In 1950 Alan Turing, a noted mathematician and cryptographer, published a paper in which he described the "Turing Test". In its modern form imagine texting to a stranger. You can send any kind of text message you want. The stranger can reply or not as and how he chooses. After some time (days, perhaps a week) you are asked to answer a simple question: Is the stranger a person or a machine? The Turing Test is designed to answer an important question: Is it possible to create an intelligent machine? If a machine can pass the Touring Test by successfully impersonating a human then it is possible to create an intelligent machine, according to Turing.
Since then Computer Scientists and many others have been fascinated by the Turing Test. Individuals and groups have set up actual Touring Tests but it turns out to be tougher than you would think to get right. What would happen, for instance, if the stranger was a human who tried to imitate a machine? Is this really fair? Also, certain limitations are usually necessary because machines that can look, sound, and act like humans only exist in the realm of fiction. Hence, the text message scenario.
But the concept behind the Touring Test has continued to fascinate people because Turing had a profound idea. If a machine can do things that intelligent humans do then it must be intelligent. This approach seems like a very intuitive and natural approach to figuring out what we mean by "intelligent". And we have just witnessed a very public event. The TV show "Jeopardy" hosted a three day two game exhibition match between a computer (actually a network of IBM computers) and two champion winners (Ken Jennings, winner of 74 matches in a row, and Brad Rutter, the all time money champ). We know a lot of people are fascinated because the match bumped Jeopardy's ratings up 30%, according to Nielson.
Technically, it wasn't a Touring Test because we all knew that Watson (the name IBM gave to their computer system) was a machine. But the question lots of people including yours truly were asking themselves was whether Watson was able to play like a human. The answer we got, if we just go by results. was that Watson was better during these two games than his human competition. And, given the quality of the players he was up against, we can say that he was far better than the typical Jeopardy contestant and, therefore, far far better than the rest of us.
As I have pointed out, staging a Touring Test, even a fake one like the Jeopardy exhibition, is a lot tougher than it looks, if one of your objectives is fairness. IBM staged a number of demonstration matches in order to convince the Jeopardy producers that the tournament would be a good idea. In these demonstration matches it was obvious that Watson could be led astray by constructing "questions" properly. (I know about the "response in the form of a question" gimmick. It works well on the show but I am not going to bother in this article). On the other hand, electronics are far faster at reflex activities like pressing a button. So a lot of work was put into providing what both sides saw as a level playing field. "Normal" Jeopardy questions on one side versus making Watson actually push a button on the other side. And both sides wanted to create an entertaining result so both sides wanted the human participants to have a chance and for Watson to not look like a comedy punch line. And they succeeded. It was fun to watch.
So how did it all come out? Well, Watson showed some weak spots but generally won handily. The final score was Watson - $77,147, Jennings - $24,000, and Rutter - $21,600. Watson was also way ahead at the end of the first match. And Watson was pretty good at figuring out whether he knew the answer or not. We got to see Watson's top three possible answers for most questions. The top answer was coded green for confident, red for not confident, and yellow for somewhere in between. Most of the time Watson's answer was green and another player rang in first when Watson coded his best answer red. Watson also rang in first about two thirds of the time. But the tale is told by the answers Watson got wrong, especially the ones he got really wrong.
We can decide Watson is a machine by the sheer speed and breadth of his performance. But if the IBM people did not think he was quick and knew lots of stuff the exhibition would never have taken place. So that's not enough. We all know that modern computers can organize a lot of data. But, while computers are very good at dealing with "structured" data, say where you have a table with rows and columns, computers are poor at dealing with unstructured data. Put simply, computers can't read.
Oh, they can scan text. Then they can identify all the letters and assemble the letters into words by taking advantage of spaces and other punctuation. But it is very hard for computers to take the next step and understand what the words mean. Most of the truly massive amount of data that was loaded into Watson was in the form of long sequences of text. All of Wikipedia was loaded into Watson. Wikipedia consists of over 2 million articles. And each article consists mostly of standard text because that's what people are good at using. The Internet Movie Database was also loaded in, along with a truly astounding number of other references. A lot of the IMDB data is structured. You have the movie name at the top. Then you have a section that lists each actor and role, one to a line, and so on. If you take a hard look at IMDB you will find out that it is not that easy but, for IMDB it seems like you at least have a chance of sorting much of it out. But for Wikipedia and most of what was loaded into Watson it is a lot harder.
I might find a sentence "Adam begat Cain". This tells a person that you have a parent child relationship where Adam is the father and Cain is the son. And to completely nail it down, you have to know that Adam and Cain are both male names. But what about "A boy named Sue", the popular Johnny Cash song. While Sue is normally a female name, in this case Sue is a male. A friend had a dog named Sam, short for Samantha. Sam is usually the name of a male person. And I could come up with even tougher examples where it is hard for a machine to make sense of things. There is ambiguity. There are contradictions. People are pretty good at functioning in this kind of messy environment but computers aren't.
So how did Watson do? Watson came up with the correct answer in a truly astounding number of areas. So whatever the IBM people did did to collect and organize Watson's data, it worked pretty well. Most of the time Watson came up with up with a green answer that was correct. In one case Watson came up with a yellow rated answer of "Serbia" when the correct answer was "Slovenia". I wouldn't have known which answer was the correct one. So I score Watson high for getting close and knowing when he wasn't sure. I don't know what process the IBM people to assemble the database. The advantage they had was that this could all be done "offline" before the exhibition started. And it might bee that they cheated by using statistical techniques like "this word is frequently found near that word". But if they were able to do the linguistic analysis necessary to get from "Adam begat Cain" to "Adam is the father of Cain", "Cain is the son of Adam", etc., in other words do linguistic and other analysis to turn strings of text into usable information, that would be a truly useful feat.
Jeopardy also poses quite a challenge in the structure of the clues. They are not standard English. There are frequently puns and other tricks. These are hard for people type contestants to deal with, especially with the time constraint. But they are much more difficult for a computer to deal with. And in this case, you can't use statistical tricks. It won't yield enough information because Jeopardy clues are very tightly packed and are frequently constructed so that the components are ambiguous and you have to combine all the components to narrow things down to one answer.
On several occasions Watson went astray by not figuring out an attribute that the correct answer needed to possess. For instance, in one case Watson gave a green rated answer of "Picasso", which was wrong. The clue was asking for a painting style not the name of a painter. The correct answer was "Modern Art". This would have been completely obvious to a human. In another case Watson was unable to correctly process the category. It was a tricky one, keys found on a computer keyboard. For instance, one answer that Watson did not ring in on was "F1". But in another case Watson rang in and supplied a green rated answer of "Chemise". There is no "Chemise" key on a computer keyboard but there is a "Shift" key. The clue had to do with clothing styles. I might or might not have come up with the correct answer but I would definitely have known that "Chemise" was wrong. Had Watson gotten the category, the questions would have been a piece of cake for him. Watson also answered "Dorothy Parker", an author, when what was required was "Elements of Style", the title of a book. I believe this was on a Daily Double and Watson did correctly rate his answer as a red.
So tricky categories and clues were a disadvantage to Watson. But an area he should have had a decided advantage was with ringing in. One would expect that Watson would let red answers go but would always ring in first when he had a Green answer. But in 11 cases Watson with a green answer was beat by one of the human players. I don't know what the story was here. Ken Jennings did say somewhere that it is possible to do an "anticipatory" ring in. You try to figure out when Alex is going to finish the "question" and ring in an instant after he should finish. If you ring in early your button is locked out for a while so there is a high penalty for ringing in early. Successful contestants try to figure out the answer while Alex is still talking. Watson got the questions in text form as soon as it was displayed on the board and employed the same strategy. So, for green answers, Watson should always ring in the same way.
Without knowing a lot more of the details (see - I told you this is tricky) it is impossible to give Watson a grade on the Jeopardy version of the Touring Test. But, ignoring the obvious, like the presence of an Avatar rather than a real person, and assuming the whole undertaking was "legit", for the most part Watson did very well. He was able to make the proper sense of most of the clues most of the time. And, besides the Avatar there was another dead give away. In one case Watson gave the same answer as another contestant who had gotten it wrong. Watson was deaf and they did not feed any of the audio to him. Again, ignoring the obvious (Avatar, deafness) that fact that Watson made at least one bonehead mistake means that technically he failed. But it's still a stunning achievement.
So, beyond the Touring Test aspect, what does this all mean? I was in school in the early '70s and it was one of those times when Artificial Intelligence (AI) research was on the rise. A number of "proof of concept" projects had generated a lot of buzz inside the Computer Science community. The story was "just let us crank these up a bit and see what we can really do". But none of these projects was able to progress past "proof of concept" into something more general and more powerful. After watching for a couple of years I decided that real progress in AI was a long way away and that AI was really hard to do. Unfortunately, my observations turned out to be spot on. There hasn't been a lot of headline progress on AI since. But Watson proves that real progress has been made.
The issue I discussed above of turning text into data was completely beyond the state of the art in the '70s for anything but toy environments. If, as it seems, the Watson project has been able to process astounding amounts of raw text data and turn it into real information that can be used by computers, that is tremendous and real progress. There is another aspect of the Watson project that I want to discuss next. That's machine learning.
The original approach to AI was to put in a bunch of rules. Things like "normal temperature for a human is 97 - 99 degrees Fahrenheit", that sort of stuff. You put in a bunch of rules and the computer used them to answer your question. The theory was that if you had enough rules and they were good rules, you could get a good result. That approach eventually petered out. The modern approach to the same problem is to put some kind of general structure and analytic capability into the system. They you give the system a bunch of right and wrong examples Including whether each example is right or wrong, called a "training set". In our case they fed in a bunch of right and wrong "answers and questions". Then the idea is that the system does some kind of analysis of the "training set" and figures out its own rules. Computer Science people have been playing around with this approach for many years now. And its the approach the IBM people used. Based on their results, I would have to say that the state of the art in machine learning is now pretty good. And that's good news too.
So where do we go from here? Years ago a "physician assistant" was developed. Modern medicine is (and was) unbelievably complicated. The idea was to provide some computer assistance to help medical people diagnose tough cases. The program ultimately went nowhere. But this project seems like a perfect fit for Watson's capabilities. Pump in a lot of medical data, most typically found in text form. This medical data will be chock full of ambiguities and contradictions, just as the Jeopardy database was. Watson has tremendous English language capabilities and "medical language" should be no harder to master than "Jeopardy language". Finally this "training set" approach to machine learning should work as well for medicine as it did for Jeopardy. So it sounds like this would be a good application for Watson technology.
