WHEN IT COMES TO GOING TO MARS AND BEYOND, MACHINES CAN DO THE WORK

Do you love the next planet out from the sun as much as I do? No? Does this image make you feel anything or are you suffering from Space Mumps?

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems & a cute little roving buggy

The heart-breaking ‘get our human asses to Mars’ news is that realistically it’s still at least 20 years away. If the experts are saying that something is 20 years away, they may as well be saying, “we don’t know!” There are perhaps a million innovations and incremental improvements required to actually get people safely to Mars and be able to return. So what should we do?

Can you hear Holst’s masterpiece in your head? If not, play the music and let’s visualise together an army of robots waging exploration war on the fine red regolith, then chilling out in their downtime playing the Martian-robo-mod of the Plants vs Zombies video game.

While I’d like more money to be spent on exploration rather than weapons of Terran mass murder, I agree with the current plan that machines can do the work. Let’s keep following the red brick road that space scientists and engineers and their support teams have been given the curious opportunity to robo-slave away on. With each new mission we find out more and more and with slow incremental improvements, we should one day be able to make a fully operational kill-bot who’ll be able to hermaphroditically reproduce with their double-barrelled inseminators.

Have I just jumped the Martian Sharknado in claiming that we’ll ever be able to advance from cute little remote-controlled buggies to remote-controlled synthetic humans with terminating abilities far beyond the T-1000? Perhaps, but the RC synths will be far more resistant to the deadly conditions on Mars than squishy humans and not go space-crazy on the 6 month voyage.

The biggest current obstacle that I see for a real breakthrough to get the wider population as excited as me is brain/machine interfacing: the ability for telepresence; which is remotely controlling robots using only our minds and getting the inputs piped into our brains from the robots’ sensors. If you’ve had the misfortune to see Smurfs in Space (the movie Avatar), you get the idea.

It’s all extremely cool technology to get anything to Mars, but we are in an early stage right now. Many of us don’t feel like we’ve actually gone there like we went to The Moon. Well, the current robotic technology is not as Fancy as Iggy Azalea yet, but at least the Mars bots won’t struggle with the lyrics to their own songs and cancel their concert tours and advertise underwear instead. Anyone looking forward to her troubled second album?

Am I the only one that can see her robot flanges?

Maybe Iggy is actually secretly a robot remotely controlled by Nicki Minaj. The technology hasn’t been perfected yet and Iggy is currently being repaired and upgraded, but Nikki managed to get some extra cash, no. 1 hits and awards by creating and controlling a white and non-threatening rapper and even inventing the feud between them so no one except me would be able to join the conspir-ass-y dots. Come on Nicki! Let's use some of your booty robot technology to help out the Mars robot nerds.

If I could get Nicki’s technology, I would build and control a billion Bill Cosbys to swarm over Mars and there wouldn’t be a single woman to violate on the entire planet. In a Universe without karma, this would be poetic justice for me. Think the ‘Being John Malkovich’ movie poster but with Bill Cosbys. If this thought experiment horrifies you, then how about substituting with a more friendly celebrity like Rolf Harris or Jarred ‘not from Subway anymore’ Fogle or Mel Gibson or any of these stellar individuals?

TRIGGER WARNING ON VIDEO FOR ANY HUMAN THAT ISN'T MELVIN GIBSONS

The snail pace speed of light time delay thing would be annoying for sure; like your clunky old computer that takes half an hour to download a single high-res risqué image of Tanning Chodeum in the movie Magic Mike XXL. It takes between 3 and 22 minutes to send a signal to the Martian robots, so we would need to give them just enough artificial intelligence to survive while they wait for further instructions. They could even be programmed with Cosby’s best routines and depositions to keep us all ‘entertained’.

Have I managed to make a cogent point between dumb jokes trying to somehow come to terms with the evils of human nature? Stay on target Gold Five! We are already doing what it will take to one day at least feel like we’re on Mars with the aid of technology. If you think this is far-fetched, just consider how much technology is in your smart phone. You’ve got the whole world in your hands and one day you’ll have other worlds too!

References:

Blog article about a planned human mission to Mars possible/probable scam

Pinterest board for any space exploration articles that get my space antennas buzzing