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Will it be AI, rather than humans, that evolves to colonise other planets?

I never look at the Moon without being reminded of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Their exploits, almost half a century ago, seem even more heroic in retrospect, when we realise how they depended on primitive computing and untested equipment. President Richard Nixon’s speech writer William Safire had even drafted a speech to be given if the astronauts had crash-landed on the Moon or were stranded there: “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace. [They] know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.”

The night sky has inspired wonder and mystery throughout human history. The uncharted universe is vast, and we can bring some of its mysteries closer. But taking into account the advance of technology and artificial intelligence (AI), as well as the gains and losses from space exploration, I believe it is the “post-human” chapter of space that holds the greatest possibilities for our future.

The Apollo programme was the culmination of 12 years of space exploits. The Soviet Sputnik 1 took off in 1957; a month later, a dog was sent up. Four years after that, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to go into orbit — and a global celebrity. He was mobbed by crowds when he visited Britain (though Harold Macmillan, prime minister at the time, sardonically noted that “there would have been twice the crowds if they’d sent the dog”). Armstrong’s feat, as depicted by Ryan Gosling in the forthcoming film First Man, came only eight years later. It is a moving and authentic portrayal of the undemonstrative self-control crucial for Armstrong’s success.

In the 1960s there was a “space race” against the Soviet Union — a contest in superpower rivalry. Had that momentum been maintained, there would surely be human footprints on Mars by now; that’s what my generation expected. However, once that race was won, there was no motivation for continuing the requisite expenditure. In the 1960s, Nasa absorbed more than 4 per cent of the US federal budget. The current figure is 0.6 per cent.

Hundreds more have ventured into space since Armstrong and Aldrin — but, anticlimactically, they have done no more than circle the Earth in low orbit. The International Space Station (ISS) was probably the most expensive artefact ever constructed. Its cost, plus that of the Space Shuttles whose main purpose was to service it (though they have now been decommissioned), ran well into 12 figures. The scientific and technical pay-off from the station hasn’t been negligible, but it has proved less cost-effective than unmanned missions. Nor are these voyages inspiring in the way that the pioneering Soviet and US space exploits were.

The ISS makes news only when something goes wrong: when the loo fails, for instance; or when astronauts perform “stunts”, such as the Canadian Chris Hadfield playing guitar and singing David Bowie songs.

The hiatus in manned space flight exemplifies that when there’s no economic or political demand, there’s a big lag between what is actually done and what could be achieved.

Space technology has nonetheless flourished in the past four decades. We depend routinely on orbiting satellites for communication, satnav, environmental monitoring, surveillance and weather forecasting. Space telescopes orbiting far above the blurring and absorptive effects of Earth’s atmosphere have beamed back images from the remotest cosmos. They have surveyed the sky in infrared, UV, X-ray and gamma ray bands that don’t penetrate the atmosphere and therefore can’t be observed from the ground. They have revealed evidence for black holes and other exotica and have probed with high precision the “afterglow of creation” — the microwaves pervading space whose properties hold clues to the very beginning, when the entire observable cosmos was squeezed to microscopic size.

Of more immediate public appeal are the findings from spacecraft that have journeyed to all the planets of the solar system. Nasa’s New Horizons beamed back amazing pictures from Pluto, about 20,000 times farther away than the Moon. And the European Space Agency’s Rosetta landed a robot on a comet. These spacecraft took five years to design and build and then nearly 10 years journeying to their remote targets. The Cassini probe spent 13 years studying Saturn and its moons and was even more venerable; more than 20 years elapsed between its launch and its final plunge into Saturn in late 2017. These missions used 1990s technology; it is not hard to envisage how much more sophisticated today’s follow-ups could be.

During this century, the entire solar system — planets, moons and asteroids — will be explored and mapped by fleets of tiny automated probes, interacting with each other like a flock of birds. Giant robotic fabricators will be able to construct, in space, solar energy collectors and other giant structures. The Hubble telescope’s successors, with oversize mirrors assembled in zero gravity, will further expand our vision of exoplanets, stars, galaxies and the wider cosmos. The next step would be space mining.

But will there be a role for humans? There’s no denying that Nasa’s Curiosity, a vehicle the size of a small car that has since 2011 been trundling across a giant Martian crater, may miss startling discoveries that no human geologist could overlook. But machine learning is advancing fast, as is sensor technology. In contrast, however, the cost gap between manned and unmanned missions remains outsized. The practical case for manned space flight gets ever weaker with each advance in robots and miniaturisation.

If there were a revival of the “Apollo spirit” and a renewed urge to build on its legacy, a permanently manned lunar base would be a credible next step. It could be built entirely by robots — bringing supplies from Earth and mining some from the Moon. An especially propitious site is the Shackleton crater, at the lunar south pole, 21 kilometres across and with a rim four kilometres high. Because of the crater’s location, its rim is always in sunlight and so escapes the extreme monthly temperature contrasts experienced on the rest of the Moon’s surface. Moreover, there may be a lot of ice in the crater’s perpetually dark interior — crucial, of course, for sustaining a “colony”.

Nasa’s manned space programme, ever since Apollo, has been constrained by public and political pressure to be risk-averse. Its Space Shuttle failed twice in 135 launches. Astronauts or test pilots would willingly accept this level of risk — less than 2 per cent. And of course the Apollo astronauts faced far greater dangers. But the Shuttle had, unwisely, been promoted as a safe vehicle for civilians (and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe was one of the casualties of the 1986 Challenger disaster). Each failure caused a national trauma in the US and was followed by a hiatus while costly efforts were made (with very limited effect) to reduce risks still further.