This has already occurred to IBM. They are starting work on a medicine version of Watson. Another area they have identified is the law. Again you have vast amounts of text, in this case legalese, that is ambiguous and contradictory. But again the same types of abilities that made Jeopardy Watson successful look like a good fit. Certainly if one or both of these projects are successful we can expect IBM (and eventually others) to come up with other applications.
Finally, can we look forward to a rematch? I don't think so. I have seen some of the test runs IBM did before the Jeopardy producers decided Watson was ready for prime time. The goofs were much more frequent and much more embarrassing. Yet the progress from there to what we saw in prime time only a few months later was truly astounding. Given even a few more months I am sure the Watson team could fix the few goofs we saw and many more to the point that human contestants would go from having little chance to having no chance at all. The only reason I can think of that I might have misjudged the situation would be if the books were cooked is some non obvious way. Since I don't think the books were cooked I think this Jeopardy challenge will be a one time event.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Defeating Creationism
An article “Defeating Creationism in the Courtroom, But Not in the Classroom” was published in the January 28 issue of Science, the official magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I characterize it as the latest in a long series of “what we are currently doing is not working” stories. The authors suggest as a solution a minor tweak in how we educate Biology teachers. Does anyone really believe that this is going to turn the tide? I don’t. It is wholly inadequate. I advocate a much more drastic change. Creationists want to “teach the controversy”. I think we should go even further and teach Biblical Creationism (e.g. Genesis) in the science classroom. Am I a Creationist? No! Am I nuts? Also, no. Hear me out.
The standard argument (cleaned up and clarified) propounded by Creationists is:
There are only two possible explanations Evolution and Biblical Creationism.
Since Evolution is flawed it must be false and Biblical Creationism must be true.
My point is that Biblical Creationism is never examined. Most Creationists are ignorant about Evolution. But if you dig a little deeper you will find out that they are also ignorant about Biblical Creationism. Almost everybody assumes that everybody knows what Biblical Creationism is. But almost everybody and especially almost all Creationists are wrong. In fact, everyone in general and Creationists in particular do NOT know what Biblical Creationism is. Sure they know that it is the first part of Genesis in the Bible. And they know a few phrases like “let there be light” but that’s about it. So everyone assumes that Biblical Creationism is a well understood theory. And Creationists in particular believe there is little reason to doubt its efficacy. The truth is actually the opposite.
So my proposal is to teach Biblical Creationism and then demolish it. It is easily demolished but little effort has been invested in demolishing it for the last couple of hundred years. I am a poor researcher and terribly lazy. So I suggest that someone who is a better researcher go back and look for the problems that led earlier scientists to find Genesis problematic, search for alternatives, and eventually adopt Evolution. In the mean time let me show you just how easy it is to find problems with Biblical Creationism. Genesis 1, verse 5 says “And the evening and the morning were the first day”. There is similar language for the other days. This language implies the existence of a “light and dark” day and night cycle. For this to happen you need the Sun. But God does not create the Sun until day 4 (“And God made two great lights, the greater one to rule the day” – Genesis 1, verse 16). So it is impossible to have days and nights until the end of day 4. Another problem with Genesis has to do with when mankind gets created. The first possible answer is on day 6 (“And God said let us make man” – Genesis 1, verse 26). But the whole “Adam and Eve” story is later in Genesis after God has rested on the seventh day. So when is it: on day six or after day seven? These two examples show the kinds of problems that can easily be found with "Genesis".
It is not necessary to demolish Biblical Creationism in the classroom, although I think it would be a good idea if it could be done. But it is necessary to demolish it loudly and publicly where Creationists can’t ignore it. I think the most important reason Evolution has been losing and Creationism has been winning in the forum of public opinion is that there has been no public effort to damage Biblical Creationism as a viable theory. So the battle becomes between a flawed (if you believe the Creationists) theory of Evolution and a flawless (it must be flawless, no one has attacked it directly) theory of Biblical Creationism. It would be nice to think that “everyone knows that Biblical Creationism is seriously flawed” but I think most people in fact don’t know.
A final thought. I think it is important to develop a rendition of modern scientific thought on the Genesis story in Genesis language. Here’s what I mean by “Genesis language”. If God made the world as Creationists believe, I think we would all agree he was a very smart guy. Nevertheless, he had a problem when composing Genesis, (the Bible is after all “the word of God”). He was talking to a group of people with a limited frame of reference for understanding the world. He had to stick with language and concepts that his audience could understand. So he would be forced to provide a simplified version of what happened. But even with this limitation he could have done a much better job of getting things right. Presenting an accurate story of what we now know happened would necessarily be simplistic. But it is not hard to avoid many of the problems found in Genesis while sticking to concepts people of that time and place could understand. If the scientific community develops a correct Genesis-like story to place beside the one that is actually in the Bible it will demolish many of the arguments Biblical Creationists will put forward to rebut scientific criticisms of Biblical Creationism.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
State of the Union
A few days ago President Obama gave his annual "State of the Union" message. It was well received by the public and by me. This is on top of his excellent speech after the Assassination attempt on Rep. Giffords in Tuscon. And, as I have indicated elsewhere (http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/12/negotiation-101.html), President Obama is on something of a roll. This is all good news. But it is too soon to tell whether the President and his team have learned the right lessons. I am still skeptical.
The President laid out a very modest agenda in his State of the Union speech. All things being equal I would have preferred a lot more. But all things are not equal so I am happy with the modest proposals he laid out. But I have been here before. President Obama is noted for his speaking ability. He has given many notable and some great speeches. The problem has been the follow through.
The narrative line from the DC pundits is that he concentrated too much on getting things done and not enough on communication. There is a lot of truth to this. Of course, the Republicans are past masters at throwing up noise ("Death Panels", "He is a Socialist who was born in another country", "you lie") to drown out the narrative. There is good evidence in these early days of the post-election period that the Obama administration has learned the "don't lose track of the narrative line" lesson. And in his speech he did an effective job at connecting "jobs, jobs, jobs" to his economic ideas of more R&D and education, something he had been less than successful at before. So on the messaging front there is reason for hope.
But on the "negotiation" front, we'll just have to wait and see if he has made the proper course correction. It shouldn't take too long. The "repeal Obamacare" front is a distraction. The GOP is currently putting a lot of energy into it but polling suggests that the public as a whole wants to move on. So I expect that this front will consume way more energy than it deserves but that doesn't stop it from being a side show. The main front is on the economy in general and the budget in particular.
Here I don't think the Republicans have figured out just how little time they have. There are three major items. In order of when they must be addressed they are: (1) The budget for the remainder of this fiscal year (April to September). (2) Raising the debt ceiling. (3) The budget for the next fiscal year (fiscal 2012: October 2011 - September 2012). Taking them in this sequence:
FY11: The Federal government is currently operating on a "continuing resolution", funding everything at FY10 levels. This is a real mess. Some old programs that have ended are funded whereas new programs that didn't exist in FY10 are unfunded. Then there are some funding level tweaks up or down for continuing activities that should be made but can't due to the rules of how "continuing resolution" funding works. This situation is entirely the result of GOP obstructionism in the Senate. Never the less, the Republicans have about a month to get a real budget for the second half of FY11 in place.
In this time the GOP controlled House needs to create and pass a bill. Then the "Split but with the Dems still having a slight majority" Senate must approve it too. Then, if there is any difference between the two bills (the most likely scenario), it must go to a joint House - Senate "reconciliation" committee and both houses need to pass the reconciled version. Then the President needs to sign it. And hopefully this is all done by March 1 so that the governmental departments get a few weeks to figure out how to implement it. It is unlikely in the extreme that the GOP will be able to meet this schedule. And I note in passing that these kinds of last minute budgeting shenanigans result in a lot of "waste, fraud, and inefficiency" the GOP pretends it is opposed to. We could probably increase the efficiency of and reduce the waste and fraud in the Federal budget by 2-5%, hundreds of Billions of Dollars, just by approving a budget in a timely manner.
On paper the GOP has taken a good first step. They have made Rep. Ryan the House "budget Czar" (hypocrisy alert - there's just no other way to describe the situation accurately). Theoretically Ryan can whip something out quickly and, on paper, he can run roughshod over the mandarins that control the various committees that usually deal with each part of the budget. We will see how this works out in practise.
The GOP has been very careful to promise dramatic budget reduction without being specific. Theoretically there are specifics, some of them from the esteemed Mr. Ryan. But these specifics have been glossed over for the most part. Mr. Ryan, for instance, did not trot out any of these specifics in his official GOP rebuttal to Obama's State of the Union. He very carefully stuck to "principles" and other generalities. But, wait! It's even worse. Little noted in the press was the fact that many Republicans accused Democrats of "cutting Medicare" during the last election campaign. This was based on the extremely modest cost saving provisions in Obamacare. It worked. The GOP did very well with seniors who thought these Republicans were the defenders of Medicare and Democrats were not. So these GOP politicians are now on record in the minds of these seniors as protectors of Medicare. The GOP is NOT the protector of Medicare and one of Mr. Ryan's proposals is to gut Medicare. And so it goes.
By being fiscally irresponsible while saying the opposite Republicans have put themselves in a bind. They have gotten away with this contradiction for years. They ran up huge deficits, most recently under Bush during the 6 years when they had complete control - they controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House. They have gotten away with this by adroitly deploying their brilliant PR machine. The media was asleep at the switch as were most voters. So no one noticed. And the Democrats were inept at both doing anything about it (understandable given their powerlessness) nor with getting the message out effectively (kudos to the GOP PR machine and the feckless press).
By now it should be obvious what the Obama administration and the Democrats need to do. Number one on the agenda is to start working together. I blame most of the past problem on the Obama administration. They spent all their time and energy on the GOP and a few Blue Dogs and ignored mainstream Democrats, especially House Democrats. The White House needs to work with and support a coordinated program. Given their choices, congressional Democrats will support the White House. But it would be tremendously helpful to their moralle and to their effectiveness if they knew the White House had their backs. The White House can then stay above the fray while Democrats in congress do the heavy lifting. The White House must be particularly careful to let the GOP go first on the budget for the remainder of FY11.
