Monster Wave soon to hit your shore

The confluence of two emerging technologies will produce a swell coming your way

-+-+-+-+

In 1820’s the confluence of steam power and advanced steel making technologies produced a new invention called railroads that changed the world in unimaginable ways.

We are now on the threshold of a similar transformation. The confluence of competent AI and cheap orbital launch technologies will bring on a new space age with space habitats and automated orbital factories before the end of this century.

Such things were proposed before but were never attempted because (a) orbital lifts were too expensive; and (b) the machine intelligence required to achieve full automation in space did ot exist.

Launches are still expensive and machine intelligence is still in its infancy but all this is to change soon. Once the technology is there, commercial interests alone will be enough to promote orbital industries.

I commented before on Large Language Models and progress to competent AI¹. Today, I will write about SpaceX Starship, inspired by the recent launch.

I was disappointed to see the explosion of the Starship test flight on April 21st being reported with thinly disguised glee in most media. Liberal media for some reason does not like Musk. I see Elon Musk as an engineer and entrepreneur in the same mold as Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. 100 years ago, these men were also met with criticism and ridicule for their bold ideas. They persevered and ultimately changed the world. I am excited to see what Musk may accomplish in the years to come. He reminds me of Stephen Baxter’s Reid Malenfant character. In fact, if Baxter had not written the Manifold trilogy in nineties, one could argue that he styled his protagonist after Musk.

-+-+-+-+

The promise of SpaceX Starship

NASA supported Elon Musk’s Starship by a $2.9b contract in 2021 for future moon missions. The Starship is designed to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, and possibly to Mars. It is estimated that the Starship will be able to carry up to 100 people on long-duration, interplanetary flights. It will also help satellite delivery as SpaceX says that Starship will be capable of lifting up to 150 tonnes of payloads to low Earth orbit — five to ten times what most current rockets can do, and long-distance transport here on Earth. Let us try to unpack these.

-+-+-+-+

Back to the Moon

In 2021, NASA chose SpaceX to develop the lunar lander for its Artemis mission. The moon-landing Starship may be of a size as depicted in Figure 1.

Fig. 1 The expected size of the Starship moon lander for NASA’s Artemis project. For comparison, I drew in scale the previous lander Apollo Lunar Module.

The Apollo Lunar Module, which was the vehicle used in previous moon travel, had a crew capacity of two with zero payload. In comparison, Starship will lift 100+ tonnes to the moon. This implies that, this time with the humans back on the moon, they will be be able to take enough stuff with them to build permanent bases.

-+-+-+-+

Space Factories

Fig.2 - Starship capacity and cost compared against alternative launch vehicles

The ability to launch heavier payloads at lower cost will translate to new opportunities in building orbital laboratories as explained in detail in a recent Physics Today article by Elvis, Lawrence and Seager.

If we can send payload sizes up to 100 tonnes at a cost of $600k/tonne as projected in Figure 2, this would open a whole new space age. A whole lot of scenarios presently only imagined in science fiction like mining asteroids to provide raw materials for orbital factories, orbital smelting of minerals and metals from these raw materials using cheap and continuous solar energy, zero-gravity manufacturing of fault-free semiconductor devices. These industries will include flawless manufacturing of new advanced materials in micro-gravity conditions, tissue engineering and production of organs like kidneys and liver like the original versions, cheap, unlimited and uninterruptible solar energy combined with access to precious metals and rare materials through mining asteroids (e.g. Harris, 2013 or the wikipedia article on space manufacturing).

-+-+-+-+

Intercontinental Travel

Elon Musk also raises the potential for travelling between any two points on the world within one hour using the Starship technology. This may be conceivable in the future, I think, if the launch costs can be reduced by a factor of 10. Otherwise, compared to commercial airlines, the Starship costs would be prohibitively expensive. For example, a Boeing 747-8 had a payload capacity of 140t and could carry about 500 passengers. With a payload capacity of 100t, we can assume 350 passengers for the Starship. This means $168,000/passenger.

\(\frac{600000\times100}{350}=168000 \frac{$}{passenger}\)

Even with the advantage of cutting a 20-h travel time to one hour, this is too expensive as a commercial proposition. However, if the costs can be taken down to $17,000/passenger, the Starship rocket technology would be a serious competitor to jet engines over intercontinental travel distances.

These are the known and observable opportunities. There will be many more yet unimaginable and they will manifest themselves at appropriate technology levels. The world at the end of this century will be fundamentally different from what it is today. Countries that harness the new technologies most effectively will be at the forefront of the new world order. Unfortunately, the race will not be limited to technology development. At least until space resources become available, we may see advanced countries/companies ruthlessly competing for the precious rare metals that make these new technologies possible.