I hope some people now living will walk on Mars — as an adventure and as a step towards the stars. But Nasa will confront political obstacles in achieving this goal within a feasible budget. China has the resources, the dirigiste government and maybe the willingness to undertake an Apollo-style programme. If it wanted to assert its superpower status by a “space spectacular” and to proclaim parity, China would need to leapfrog, rather than just rerun, what the US had achieved 50 years earlier. It already plans a “first” by landing on the far side of the Moon. A clearer-cut “great leap forward” would involve footprints on Mars.

Leaving aside the Chinese, I think the future of manned space flight lies with privately funded adventurers. SpaceX, led by Elon Musk or the rival effort, Blue Origin, bankrolled by Jeff Bezos, will soon offer orbital flights to paying customers. These ventures — bringing a Silicon Valley culture into a domain long dominated by Nasa and a few aerospace conglomerates — have shown that it’s possible to recover and reuse the launch rocket’s first stage — presaging real cost savings. They have innovated and improved rocketry far faster than Nasa or the European Space Agency. The future role of the national agencies will be attenuated — becoming more akin to an airport than to an airline.

If I were an American, I would not support Nasa’s manned programme — I would argue that inspirationally led private companies should “front” all manned missions as cut-price, high-risk ventures. There would still be many volunteers — some perhaps even accepting “one-way tickets” — driven by the same motives as early explorers, mountaineers and the like. Indeed, it is time to eschew the mindset that space ventures should be national (even international) projects — along with pretentious rhetoric where the word “we” is used to denote the whole of humanity.

There are plans for week-long trips round the far side of the Moon — voyaging farther from Earth than anyone has gone before (but avoiding the greater challenge of a Moon landing and blast-off). And Dennis Tito, an entrepreneur and former astronaut, has proposed, when a new heavy-life launcher is available, to send people to Mars and back — albeit without landing. This would require 500 days in isolated confinement. (The ideal crew would be a stable middle-aged couple — old enough to not be bothered about the high dose of radiation accumulated on the trip.)

The phrase “space tourism” should be avoided. It lulls people into believing that such ventures are routine and low-risk. And if that’s the perception, the inevitable accidents will be as traumatic as those of the Space Shuttle. These exploits must be “sold” as dangerous sports or intrepid exploration.

By 2100 thrill seekers in the mould of Felix Baumgartner (the Austrian skydiver who in 2012 broke the sound barrier in free fall from a high-altitude balloon) may have established “bases” independent from the Earth — on Mars or maybe on asteroids. Musk (born in 1971) of SpaceX says he wants to die on Mars — but not on impact. But don’t ever expect mass migration from Earth. And here I disagree strongly with Musk and with my late Cambridge colleague Stephen Hawking, who enthuse about rapid build-up of large-scale Martian communities. It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems; we’ve got to solve these here. Coping with climate change may seem daunting, but it’s a doddle compared with terraforming Mars. No place in our solar system offers an environment as clement as even the Antarctic or the top of Everest. There’s no “Planet B” for ordinary risk-averse people.

But we (and our progeny here on Earth) should cheer on the brave space adventurers because they will have a pivotal role in shaping what happens in the 22nd century and beyond.

The space environment is inherently hostile for humans. So because they will be ill-adapted to their new habitat, the pioneer explorers will have a more compelling incentive than those of us on Earth to redesign themselves. They’ll harness the super-powerful genetic and cyborg technologies that will be developed in coming decades. These techniques will, one hopes, be heavily regulated on Earth, on prudential and ethical grounds, but “settlers” on Mars will be far beyond the clutches of the regulators. We should wish them good luck in modifying their progeny to adapt to alien environments. This might be the first step towards divergence into a new species. Genetic modification would be supplemented by cyborg technology — indeed there may be a transition to fully inorganic intelligences. So it is these spacefaring adventurers, not those of us comfortably adapted to life on Earth, who will spearhead the post-human era.

Organic creatures need a planetary surface environment, but if post-humans make the transition to fully inorganic (electronic) intelligences, they won’t need an atmosphere. And they may prefer zero-G, especially for constructing extensive but lightweight habitats. So it is in deep space — not on Earth, or even on Mars — that non-biological “brains” may develop powers that humans can’t even imagine. The timescales for technological advance are but an instant compared with the timescales of the Darwinian natural selection that led to humanity’s emergence — and (more relevantly) they are less than a millionth of the vast expanses of cosmic time lying ahead. The outcomes of future technological evolution could surpass humans by as much as we (intellectually) surpass slime mould.

By any definition of “thinking”, the amount and intensity performed by organic human-type brains will be utterly swamped by the cerebrations of AI. We are perhaps near the end of Darwinian evolution, but a faster process of technological evolution of intelligence is only just beginning. It will happen fastest away from the Earth — I wouldn’t expect (and certainly wouldn’t wish for) such rapid changes in humanity here on Earth, though our survival will depend on ensuring that the AI on Earth remains “benevolent”.

Humans may be closer to the beginning than to the end of a process whereby ever more complex intelligence spreads through the galaxy. The leap to neighbouring stars is just an early step in this process. Interstellar voyages — or even intergalactic voyages — would hold no terrors for near-immortals.

Even though we are not the terminal branch of an evolutionary tree, we humans could claim truly cosmic significance for jump-starting the transition to electronic (and potentially immortal) entities, spreading their influence far beyond the Earth, and far transcending our limitations. And if just a single member of our species is remembered millennia hence as encapsulating this transition, Neil Armstrong is surely a worthy exemplar of human strengths and failings.