The Constitution, so near and dear to Tea Partiers, is on their side. Money bills must, by constitutional fiat, originate in the House. Beyond that, the White House can claim justifiably that they already laid out their plans in the budget they submitted almost a year ago. And they worked with the House and Senate on compromise legislation both in September and December. The GOP rejected all of this so it's time for the GOP to lay out in public the specifics of what they propose. I would further propose that, given how hard it is to get anything through the Senate, the White House refuse to comment on what the House GOP comes up with until they have passed a complete bill suitable for Senate action. And, while the White House is being conspicuously silent, House Democrats would be unleashed to lay into whatever the GOP in the House comes up with.
There are two general approaches the GOP representatives can go with. They can not try to cut spending in which case House Democrats lay into them for not cutting the budget as promised. Or they can cut drastically and House Democrats can lay into them for reneging on their promises (if they are foolish enough to cut into Medicare) or they can channel the anger of the supporters of whatever parts of the budget the GOP chooses to cut. And, if the GOP chooses to hew to some middle ground then Dems go at them from both directions. Critical to making this work is forcing the GOP to go first. Will the White House figure this out and actually do it? That's the question.
Debt Ceiling: The Debt Ceiling will have to be raised in the next few months. This can probably be put off until the FY11 budget is passed, assuming the GOP manages to stick to the schedule I have outlined above. There are a number of Tea Party types that are willing to shut the government down by not raising the limit. And, again this is a "fiscal" matter so legislation needs to originate in the House. That puts House GOP members in the hot seat, if Obama and the Democrats play their cards right. I am pessimistic they will. But I know what I would start doing if I was the Obama administration.
I would start publicly planning for a government shutdown. I would start quiet but make sure the story leaks. Then I would point to various statements by various Republicans and say "we are only trying to be prudent here". Then the next thing I would do is have House Dems start talking about not voting for any Debt Ceiling increase unless it has broad GOP support. "They are in charge. It's their responsibility to govern." would be the message. The message should also include documentation of the several times GOP members have voted en mass against raising the debt ceiling recently. Once this is done it should be just a matter of time before the GOP's business allies tell their lap dogs to get in line and make a debt ceiling increase happen.
Finally, there is the FY12 budget. The budget the Obama administration sends up in a few weeks should reflect what Obama said in the State of the Union. It should have increased funding for education and R&D. It should have cuts in the military. It should meet his promise of keeping discretionary spending flat, something that will be hard to do. (And "flat" means at the same level as his original FY11 budget proposal). He should not do the work of the Republicans by cutting except where I have indicated above. Of course, he could cut programs that are near and dear to Republicans but that is too much to expect. Let the Republicans take the heat from constituencies for cutting some one's pet spending. The key to the strategy is to get Republicans on record for unpopular cuts. And, if they are unwilling to step up and support unpopular cuts then to take them to task for that. Now a lot of the "bad cop" work can be done by congressional Democrats while the White House stays above the fray. But for this to work congressional Democrats need to know that the White House has their back. For the past two years it has been obvious to everyone that the White House did NOT have their back. That must change.
The President laid out a very modest agenda in his State of the Union speech. All things being equal I would have preferred a lot more. But all things are not equal so I am happy with the modest proposals he laid out. But I have been here before. President Obama is noted for his speaking ability. He has given many notable and some great speeches. The problem has been the follow through.
The narrative line from the DC pundits is that he concentrated too much on getting things done and not enough on communication. There is a lot of truth to this. Of course, the Republicans are past masters at throwing up noise ("Death Panels", "He is a Socialist who was born in another country", "you lie") to drown out the narrative. There is good evidence in these early days of the post-election period that the Obama administration has learned the "don't lose track of the narrative line" lesson. And in his speech he did an effective job at connecting "jobs, jobs, jobs" to his economic ideas of more R&D and education, something he had been less than successful at before. So on the messaging front there is reason for hope.
But on the "negotiation" front, we'll just have to wait and see if he has made the proper course correction. It shouldn't take too long. The "repeal Obamacare" front is a distraction. The GOP is currently putting a lot of energy into it but polling suggests that the public as a whole wants to move on. So I expect that this front will consume way more energy than it deserves but that doesn't stop it from being a side show. The main front is on the economy in general and the budget in particular.
Here I don't think the Republicans have figured out just how little time they have. There are three major items. In order of when they must be addressed they are: (1) The budget for the remainder of this fiscal year (April to September). (2) Raising the debt ceiling. (3) The budget for the next fiscal year (fiscal 2012: October 2011 - September 2012). Taking them in this sequence:
FY11: The Federal government is currently operating on a "continuing resolution", funding everything at FY10 levels. This is a real mess. Some old programs that have ended are funded whereas new programs that didn't exist in FY10 are unfunded. Then there are some funding level tweaks up or down for continuing activities that should be made but can't due to the rules of how "continuing resolution" funding works. This situation is entirely the result of GOP obstructionism in the Senate. Never the less, the Republicans have about a month to get a real budget for the second half of FY11 in place.
In this time the GOP controlled House needs to create and pass a bill. Then the "Split but with the Dems still having a slight majority" Senate must approve it too. Then, if there is any difference between the two bills (the most likely scenario), it must go to a joint House - Senate "reconciliation" committee and both houses need to pass the reconciled version. Then the President needs to sign it. And hopefully this is all done by March 1 so that the governmental departments get a few weeks to figure out how to implement it. It is unlikely in the extreme that the GOP will be able to meet this schedule. And I note in passing that these kinds of last minute budgeting shenanigans result in a lot of "waste, fraud, and inefficiency" the GOP pretends it is opposed to. We could probably increase the efficiency of and reduce the waste and fraud in the Federal budget by 2-5%, hundreds of Billions of Dollars, just by approving a budget in a timely manner.
On paper the GOP has taken a good first step. They have made Rep. Ryan the House "budget Czar" (hypocrisy alert - there's just no other way to describe the situation accurately). Theoretically Ryan can whip something out quickly and, on paper, he can run roughshod over the mandarins that control the various committees that usually deal with each part of the budget. We will see how this works out in practise.
The GOP has been very careful to promise dramatic budget reduction without being specific. Theoretically there are specifics, some of them from the esteemed Mr. Ryan. But these specifics have been glossed over for the most part. Mr. Ryan, for instance, did not trot out any of these specifics in his official GOP rebuttal to Obama's State of the Union. He very carefully stuck to "principles" and other generalities. But, wait! It's even worse. Little noted in the press was the fact that many Republicans accused Democrats of "cutting Medicare" during the last election campaign. This was based on the extremely modest cost saving provisions in Obamacare. It worked. The GOP did very well with seniors who thought these Republicans were the defenders of Medicare and Democrats were not. So these GOP politicians are now on record in the minds of these seniors as protectors of Medicare. The GOP is NOT the protector of Medicare and one of Mr. Ryan's proposals is to gut Medicare. And so it goes.
By being fiscally irresponsible while saying the opposite Republicans have put themselves in a bind. They have gotten away with this contradiction for years. They ran up huge deficits, most recently under Bush during the 6 years when they had complete control - they controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House. They have gotten away with this by adroitly deploying their brilliant PR machine. The media was asleep at the switch as were most voters. So no one noticed. And the Democrats were inept at both doing anything about it (understandable given their powerlessness) nor with getting the message out effectively (kudos to the GOP PR machine and the feckless press).
By now it should be obvious what the Obama administration and the Democrats need to do. Number one on the agenda is to start working together. I blame most of the past problem on the Obama administration. They spent all their time and energy on the GOP and a few Blue Dogs and ignored mainstream Democrats, especially House Democrats. The White House needs to work with and support a coordinated program. Given their choices, congressional Democrats will support the White House. But it would be tremendously helpful to their moralle and to their effectiveness if they knew the White House had their backs. The White House can then stay above the fray while Democrats in congress do the heavy lifting. The White House must be particularly careful to let the GOP go first on the budget for the remainder of FY11.
The Constitution, so near and dear to Tea Partiers, is on their side. Money bills must, by constitutional fiat, originate in the House. Beyond that, the White House can claim justifiably that they already laid out their plans in the budget they submitted almost a year ago. And they worked with the House and Senate on compromise legislation both in September and December. The GOP rejected all of this so it's time for the GOP to lay out in public the specifics of what they propose. I would further propose that, given how hard it is to get anything through the Senate, the White House refuse to comment on what the House GOP comes up with until they have passed a complete bill suitable for Senate action. And, while the White House is being conspicuously silent, House Democrats would be unleashed to lay into whatever the GOP in the House comes up with.
There are two general approaches the GOP representatives can go with. They can not try to cut spending in which case House Democrats lay into them for not cutting the budget as promised. Or they can cut drastically and House Democrats can lay into them for reneging on their promises (if they are foolish enough to cut into Medicare) or they can channel the anger of the supporters of whatever parts of the budget the GOP chooses to cut. And, if the GOP chooses to hew to some middle ground then Dems go at them from both directions. Critical to making this work is forcing the GOP to go first. Will the White House figure this out and actually do it? That's the question.
Debt Ceiling: The Debt Ceiling will have to be raised in the next few months. This can probably be put off until the FY11 budget is passed, assuming the GOP manages to stick to the schedule I have outlined above. There are a number of Tea Party types that are willing to shut the government down by not raising the limit. And, again this is a "fiscal" matter so legislation needs to originate in the House. That puts House GOP members in the hot seat, if Obama and the Democrats play their cards right. I am pessimistic they will. But I know what I would start doing if I was the Obama administration.
I would start publicly planning for a government shutdown. I would start quiet but make sure the story leaks. Then I would point to various statements by various Republicans and say "we are only trying to be prudent here". Then the next thing I would do is have House Dems start talking about not voting for any Debt Ceiling increase unless it has broad GOP support. "They are in charge. It's their responsibility to govern." would be the message. The message should also include documentation of the several times GOP members have voted en mass against raising the debt ceiling recently. Once this is done it should be just a matter of time before the GOP's business allies tell their lap dogs to get in line and make a debt ceiling increase happen.
