Abstract
We are on the threshold of enormous change as humans embark on a new generation of Space exploration. Within the next two decades, NASA, ESA, and other international Space agencies are planning to establish the first human outposts on Mars and the Moon. The initial crews for these outposts will be small—somewhere between three and eight—and their length of stay may last only several months or up to several years before eventually returning to Earth. But with time, as the outposts develop into settlements, and settlements later become communities, the durations of inhabitation will extend to lifetimes, and even generations.
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Notes
- 1.
This approach subscribes to the methods used in artificial life simulations. In an attempt to create complex computer systems that simulated those of living systems, AL researchers began with programs of simple algorithms, and by applying them in a recursive fashion, could generate systems of complexity in much greater magnitudes of order than could possibly be quantified or predicted given the original set of rules. This method is the opposite of the approach employed in artificial intelligence research, in which human intelligence was the benchmark by which the engineered systems were assessed. The fundamental difference between artificial life and artificial intelligence resides in the notion of emergence: whereas AI—in a top-down approach—set human intelligence and consciousness as the bar by which machines were to be measured, “the goal of AL is to evolve intelligence within the machine through pathways found by the ‘creatures’ themselves” (Hayles 1999, p. 239). AL took the bottom-up stance that consciousness is not at the core of the human being, but rather an emergent property derived from incremental adaptive steps that the machine then learns from and builds upon. A bottom-up approach does not limit the potential of what the human being can evolve into, as the top-down approach does.
References
Gardner, J. N. (2003). Biocosm: The new scientific theory of evolution. Maui, HI: Inner Ocean Publishing.
Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics (1st ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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Lockard, E.S. (2014). Introduction. In: Human Migration to Space. Springer Theses. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05930-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05930-3_1
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