-+-+-+-+

Another rider of the wave is China

Interesting stuff is happening in China too in these two areas. In direct competition with the US Artemis program, China and Russia announced in 2021 that they are planning an International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) and invited other countries to join them. CNSA (China and Asia Space flight) tweeted last week that the founding members for the ILRS Cooperation are expecting to sign their partnership agreement in June 2023.

China has already been to the Moon and back, of course, using unmanned craft, Chang’e 5, which landed on the Moon on 1 December 2020, and returned to Earth with 2 kilograms of lunar soil on 16 December 2020.

The introduction and immediate success of ChatGPT caught Chinese AI community by surprise as it seemed to have caught Google by surprise. However, China is not behind US in this area. In terms of numbers of AI papers published every year and in terms of the number of AI scientists working in the field, China and US are head to head, with either of them doing better than the sum of the next four countries (UK, Japan, Germany and France) together (AlShebli, 2023). The Chinese equivalent of Google, Baidu, has a ChatGPT competitor, ERNIE, but it is in Chinese and I have not had a chance to try it. Nevertheless, China is paying tremendous attention to AI developments at all levels. This is from the talk Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei gave on 24 February 2023:

The application of [large language] models sometimes has more potential than the models themselves. … The iteration speed in computer sciences is much faster than that of communication. It is not one iteration every two or three years but every two or three months….AI is overturning our cognition of the world in the past. Therefore, the changes in human society are unimaginable. (Ren Zhengfei, Huawei Founder)

It is interesting that the Chinese investors were more optimistic than Americans about the prospects of AI. The following graph compares the share price growth in the last two months for the maker of AI chips in USA(NVIDIA) and in China(Cambrion).

Fig. 3. Share index for NVIDIA(USA) and Cambricon(China)

-+-+-+-+

Medium-sized countries cannot stay complacent

At the beginning of the 19th century, the gaps between rich and poor nations were not as wide as they are today but widened enormously through that century with the technologically advanced countries rapaciously exploiting the rest while preventing them from catching up. This process caused inequalities not only between nations but also within nations and produced the Great War and its continuation World War 2 as attempts to resolve these inequalities. The world was gradually becoming more equal in the second half of the 20th century but this process reversed itself in the last twenty years and the gap between rich and poor started started increasing. I am very concerned that by 2100, those countries that cannot utilise the new technologies will see themselves far behind again.

What is to be done? Medium-size countries such as Australia and Turkey may find it difficult to be technology leaders in this race. But it is still imperative that they seek to be part of it and build a competitive niche. As the importance of cheap labour and cheap raw materials and fuels get less and less, technological competence will remain as the only means by which nations can maintain and even improve their global standing.

-+-+-+-+

Short Takes

• Whale baths - We now know why Humpback Whales come near the coast every now then and stay there in shallow waters for a while before returning to the open seas again. According to research from Griffith University, whales get rid of dead cells on their backs by rubbing their bodies against sand. It's like getting a good scrub in a Turkish hamam.

• Tucker Carlson - Fox News fired Tucker, reportedly on Murdoch’s decision. For me this proves again that the priority for Murdoch is not ideology but making money. For example, in Turkey, where all other mainstream TV channels are Erdogan followers, Turkish Fox News holds a left-of-center position because moderate opposition is the most profitable place under such conditions. For the same reasons, in USA, Fox News appeals to that half of the population alienated by the left liberal discourse of the mainstream media such as CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times. The Pied Piper Carlson was a master of this appeal. Unfortunately for him, paying the Dominion company $880 million for having been found making false claims, showed Murdoch that there could be serious financial and other consequences to broadcasting for ratings not for truth.

References

AlShebli, B.K., Memon, S., Evans, J.A., & Rahwan, T. (2023). China and the U.S. produce more impactful AI research when collaborating together.

Elvis, M., Lawrence, C., & Seager, S. (2023). Accelerating astrophysics with the SpaceX Starship. Physics Today.

Harris, S.(2013). Your questions answered: asteroid mining, Engineer.

Seth Miller, Musk teases Starship flights from Texas to Singapore in under an hour, 14 February 2022.

Witze, A. (2023), Mega rocket Starship could enable new types of astrophysics, Nature, 616.

Witze, A. (2023). SpaceX Starship: launch of biggest-ever rocket ends with explosion. Nature, 616, 635 - 636.

1. As you may have noticed, I prefer the term competent AI rather than Artificial General Intelligence. I think competent AI will startchanging the world long before Artificial General Intelligence becomes possible. I wrote about this on 24 March 2023.