Finally, there is the FY12 budget. The budget the Obama administration sends up in a few weeks should reflect what Obama said in the State of the Union. It should have increased funding for education and R&D. It should have cuts in the military. It should meet his promise of keeping discretionary spending flat, something that will be hard to do. (And "flat" means at the same level as his original FY11 budget proposal). He should not do the work of the Republicans by cutting except where I have indicated above. Of course, he could cut programs that are near and dear to Republicans but that is too much to expect. Let the Republicans take the heat from constituencies for cutting some one's pet spending. The key to the strategy is to get Republicans on record for unpopular cuts. And, if they are unwilling to step up and support unpopular cuts then to take them to task for that. Now a lot of the "bad cop" work can be done by congressional Democrats while the White House stays above the fray. But for this to work congressional Democrats need to know that the White House has their back. For the past two years it has been obvious to everyone that the White House did NOT have their back. That must change.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Truthiness - Even Older than I thought
In http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/10/dumbth-truthiness-and-steve-allen.html I argued that Truthiness is really the same thing as Steve Allen's word "dumbth". I thought I was doing pretty good to trace the idea that far back until I read "The Greatest Show on Earth" by Richard Dawkins. It's a great book and you should read it. But what I am specifically referring to is information I found in his "from the war of nature, from famine and death" section in chapter 13. The revelation is on page 402 of my copy.
Dawkins refers to a logical fallacy called "Argumentum ad Consequentiam", "Appeal to Consequences" in English. The concept of a logical fallacy (unreliable argument) dates all the way back to the ancient Greeks. But according to a paper by Douglas Walton called "Historical Origins of Argumentum ad Consequentiam" published in 1999 in the magazine Argumentation (13 (3) 251-264) this logical fallacy is of more recent vintage. The phrase was first used in print by James McCosh in 1879. McCosh was President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) at the time. But this still makes the idea over 200 years old.
An "Argumentum ad Consequentiam" argument goes like this:
Dawkins refers to a logical fallacy called "Argumentum ad Consequentiam", "Appeal to Consequences" in English. The concept of a logical fallacy (unreliable argument) dates all the way back to the ancient Greeks. But according to a paper by Douglas Walton called "Historical Origins of Argumentum ad Consequentiam" published in 1999 in the magazine Argumentation (13 (3) 251-264) this logical fallacy is of more recent vintage. The phrase was first used in print by James McCosh in 1879. McCosh was President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) at the time. But this still makes the idea over 200 years old.
An "Argumentum ad Consequentiam" argument goes like this:
- If A is true then something good will happen.
- Therefore, A is true.
- If A is true then something bad will happen.
- Therefore, A is false.
- I think it would be a good thing if A were true.
- Therefore, A is true.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Robot Jet Fighters
I have posted on the subject of taking the man out of the can in the space program (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/11/space-shuttle-rip.html and http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/12/space-final-frontier.html). This post is about taking the man out of the can when it comes to combat aircraft.
I think a lot of people would think that one of the last places where a person could be replaced by a computer would be with respect to airplane pilots. But we have been moving in that direction for a long time. The story goes that when Boeing was developing the B-17 bomber before World War II there was a crash. The crash was attributed to pilot error. Now the pilots in this case were Boeing's most experienced and skilled test pilots. So how did they go wrong? Boeing engineers decided that the plane was just two complicated to fly if you had to remember everything. So the engineers developed a series of checklists. There was a preflight checklist, a takeoff checklist, and several others. With the memory aid of the checklists pilots stopped skipping critical steps and the B-17 eventually became one of the most successful airplanes of the WW II era. And this experience quickly spread throughout the airplane industry. It is now standard for pilots to use checklists as an aide to most aspects of flying.
We now move forward to the middle of WW II. The Germans developed two "terror" weapons during the war: the V-1 and the V-2. I have talked about the V-2 rocket elsewhere and its critical place in the history of modern rocketry. Here I want to focus on the V-1. The V-1 was a robotic jet plane. V-1's were launched from northern Europe and used to attack England. They flew in a predetermined direction until they ran out of fuel. Then they crashed and exploded. That was as sophisticated as the technology of the day permitted. And I doubt anyone would like to be aboard as a passenger. But, in fact, the V-1 was the first robot plane, and a jet plane to boot.
After the V-1s the whole notion of a robot plane was abandoned for many years. It looked like a robot plane was just not capable enough to compete with a human controlled one. But time and computer technology marched on. And while handing complete control over to a robot seemed like a bad idea, handing partial control looked like a better and better idea as time passed. The robot was usually referred to as an autopilot. Originally, autopilots were just capable of maintaining speed, direction, and altitude. This was good enough to make them useful. Long flights involve substantial periods of just flying in the same direction at the same speed and altitude. So the autopilot allowed pilots to (on large commercial planes) stretch their legs and get something to eat. Even in cramped military planes the pilot could disconnect and relax for a while.
But while no one was looking autopilots kept getting more sophisticated. After a while you could plug in a flight plan and the autopilot would change course, speed, and altitude automatically as it flew various legs of the flight plan. And aeronautical engineers continued to study what was involved in more complicated evolutions like take off and landing. For instance, there are a number of airports that have serious weather problems that result in terrible visibility problems. Various systems were evolved where the plane was controlled from the ground. The ground based people had access to radar which allowed them to know where the plane was at all times so eventually they could guide the plane to a safe landing even in "0 visibility" conditions. It turns out that takeoff and landing are more complicated than straight level flight but they can be understood enough so that the process could be reduced to computer code.
While this was going on another trend was taking place, particularly with high performance military jets. They were getting more powerful. "G" is a measure of acceleration. 1 G is that amount of acceleration we experience standing still on earth at sea level. 2 Gs represent twice that acceleration, and so on. It turns out that the human body can operate reasonably effectively while being subjected to several Gs. But there is a limit. Depending on the situation, how long the high G forces last, for instance, this limit varies. But it is somewhere between 5 and 10. As the capabilities of high performance military aircraft have improved, they have become more and more capable of inflicting high G forces on the pilots. This is particularly easy to do in tight turns. If the G force tolerance of the pilot is exceeded the pilot "blacks out" or looses consciousness. An unconscious pilot is an ineffective pilot. Modern high performance aircraft designs spend a lot of effort dealing with this issue. Tremendous effort is put into doing everything that can be done to increase the pilot's G tolerance. This has become a limiting factor on the top performance of the aircraft. The plane can be built to dish out and take more G punishment than the pilot can.
Remember that one of the ways we can subject pilots to too much G is in tight turns. This is critical in dogfight situations. This problem goes all the way back to WW I. The most famous fighter pilot of WW I was The Red Barron. He flew a Fokker Triplane. Why is this important? Because the "tri" in the name indicates that his plane had three main wings stacked one on top of the other. The benefit of doing this was that the plane had short wings. The benefit of this was that he could turn more sharply than a pilot in a plane with one or two longer main wings. That meant he could "cut the chord" (turn more sharply and get inside of the other pilot). This allowed him to get into position so that he could shoot his opponent down without exposing himself, which he did. Turning radius is critical in a dogfight.
This G issue is only one issue where the fact that you have to keep the pilot alive and functional limits the performance of a plane. Jet planes are very fast and very powerful. The Red Barron when flying his plane was primarily concerned with what was happening right now. His plane was highly maneuverable but slow. He spent little of his time worrying about what was going to be happening 20, 30, 40 seconds in the future. That would mostly depend on what he did then and not much on what he was doing now. Jets changed all that. A Jet pilot has to be thinking about the future because what he does now will have a strong influence on what the plane will be doing 20, 30, 40 seconds from now. You have to imagine what the plane will be doing in the future in order to take the right course of action now. This is very confusing and hard to do. Flying a high performance airplane at the limit of its capability is very hard to do.
In the last 10 years we have seen a tremendous increase in the use of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) by the military. Their mission, like that of airplanes in the early days of WW I, was initially focused on gathering intelligence. But, again like WW I, their role quickly transitioned to offensive warfare. We now regularly see stories in the news about "Predator Drone Strikes", events where a UAV was used to blow something up, not just take pictures of it. But, for the most part these UAVs were not robot piloted. They were remote piloted. A skillful person would be at the controls. It's just that he was not in the vehicle. He was connected to it by radio and was piloting it remotely.
But there has also been an evolution in the role of the remote pilot. Initially he had detailed control of the vehicle, a pilot in all but physical location. But this is hard to do. There are delays. Your vision is very limited. Since you are not in the vehicle there is no "seat of the pants" feedback. This made these vehicles very hard to operate. At the same time the power of the computers involved grew by leaps and bounds. And various "autopilot" and "ground control assist" projects had increased the level of detail and sophistication of what could be done to "assist" a pilot in flying. The industry became more and more confident they knew how to get a computer to fly an airplane.
And it is important to remember that these airplanes have no people on board. So if the computer makes a mistake and the plane crashes no lives are lost. This made it possible to push the envelope. Now more and more of the detailed flying of these UAVs is being done by a computer. The operator, no longer engaged in the detailed piloting of the UAV, concentrates on where the vehicle should go, what it should focus its camera on, etc. This means that the level of skill and the amount of concentration required of the remote operator is much reduced. This is very important because, according to the story, the U.S. now has more than 7,000 UAVs in its inventory. And many of these UAVs are specifically designed to be operated by front line troops who do not have a high level of training and skill in piloting and who may be being distracted by bad guys shooting at them.
The story was about three new UAVs. One of them was called a "Global Observer". Its top speed is 120 MPH. But it can fly as high as 65,000 feet and stay in the air for 5-7 days. This puts it in line with current UAVs. Its capabilities are greater but they generally fall into the "more of the same" category. It is the other two UAVs that are the interesting ones.
The X-47B and the Phantom Ray look like fighters. The X-47B is capable of a top speed of over 500MPH and the Phantom Ray can go more than 600MPH. These are "fighter plane" specs. They are also fighter sized and both look a lot like F-117 stealth fighters. Their specs (ceiling, range, payload weight) are also similar to the F-117. They are definitely NOT designed to be "loiter leisurely on target for long periods of time to do reconnaissance" planes. They look like first generation robot jet fighters to me.
