Fifty Years On: The Future of Space Exploration

  Fifty Years On:  The Future of Space Exploration
    By G. Scott Hubbard

      Forecasting the future is both fun and hazardous. Pity the ancient soothsayer whose reading of bird entrails was at odds with a monarch’s agenda. In more modern times civilization has been entertained by 150 years of speculative fiction, some of which was amazingly prescient. I hope to be in the latter class here.

      Ordinarily, science fiction writers and futurists point to a new technology or scientific discovery that is the vehicle for envisioning “things to come.” While I will develop a few of those same themes, my principal prediction is that human beings will change in some fundamental ways that will both enable and react to space exploration.
    

      Some of this change will be attitudinal. We will invest heavily in stewardship of this planet as climate changes. We will use both in situ and spaceborne assets to think globally, predict regionally, and act locally. Humanity will be both humbled and inspired when we find living microbes on Mars, alien sea-life under Europa’s ice and detect many “pale blue dots” that are Earth-like planets around other stars.

      The power of genetic engineering will allow us to understand and manipulate the aging bio-clock, and to practice individualized genetic medicine. We will see a proliferation of prosthetics that both replace and extend our abilities. Humanity (or our bioengineered descendents) will then be physically able to endure the rigors of space travel.

     While there will undoubtedly be government-sponsored space exploration that is in service of science and opening new frontiers, the trailing edge of economic development will provide new technologies, new jobs and new wealth. The reasons to make the trip to space will vary greatly: Some of us will be busy extracting “Sutter’s gold” from orbiting bio-tech laboratories or near-Earth object minerals; some will be developing a second home for humanity on Mars and studying the “second genesis” of life we will have found under the surface of the Red Planet.

     However, I think there are even more fundamental changes coming by 2057 in our mental capabilities and relationship to the natural world.  Multi-tasking, and the search, storage and manipulation of vast googolplex-sized data clouds will result in a mind-machine interface that is seamless. The barriers between the virtual world and the real world will become meaningless as we constantly move between them. We will perfect virtual experiences, create robots that pass the Turing test for artificial intelligence (producing conversation indistinguishable from that of a human control) and modify our own beings to create an integration that will make the old debates of human versus robotic space exploration meaningless.

     Beyond even these changes, though, lies something more wondrous and amazing. That is the understanding and application of entanglement – Einstein’s despised “spooky action at a distance” that is nevertheless a fact of quantum mechanics. Experiments conducted since 1972 continue to demonstrate that pairs of subatomic particles and photons created through certain processes (radioactive decay, double-slit experiments) are “entangled.” It is well known that pairs created this way have opposite characteristics (opposite quantum spin, opposite optical polarity).

      The spooky feature is that when one measures one particle to be, for example, spin up, even after it has traveled kilometers, the brother particle will instantly exhibit the opposite spin. It is as if either information has traveled faster than the speed of light, or there is a property of matter that transcends space-time distance as we ordinarily observe it in our (mostly Newtonian) world.  Entangled particles, and even ensembles of particles, have now been used by several prominent research groups to demonstrate a form of “teleportation.”

      By 2057, science will have come to grips with the phenomenon of entanglement in a variety of startling ways. We will understand the relationship of mind and matter: why the act of “human observation or measurement” results in a certain reality. In the practical world of space exploration, entanglement engineering will result in a method of sending messages and matter that evades the speed of light barrier in the macro-universe.

     We now have cell phones that were only fantasy in the 1968 edition of Star Trek. Can the matter transporter be far behind by 2057? Beam me up, Scotty!

-- A former director of NASA Ames Research Center, G. Scott Hubbard holds the Carl Sagan Chair at the SETI Institute and is a visiting scholar at Stanford University.

Comments

[Kathleen Connell]

Scott's vision is refreshing-and certainly not "more of the same."
Space Ones would do well to also look where Scott is casting his vision-particularly at the revolutionary "mind and matter" matrix that is re-defining medicine and many other fields.

The one word that will drive all in the new world in space? Energy.