Productions. Zabel co-hosts the popular new podcast Need to Know with Coulthart and Zabel that can be found on all major platforms.