And there is no practical reason not to go in this direction. Most dogfight maneuvers were developed during WW I so the "art" is well understood. A lot of dogfight tactics depend on geometrical considerations, who is above who, who is going faster, who is going in what direction, the relative positions of the craft, that sort of thing. Computers are good at figuring out this sort of thing and keeping it straight. The other thing fighters are used for is "stand off - fire and forget" tactics. It is even easier to reduce this kind of situation to a set of rules that a computer can understand. And, if you throw in a random number generator, computers can behave in an unpredictable manner.
Computers are now capable of making billions of computations per second. And they are small enough and cheap enough that you can easily put several of them on board, if one is not enough. They can easily be made rugged enough to remove the performance limits now imposed to keep the on board pilot alive and functioning. It may even be possible to reduce the size of the plane and increase either the performance or the payload of the UAV compared to a manned fighter. This is done by eliminating the pilot and all the support infrastructure necessary to keep him alive and functioning. All other things being equal, the higher performance plane has a big advantage.
There are two issues that can slow things down. The more minor issues is communications. Current UAVs are in something like continuous communication with ground support. It is possible that the bad guys could disrupt this communication or it might be important for the plane to go "emissions dark". This means that the plane is on its own with no "flexible" pilot on board. And in some circumstances this may be a problem. But it is also sometimes a problem that the human pilot loses focus, gets distracted, forgets something, or otherwise screws up and blows the mission. So this is a trade off that will eventually, if it doesn't currently, tilt toward the UAV.
The bigger problem is that a lot of this is run out of the Air Force. The Air Force is run by pilots and ex-pilots. These people have every interest in keeping the man in the can. They will deploy their substantial, perhaps overwhelming, political clout to make sure that the man is never taken out of the can. We can already see this in effect. In spite of the fact that both of these planes look like robot controlled fighters to me, the official list of their missions does not include active combat. Instead they will be used for "surveillance", "reconnaissance" and perhaps "electronic attack" (e.g. supporting the real warriors in the manned vehicles). Although, those sneaky Phantom Ray guys did sneak "ground strike" in. But that's probably just looking after those ground pounder infantry pukes, something the Air Force has always avoided as much as possible.
I think a lot of people would think that one of the last places where a person could be replaced by a computer would be with respect to airplane pilots. But we have been moving in that direction for a long time. The story goes that when Boeing was developing the B-17 bomber before World War II there was a crash. The crash was attributed to pilot error. Now the pilots in this case were Boeing's most experienced and skilled test pilots. So how did they go wrong? Boeing engineers decided that the plane was just two complicated to fly if you had to remember everything. So the engineers developed a series of checklists. There was a preflight checklist, a takeoff checklist, and several others. With the memory aid of the checklists pilots stopped skipping critical steps and the B-17 eventually became one of the most successful airplanes of the WW II era. And this experience quickly spread throughout the airplane industry. It is now standard for pilots to use checklists as an aide to most aspects of flying.
We now move forward to the middle of WW II. The Germans developed two "terror" weapons during the war: the V-1 and the V-2. I have talked about the V-2 rocket elsewhere and its critical place in the history of modern rocketry. Here I want to focus on the V-1. The V-1 was a robotic jet plane. V-1's were launched from northern Europe and used to attack England. They flew in a predetermined direction until they ran out of fuel. Then they crashed and exploded. That was as sophisticated as the technology of the day permitted. And I doubt anyone would like to be aboard as a passenger. But, in fact, the V-1 was the first robot plane, and a jet plane to boot.
After the V-1s the whole notion of a robot plane was abandoned for many years. It looked like a robot plane was just not capable enough to compete with a human controlled one. But time and computer technology marched on. And while handing complete control over to a robot seemed like a bad idea, handing partial control looked like a better and better idea as time passed. The robot was usually referred to as an autopilot. Originally, autopilots were just capable of maintaining speed, direction, and altitude. This was good enough to make them useful. Long flights involve substantial periods of just flying in the same direction at the same speed and altitude. So the autopilot allowed pilots to (on large commercial planes) stretch their legs and get something to eat. Even in cramped military planes the pilot could disconnect and relax for a while.
But while no one was looking autopilots kept getting more sophisticated. After a while you could plug in a flight plan and the autopilot would change course, speed, and altitude automatically as it flew various legs of the flight plan. And aeronautical engineers continued to study what was involved in more complicated evolutions like take off and landing. For instance, there are a number of airports that have serious weather problems that result in terrible visibility problems. Various systems were evolved where the plane was controlled from the ground. The ground based people had access to radar which allowed them to know where the plane was at all times so eventually they could guide the plane to a safe landing even in "0 visibility" conditions. It turns out that takeoff and landing are more complicated than straight level flight but they can be understood enough so that the process could be reduced to computer code.
While this was going on another trend was taking place, particularly with high performance military jets. They were getting more powerful. "G" is a measure of acceleration. 1 G is that amount of acceleration we experience standing still on earth at sea level. 2 Gs represent twice that acceleration, and so on. It turns out that the human body can operate reasonably effectively while being subjected to several Gs. But there is a limit. Depending on the situation, how long the high G forces last, for instance, this limit varies. But it is somewhere between 5 and 10. As the capabilities of high performance military aircraft have improved, they have become more and more capable of inflicting high G forces on the pilots. This is particularly easy to do in tight turns. If the G force tolerance of the pilot is exceeded the pilot "blacks out" or looses consciousness. An unconscious pilot is an ineffective pilot. Modern high performance aircraft designs spend a lot of effort dealing with this issue. Tremendous effort is put into doing everything that can be done to increase the pilot's G tolerance. This has become a limiting factor on the top performance of the aircraft. The plane can be built to dish out and take more G punishment than the pilot can.
Remember that one of the ways we can subject pilots to too much G is in tight turns. This is critical in dogfight situations. This problem goes all the way back to WW I. The most famous fighter pilot of WW I was The Red Barron. He flew a Fokker Triplane. Why is this important? Because the "tri" in the name indicates that his plane had three main wings stacked one on top of the other. The benefit of doing this was that the plane had short wings. The benefit of this was that he could turn more sharply than a pilot in a plane with one or two longer main wings. That meant he could "cut the chord" (turn more sharply and get inside of the other pilot). This allowed him to get into position so that he could shoot his opponent down without exposing himself, which he did. Turning radius is critical in a dogfight.
This G issue is only one issue where the fact that you have to keep the pilot alive and functional limits the performance of a plane. Jet planes are very fast and very powerful. The Red Barron when flying his plane was primarily concerned with what was happening right now. His plane was highly maneuverable but slow. He spent little of his time worrying about what was going to be happening 20, 30, 40 seconds in the future. That would mostly depend on what he did then and not much on what he was doing now. Jets changed all that. A Jet pilot has to be thinking about the future because what he does now will have a strong influence on what the plane will be doing 20, 30, 40 seconds from now. You have to imagine what the plane will be doing in the future in order to take the right course of action now. This is very confusing and hard to do. Flying a high performance airplane at the limit of its capability is very hard to do.
In the last 10 years we have seen a tremendous increase in the use of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) by the military. Their mission, like that of airplanes in the early days of WW I, was initially focused on gathering intelligence. But, again like WW I, their role quickly transitioned to offensive warfare. We now regularly see stories in the news about "Predator Drone Strikes", events where a UAV was used to blow something up, not just take pictures of it. But, for the most part these UAVs were not robot piloted. They were remote piloted. A skillful person would be at the controls. It's just that he was not in the vehicle. He was connected to it by radio and was piloting it remotely.
But there has also been an evolution in the role of the remote pilot. Initially he had detailed control of the vehicle, a pilot in all but physical location. But this is hard to do. There are delays. Your vision is very limited. Since you are not in the vehicle there is no "seat of the pants" feedback. This made these vehicles very hard to operate. At the same time the power of the computers involved grew by leaps and bounds. And various "autopilot" and "ground control assist" projects had increased the level of detail and sophistication of what could be done to "assist" a pilot in flying. The industry became more and more confident they knew how to get a computer to fly an airplane.
And it is important to remember that these airplanes have no people on board. So if the computer makes a mistake and the plane crashes no lives are lost. This made it possible to push the envelope. Now more and more of the detailed flying of these UAVs is being done by a computer. The operator, no longer engaged in the detailed piloting of the UAV, concentrates on where the vehicle should go, what it should focus its camera on, etc. This means that the level of skill and the amount of concentration required of the remote operator is much reduced. This is very important because, according to the story, the U.S. now has more than 7,000 UAVs in its inventory. And many of these UAVs are specifically designed to be operated by front line troops who do not have a high level of training and skill in piloting and who may be being distracted by bad guys shooting at them.
The story was about three new UAVs. One of them was called a "Global Observer". Its top speed is 120 MPH. But it can fly as high as 65,000 feet and stay in the air for 5-7 days. This puts it in line with current UAVs. Its capabilities are greater but they generally fall into the "more of the same" category. It is the other two UAVs that are the interesting ones.
The X-47B and the Phantom Ray look like fighters. The X-47B is capable of a top speed of over 500MPH and the Phantom Ray can go more than 600MPH. These are "fighter plane" specs. They are also fighter sized and both look a lot like F-117 stealth fighters. Their specs (ceiling, range, payload weight) are also similar to the F-117. They are definitely NOT designed to be "loiter leisurely on target for long periods of time to do reconnaissance" planes. They look like first generation robot jet fighters to me.
And there is no practical reason not to go in this direction. Most dogfight maneuvers were developed during WW I so the "art" is well understood. A lot of dogfight tactics depend on geometrical considerations, who is above who, who is going faster, who is going in what direction, the relative positions of the craft, that sort of thing. Computers are good at figuring out this sort of thing and keeping it straight. The other thing fighters are used for is "stand off - fire and forget" tactics. It is even easier to reduce this kind of situation to a set of rules that a computer can understand. And, if you throw in a random number generator, computers can behave in an unpredictable manner.
Computers are now capable of making billions of computations per second. And they are small enough and cheap enough that you can easily put several of them on board, if one is not enough. They can easily be made rugged enough to remove the performance limits now imposed to keep the on board pilot alive and functioning. It may even be possible to reduce the size of the plane and increase either the performance or the payload of the UAV compared to a manned fighter. This is done by eliminating the pilot and all the support infrastructure necessary to keep him alive and functioning. All other things being equal, the higher performance plane has a big advantage.
There are two issues that can slow things down. The more minor issues is communications. Current UAVs are in something like continuous communication with ground support. It is possible that the bad guys could disrupt this communication or it might be important for the plane to go "emissions dark". This means that the plane is on its own with no "flexible" pilot on board. And in some circumstances this may be a problem. But it is also sometimes a problem that the human pilot loses focus, gets distracted, forgets something, or otherwise screws up and blows the mission. So this is a trade off that will eventually, if it doesn't currently, tilt toward the UAV.
The bigger problem is that a lot of this is run out of the Air Force. The Air Force is run by pilots and ex-pilots. These people have every interest in keeping the man in the can. They will deploy their substantial, perhaps overwhelming, political clout to make sure that the man is never taken out of the can. We can already see this in effect. In spite of the fact that both of these planes look like robot controlled fighters to me, the official list of their missions does not include active combat. Instead they will be used for "surveillance", "reconnaissance" and perhaps "electronic attack" (e.g. supporting the real warriors in the manned vehicles). Although, those sneaky Phantom Ray guys did sneak "ground strike" in. But that's probably just looking after those ground pounder infantry pukes, something the Air Force has always avoided as much as possible.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Israel - a Three State Solution
The Israel/Palestine conflict has been around since the state of Israel was created, about as long as I have been alive. In fact, some would say that the conflict has been around for 3,000 years. I am going to ignore that 3,000 year history. In fact, I am going to ignore most of the history that has taken place while I have been alive and concentrate on more recent events.
For a long time Israel put its hopes behind a "one state" solution, namely it's all Israel. The Palestinians also put their hopes behind a "one state" solution. Only in their case the "one state" was all Palestine as the Jews had been driven into the sea. So it was considered some kind of breakthrough when Israel instead got behind a "two state" solution. Some but not all Palestinians have also gotten behind this "two state" solution.
The idea behind the "two state" solution is that the area would be partitioned into an Israeli state and a Palestinian state. Certainly this left the issue of where the boundaries would be drawn. And there were many other issues to be settled but the "two state" solution was generally seen as a step forward and progress toward a complete resolution of all the issues. But the "two state" solution has been under serious consideration since the 1990's and not much progress has been made in that time. I would like to replace the "two state" solution with a "three state" solution. Here's what I mean.
The actual current situation is that the region is now partitioned into three areas. They are Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. Historically all three areas have been under the control of Israel. But in 2005 Israel pulled out of Gaza. The third area is generally referred to as the West Bank and is mostly populated by Palestinians. The boundary of Gaza is clear and not in dispute. But the boundary of the Palestinian West Bank, the area that the Palestinians do or should control, is under dispute. Israel is what's left after Gaza and the Palestinean West Bank have been carved out. Setting the boundaries of the Palestinian West Bank is the most serious issue among the many serious issues that divide the Israelis and the Palestinians. All non-"one state" solutions require a solution to this issue. There has been no significant progress on this boundary issue in decades. But there has been a recent (2007) development that has affected the chances of making progress.
Historically the Palestinians have spoken with one voice. For a long time it was called the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization). The PLO is now often referred to as Fatah. In 2007 elections were held in Gaza and Hamas, a different Palestinian faction, won. Since then Hamas has consolidated its political hold on Gaza. Meanwhile Fatah has consolidated its hold on the West Bank. Now Fatah is generally seen as the "moderate" wing that wants to move ahead with a "two state" solution and come to an accommodation with Israel. Hamas, on the other hand, officially holds a "one state" position and wants to drive Israel into the sea. There are many factions on the Israeli side and they have held up peace talks many times. But one of the biggest impediments to making progress at this time is the Hamas/Fatah feud within the ranks of the Palestinians. And the chances of healing this feud in the short term look poor to everyone. What to do?
My proposal is to start with a realistic view of the current facts on the ground and build from there. So my "three state" solution envisages not one but two Palestinian states. Gaza would be treated as one state controlled by Hamas and the West Bank would be treated as a separate state and control would rest with Fatah. So we would end up with Israel, the Jewish state, Gaza, the Hamas controlled Palestinian state, and Palestine, the name that would be given to the West Bank area, whatever its eventual boundaries, controlled by Fatah. Let's examine this proposal in more detail.
First, there is no dispute about the boundaries of Gaza so that issue in not even on the table. Second, there is no "resettlement" issue with respect to Gaza. All the Israelis pulled out in 2005 so everyone currently resident in Gaza is Palestinian. So again with respect just to Gaza there is no issue here. There is a big issue with respect to Gaza and that's it's relationship to Israel. I would suggest that the initial relationship would be a state of war in which there is currently a cease fire. All the issues between Israel and Gaza are of the "war and peace" variety. The Hamas position of "driving the Israelis into the sea" sounds like a "war and peace" issue to me. Shelling of Israel from Gaza sounds "war and peace" to me. Control of Gaza's borders, now split between Israel and Egypt, also sounds like the kind of issue that is typically ironed out in a postwar peace conference. For the moment we assume negations between the two parties are currently in abeyance and leave the current status quo in place. Instead we focus on the dispute between Israel and Palestine (now just the West Bank area).
The Israel/ (redefined) Palestine dispute now involves two parties that actually seem interested in coming to an amicable resolution. The fire breathers on the Palestinian side (Hamas) have for the most part been shunted aside. They are no longer a central part of the process. There are many issues to be resolved on this front but both sides have at times shown a sincere interest in resolving them. With just these two parties involved there is a real chance that progress can be made. And there is another issue the "three state solution" approach automatically solves. That is the little discussed issue of connectivity. Palestinians would like the two parts of their state connected by some kind of corridor. But a corridor connecting the two Palestinian parts would break Israel in two, something that is unacceptable to the Israelis. But if there are two Palestinian states then there is no Palestinian corridor requirement. Once Israel and Fatah come to an agreement most of the most intractable issues between Israel and the Palestinians will have been solved. Then Israel can focus on Israel/Hamas issues. If Hamas doesn't want to come to an agreement then the status quo can be maintained. The North/South Korea dispute has been stuck at stalemate for over 50 years.
Is the partition of the Palestinian that the "three state solution" envisions necessarily a permanent one? No! The partition of the Palestinian territories into two states would become an internal Palestinian issue. Whether the two territories would eventually unite would be strictly up to the Palestinians. It does not need to involve the Israelis at all. The example of the East/West Germany reunification demonstrates that a happy (and peaceful) ending is possible even if the partition has lasted for decades. Personally, I think the actual result would turn out to be like Pakistan/Bangladesh. When India was partitioned two predominantly Muslim areas were carved off. One became Pakistan. The other was initially affiliated with Pakistan but eventually became the independent country of Bangladesh. But fortunately my opinion does not matter. Only the opinions of Palestinians matter.
A similar approach should be taken with the "right of return" issue. Israel would not accept Palestinians. But immigration policy for the two independent Palestinian states would be completely up to the Palestinian governments. They are certainly free to decide to accept Palestinians if they wish without having to consult with anyone else.
A "three state solution" approach resolves several issues and creates an environment where the conflict has a real chance of moving to resolution. I would like to make one final suggestion. Imagine a table with an Israeli on one side and a Palestinian on the other. Each would build up a pile to represent the injuries done by the other side to their side. Small injuries would be represented by grains of sand. There would be a lot of them on each side. Larger injuries would be represented by stones, larger stones for larger injuries. Each side would build a pile consisting of the sand and stones representing all the injuries done to their side. Each side would be able to determine how many stones or grains of sand should be put in their pile. Each side would be able to select the size of stone they thought most appropriate to represent the severity of each injury. In the end we would have a pile in front of each person.
Now each side would observe that the other pile was indeed large. And each side would observe that the other pile contained some large stones. What either side would not be permitted to do was to try to determine which pile was larger. Nor would they by permitted to challenge the size of stone the other side selected for a particular injury nor whether there was an underlying injury. There has been a lot of bad behavior on both sides. This business of arguing about who has suffered the greatest injury or who has been injured the most is not productive. What is productive is for each side to acknowledge that their side has done a lot of injury to the other side and that some of these injuries were very serious. But once this has been done, that's the appropriate point to stop the blame game.
For a long time Israel put its hopes behind a "one state" solution, namely it's all Israel. The Palestinians also put their hopes behind a "one state" solution. Only in their case the "one state" was all Palestine as the Jews had been driven into the sea. So it was considered some kind of breakthrough when Israel instead got behind a "two state" solution. Some but not all Palestinians have also gotten behind this "two state" solution.
The idea behind the "two state" solution is that the area would be partitioned into an Israeli state and a Palestinian state. Certainly this left the issue of where the boundaries would be drawn. And there were many other issues to be settled but the "two state" solution was generally seen as a step forward and progress toward a complete resolution of all the issues. But the "two state" solution has been under serious consideration since the 1990's and not much progress has been made in that time. I would like to replace the "two state" solution with a "three state" solution. Here's what I mean.
The actual current situation is that the region is now partitioned into three areas. They are Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. Historically all three areas have been under the control of Israel. But in 2005 Israel pulled out of Gaza. The third area is generally referred to as the West Bank and is mostly populated by Palestinians. The boundary of Gaza is clear and not in dispute. But the boundary of the Palestinian West Bank, the area that the Palestinians do or should control, is under dispute. Israel is what's left after Gaza and the Palestinean West Bank have been carved out. Setting the boundaries of the Palestinian West Bank is the most serious issue among the many serious issues that divide the Israelis and the Palestinians. All non-"one state" solutions require a solution to this issue. There has been no significant progress on this boundary issue in decades. But there has been a recent (2007) development that has affected the chances of making progress.
Historically the Palestinians have spoken with one voice. For a long time it was called the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization). The PLO is now often referred to as Fatah. In 2007 elections were held in Gaza and Hamas, a different Palestinian faction, won. Since then Hamas has consolidated its political hold on Gaza. Meanwhile Fatah has consolidated its hold on the West Bank. Now Fatah is generally seen as the "moderate" wing that wants to move ahead with a "two state" solution and come to an accommodation with Israel. Hamas, on the other hand, officially holds a "one state" position and wants to drive Israel into the sea. There are many factions on the Israeli side and they have held up peace talks many times. But one of the biggest impediments to making progress at this time is the Hamas/Fatah feud within the ranks of the Palestinians. And the chances of healing this feud in the short term look poor to everyone. What to do?
My proposal is to start with a realistic view of the current facts on the ground and build from there. So my "three state" solution envisages not one but two Palestinian states. Gaza would be treated as one state controlled by Hamas and the West Bank would be treated as a separate state and control would rest with Fatah. So we would end up with Israel, the Jewish state, Gaza, the Hamas controlled Palestinian state, and Palestine, the name that would be given to the West Bank area, whatever its eventual boundaries, controlled by Fatah. Let's examine this proposal in more detail.
First, there is no dispute about the boundaries of Gaza so that issue in not even on the table. Second, there is no "resettlement" issue with respect to Gaza. All the Israelis pulled out in 2005 so everyone currently resident in Gaza is Palestinian. So again with respect just to Gaza there is no issue here. There is a big issue with respect to Gaza and that's it's relationship to Israel. I would suggest that the initial relationship would be a state of war in which there is currently a cease fire. All the issues between Israel and Gaza are of the "war and peace" variety. The Hamas position of "driving the Israelis into the sea" sounds like a "war and peace" issue to me. Shelling of Israel from Gaza sounds "war and peace" to me. Control of Gaza's borders, now split between Israel and Egypt, also sounds like the kind of issue that is typically ironed out in a postwar peace conference. For the moment we assume negations between the two parties are currently in abeyance and leave the current status quo in place. Instead we focus on the dispute between Israel and Palestine (now just the West Bank area).
The Israel/ (redefined) Palestine dispute now involves two parties that actually seem interested in coming to an amicable resolution. The fire breathers on the Palestinian side (Hamas) have for the most part been shunted aside. They are no longer a central part of the process. There are many issues to be resolved on this front but both sides have at times shown a sincere interest in resolving them. With just these two parties involved there is a real chance that progress can be made. And there is another issue the "three state solution" approach automatically solves. That is the little discussed issue of connectivity. Palestinians would like the two parts of their state connected by some kind of corridor. But a corridor connecting the two Palestinian parts would break Israel in two, something that is unacceptable to the Israelis. But if there are two Palestinian states then there is no Palestinian corridor requirement. Once Israel and Fatah come to an agreement most of the most intractable issues between Israel and the Palestinians will have been solved. Then Israel can focus on Israel/Hamas issues. If Hamas doesn't want to come to an agreement then the status quo can be maintained. The North/South Korea dispute has been stuck at stalemate for over 50 years.
Is the partition of the Palestinian that the "three state solution" envisions necessarily a permanent one? No! The partition of the Palestinian territories into two states would become an internal Palestinian issue. Whether the two territories would eventually unite would be strictly up to the Palestinians. It does not need to involve the Israelis at all. The example of the East/West Germany reunification demonstrates that a happy (and peaceful) ending is possible even if the partition has lasted for decades. Personally, I think the actual result would turn out to be like Pakistan/Bangladesh. When India was partitioned two predominantly Muslim areas were carved off. One became Pakistan. The other was initially affiliated with Pakistan but eventually became the independent country of Bangladesh. But fortunately my opinion does not matter. Only the opinions of Palestinians matter.
A similar approach should be taken with the "right of return" issue. Israel would not accept Palestinians. But immigration policy for the two independent Palestinian states would be completely up to the Palestinian governments. They are certainly free to decide to accept Palestinians if they wish without having to consult with anyone else.
A "three state solution" approach resolves several issues and creates an environment where the conflict has a real chance of moving to resolution. I would like to make one final suggestion. Imagine a table with an Israeli on one side and a Palestinian on the other. Each would build up a pile to represent the injuries done by the other side to their side. Small injuries would be represented by grains of sand. There would be a lot of them on each side. Larger injuries would be represented by stones, larger stones for larger injuries. Each side would build a pile consisting of the sand and stones representing all the injuries done to their side. Each side would be able to determine how many stones or grains of sand should be put in their pile. Each side would be able to select the size of stone they thought most appropriate to represent the severity of each injury. In the end we would have a pile in front of each person.
Now each side would observe that the other pile was indeed large. And each side would observe that the other pile contained some large stones. What either side would not be permitted to do was to try to determine which pile was larger. Nor would they by permitted to challenge the size of stone the other side selected for a particular injury nor whether there was an underlying injury. There has been a lot of bad behavior on both sides. This business of arguing about who has suffered the greatest injury or who has been injured the most is not productive. What is productive is for each side to acknowledge that their side has done a lot of injury to the other side and that some of these injuries were very serious. But once this has been done, that's the appropriate point to stop the blame game.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Space, the Final Frontier
The title of this post comes from the opening of the 1966 Star Trek TV show. Star Trek chronicled the adventures of the star ship Enterprise as it voyaged on its 5 year mission of exploration. It was kind of like the Beagle, a British naval ship that undertook an actual 5 year mission of exploration with Charles Darwin aboard. Darwin was the resident Botanist, akin to Spock, the Science Officer. Darwin restricted himself to scientific activities, whereas Spock did little or no Science. I would describe Spock's activities as more of a spy, or even more accurately as a CIA station chief, someone who coordinates intelligence gathering activities. Spock was also more actively engaged in the fighting than an actual scientist would be, certainly more actively than Darwin ever thought of being. Another difference is that the Enterprise's mission ended up lasting only three years before the show got cancelled.
And three years is just about how long the golden age of the "manned" component of the scientific exploration of space ended up lasting. The Apollo moon landings yielded a bonanza of scientific results. All of the astronauts who walked on the moon received training in Geology. Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17 - the last moon walk) was an actual geologist, having gotten his PhD from Harvard. This geological training allowed the astronauts to select interesting samples for return and to properly document the samples and other geological items of interest that they encountered in the local area around the landings. This "golden age of manned scientific exploration" lasted from July 21, 1969 to December 14, 1972, just over three years. Other than this, the manned space program has been pretty much a bust from a science perspective. A lot was learned about how to build and operate large rockets but this could have been learned from an unmanned program. And a lot was learned about how to get humans to and from space and keep them alive while they are in space. But this is more "means" information (how to do the experiment) rather than "ends" information (what the results of the experiment are and what these results mean).
The Star Trek (fictional) and Apollo (real) programs are how everyone always expected that space exploration would take place. You would send daring men and women off to explore. That was how it had always been done. It didn't occur to anyone that there might be another way. And until the advent of Star Trek and Apollo (the '60s) there really wasn't an alternative. The word "robot" was coined in 1920. The idea of robot-like creatures is older but for a long time no one thought seriously that a practical robot could actually be built. The early post WWII era saw the emergence of the concept of "cybernetics", the use of devices to exert autonomous complex control. By the '60s these techniques had evolved to the point that unmanned "robot" spacecraft were used as pathfinders to set up for later manned missions.
The Russian "Luna" program succeeded in 1959 in crashing a man made device into the Moon. The U.S. successfully crashed Ranger 4 into the moon in 1962 and soft landed Surveyor 1 in 1966. There were also various "fly by" and "orbiter" robotic missions to all kinds of places during the same time period. Besides paving the way for a successful manned landing these robotic missions gathered a tremendous amount of scientific data. In fact, by the 1969 Apollo 11 manned moon landing, robot space craft had become quite adept at pulling off scientific missions. But the mind set was still that these robotic missions were pathfinders, paving the way for later "serious" exploration by manned expeditions. Why?
People are creative and flexible. They can make "on the spot" decisions. It seems manifestly obvious that a manned expedition should be able to do a better job. Human hands connected to human eyes are very sophisticated tools. But ultimately the argument comes down to flexibility. People are just so darned flexible and things never go exactly as planned. So having people on the scene should allow last minute adjustments to be made resulting in a more successful expedition. And until the advent of small solid state computer based technology there was a lot to be said for this idea. People will always be more flexible than robots but the "value added" has gotten much smaller. It's still there. I have no doubt that all things being equal, people will do a better job than robots. But all things are not equal.
Putting people in space is fantastically hard and expensive. People are completely unsuited for space so you have to cocoon them. They need an earth-like environment with clean air and a ready supply of food and water. You also have to deal with their waste products: gaseous, liquid, and solid. They also can't be banged around too much nor exposed to too much heat or cold, nor exposed to too much radiation. They are big (5' is unusually short) and heavy (100 lbs is pretty light). Hauling the people, their environment, their "consumables", the equipment necessary to maintain their environment and deal with their waste products, all together this results in the need to haul around a lot of tons of stuff. Getting a ton of stuff to space costs roughly $20 million dollars (e.g. $10,000/lb). And you need from a few tons to a lot of tons of stuff. And I haven't even figured in the cost of making the stuff you need to haul around.
Robots based on computer technology are much less demanding. Robots work fine in a vacuum so you don't need an atmosphere. They don't need fuel in the traditional sense, just a little electricity. They can stand a much wider range of heat and cold so you don't need nearly as much temperature regulation machinery. They need to be protected from radiation but here too their tolerance range is much broader than humans. The result is that you can build something that will do something useful that will be less than a cubic foot in volume and will weigh as little as a few pounds. The only "consumable" it will require is a little electricity and, since you can put the whole thing into hibernation for months, perhaps years, mission duration can be measured in decades. You give up some flexibility but look how much you get back. And do you really give up flexibility?
The common wisdom is that robot missions are inflexible while manned missions are flexible. I do not believe the record supports the common wisdom. If nothing else, manned missions are severely limited in their duration. This means that even if you would like to extend a mission, or even significantly reprogram it, you can't. All that stuff that is necessary to keep people alive doesn't let you make big changes in the mission. Finally, there's that ultimate inflexibility. All your astronauts have to make it back and make it back alive.
What I am now going to do is look at robot missions that are notable for their flexibility, missions that were drastically reconfigured from their original mission plan after they were launched. And I am going to start with the mission that figured in the first Star Trek movie in 1979, the Voyager mission. When launched in 1977 Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were just supposed to visit Jupiter and Saturn. After launch the missions were reconfigured. Voyager 1 was reprogrammed to also fly by Titan, a moon of Saturn. Voyager 2 was reprogrammed to fly by Uranus and Neptune after completing its flyby of Jupiter and Saturn. Finally, both Voyagers were reprogrammed to research the edge of the solar system. This final reconfiguration was made over 12 years after the missions were initially launched. In 1990 Voyager 1, which was 3.7 billion miles from earth at the time, took a series of "family portrait" pictures of the Sun, Earth, and other planets. From this distance the Sun looks like just another star of unspectacular brightness. And the Earth is so small and dim that you can't make it out in the picture unless you know exactly where to look. The Voyagers are continuing to collect scientific data but the "family portrait" pictures were the last taken by either spacecraft.
The NEAR (later NEAR Shoemaker) mission was designed to investigate the Asteroid Eros. The initial plan was for the probe to go into orbit around the Asteroid. Photographs would be taken and various other readings (e.g. radar, magnetic field measurements, etc.) would also be made. The mission was launched in 1996 and went into orbit four years later. The package weighed 800KG at launch and just under 500KG when it went into orbit. So it consumed only 300KG (about 700lbs) in four years. Just try keeping a human alive for 4 years on 700lbs of anything. The power supply for the mission could generate 1800 watts, less than would be consumed by 20 100 watt light bulbs. The instrument package weighed 56KG, about the same as an astronaut, and consumed 81 watts of power (less than 1 100 watt light bulb). Try to keep an astronaut from freezing to death in deep space by letting him snuggle up to a single light bulb. The mission spent about a year in orbit around Eros. During this period many changes were made to its orbit to get a better look at some feature or another. But that's not why I picked out this mission.
After the probe had entered orbit and after a lot of science data had been collected a drastic change was made to the mission. A decision was made and implemented to land (well technically crash but the impact was so soft that none of the instruments were damaged) the probe on the Asteroid. The spacecraft operated for 16 days after the crash before being shut down. Bear in mind that the probe was never designed to land. All the design work was based on the probe NOT running into anything, let alone crash landing into an asteroid. But it was landed successfully and operated properly for more than two weeks after the landing.
The Deep Impact probe was launched on January 12, 2005. The plan was to rendezvous with Comet Tempel 1 (formally 9P/Tempel). An "impactor", essentially a large chunk of copper, would be crashed into the comet. The ejecta would be studied to learn more about the internal structure of comets. The plan was implemented successfully with the impactor hitting on July 4, 2005. So we're all done here, right? We did everything we were supposed to so that's it. Well, not exactly. The probe had some fuel left and was working fine, except that it no longer had a chunk of copper that could be crashed into something else. But instead of shutting everything down and forgetting about the probe the mission was reprogrammed to do a flyby of comet Hartley 2 (formally 103P/Hartley). The Hartley flyby was completed on November 4, 2010. And, oh by the way, since they had this really cool camera that wasn't doing anything most of the time, they tacked on another mission called EPOCh. EPOCh took pictures of the solar systems of seven stars that were known to have planets orbiting them and, just for fun, took a bunch of pictures of the Earth and the Moon. The probe is still going strong. There is no word yet on whether the probe will be given still more missions.
I have skipped over many examples of robot probes executing complex missions roughly according to the original plan. I have skipped over examples of things going horribly wrong and robot probes being successfully reprogrammed to recover and fully complete the original mission. These things have happened many times over. And it is possible that some missions have been lost that could have been saved had an Astronaut been on board to fix whatever went wrong. But configuring the mission in the first place to include an Astronaut would have made the mission impossible (all of the missions I have discussed above were "one way" missions, for instance) or made the initial cost of the mission prohibitive. Just sending one set of Astronauts to the International Space Station, let alone billions of miles beyond, costs more than the cost of a number of of the individual missions I have discussed.
What I have hoped to demonstrate is that taking the man out of the can does NOT mean taking the flexibility out of the mission. Because although we have taken the man out of the can we have not taken the man out of the mission. All of these missions have been directed by people from the ground. These people are not in a position to lay hands on the hardware. But they are in a position to do a lot of things. What is given up besides the ability to lay hands on the equipment is the ability to react quickly. But what is missing from manned missions is the ability to react slowly. With robot missions the people on the ground can spend days, weeks, sometimes months figuring out what can be done and how to do it. They also have ready access to colleagues, libraries, experts, etc. who can pitch in to help.
Robot missions give you the ability to do long duration missions. Voyager is still going decades after it was launched. Missions have been reconfigured years after they were launched. The warranty for the mars Spirit and Opportunity rovers was 90 days. The "edge of the envelope" estimate was that they might keep working for 270 days. The Spirit rover may no longer be working but it was known to be working on March 22, 2010, or 2210 days after landing. This represents a lifetime that is almost 10 times the "edge of the envelope" longest forecast lifetime. As of December 15, 2010 (day 2450) the Opportunity rover is still going strong. There is every reason to believe it will break the "10X" barrier. These kinds of things are just not possible with manned missions.
It is also important to understand that the capabilities of the "robot" part of robot probes are improving exponentially. The "computer" in each of the Viking probes had less capability than is now typically found in watches. By the time Spirit and Opportunity were built (circa 2003) the capabilities of the on board computers had improved tremendously. In early 2007 a major software update was downloaded remotely. This update made the rovers far more autonomous. They now make a lot of routine decisions locally without having to check in, and therefore without the delay. And the hardware used in space probes follows the "ground based" market but lags it by several years due to reliability and other concerns. So by looking at what's currently available here on the ground we know what the on board capacity of the computers on future probes will look like in a few years.
Today "quad core" processors running at 3 GHz are available inexpensively. Loading 64GB of RAM into a "server" system is normal and Flash Drives holding up to 256GB are available for less than $1000. These "available now on a desktop near you" capabilities represent what we will see in probes launched a few years from now. And it will all fit into a few cubic inches of space and use little power, almost no power when hibernating. This is enough computing power to enable some serious local decision making. Lack of local computing power will continue to be less and less of a constraint on future probes. The biggest constraint on outer solar system probes will not be computer power but the fact that you need a large dish to keep the power requirements of the on board transmitter reasonable.
The match up between manned missions and robot missions already heavily favors robot missions. And the balance will continue to tilt even more steeply in favor of robot missions. In spite of this the case for robot probes is rarely made. Some wise old man, frequently a retired astronaut, shows up regularly in print or on TV to extol the virtues of the manned space program. I can't remember any print or broadcast outlet giving time to someone to advocate for more robot exploration and less manned exploration. And that's too bad.
And three years is just about how long the golden age of the "manned" component of the scientific exploration of space ended up lasting. The Apollo moon landings yielded a bonanza of scientific results. All of the astronauts who walked on the moon received training in Geology. Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17 - the last moon walk) was an actual geologist, having gotten his PhD from Harvard. This geological training allowed the astronauts to select interesting samples for return and to properly document the samples and other geological items of interest that they encountered in the local area around the landings. This "golden age of manned scientific exploration" lasted from July 21, 1969 to December 14, 1972, just over three years. Other than this, the manned space program has been pretty much a bust from a science perspective. A lot was learned about how to build and operate large rockets but this could have been learned from an unmanned program. And a lot was learned about how to get humans to and from space and keep them alive while they are in space. But this is more "means" information (how to do the experiment) rather than "ends" information (what the results of the experiment are and what these results mean).
The Star Trek (fictional) and Apollo (real) programs are how everyone always expected that space exploration would take place. You would send daring men and women off to explore. That was how it had always been done. It didn't occur to anyone that there might be another way. And until the advent of Star Trek and Apollo (the '60s) there really wasn't an alternative. The word "robot" was coined in 1920. The idea of robot-like creatures is older but for a long time no one thought seriously that a practical robot could actually be built. The early post WWII era saw the emergence of the concept of "cybernetics", the use of devices to exert autonomous complex control. By the '60s these techniques had evolved to the point that unmanned "robot" spacecraft were used as pathfinders to set up for later manned missions.
The Russian "Luna" program succeeded in 1959 in crashing a man made device into the Moon. The U.S. successfully crashed Ranger 4 into the moon in 1962 and soft landed Surveyor 1 in 1966. There were also various "fly by" and "orbiter" robotic missions to all kinds of places during the same time period. Besides paving the way for a successful manned landing these robotic missions gathered a tremendous amount of scientific data. In fact, by the 1969 Apollo 11 manned moon landing, robot space craft had become quite adept at pulling off scientific missions. But the mind set was still that these robotic missions were pathfinders, paving the way for later "serious" exploration by manned expeditions. Why?
People are creative and flexible. They can make "on the spot" decisions. It seems manifestly obvious that a manned expedition should be able to do a better job. Human hands connected to human eyes are very sophisticated tools. But ultimately the argument comes down to flexibility. People are just so darned flexible and things never go exactly as planned. So having people on the scene should allow last minute adjustments to be made resulting in a more successful expedition. And until the advent of small solid state computer based technology there was a lot to be said for this idea. People will always be more flexible than robots but the "value added" has gotten much smaller. It's still there. I have no doubt that all things being equal, people will do a better job than robots. But all things are not equal.
Putting people in space is fantastically hard and expensive. People are completely unsuited for space so you have to cocoon them. They need an earth-like environment with clean air and a ready supply of food and water. You also have to deal with their waste products: gaseous, liquid, and solid. They also can't be banged around too much nor exposed to too much heat or cold, nor exposed to too much radiation. They are big (5' is unusually short) and heavy (100 lbs is pretty light). Hauling the people, their environment, their "consumables", the equipment necessary to maintain their environment and deal with their waste products, all together this results in the need to haul around a lot of tons of stuff. Getting a ton of stuff to space costs roughly $20 million dollars (e.g. $10,000/lb). And you need from a few tons to a lot of tons of stuff. And I haven't even figured in the cost of making the stuff you need to haul around.
Robots based on computer technology are much less demanding. Robots work fine in a vacuum so you don't need an atmosphere. They don't need fuel in the traditional sense, just a little electricity. They can stand a much wider range of heat and cold so you don't need nearly as much temperature regulation machinery. They need to be protected from radiation but here too their tolerance range is much broader than humans. The result is that you can build something that will do something useful that will be less than a cubic foot in volume and will weigh as little as a few pounds. The only "consumable" it will require is a little electricity and, since you can put the whole thing into hibernation for months, perhaps years, mission duration can be measured in decades. You give up some flexibility but look how much you get back. And do you really give up flexibility?
The common wisdom is that robot missions are inflexible while manned missions are flexible. I do not believe the record supports the common wisdom. If nothing else, manned missions are severely limited in their duration. This means that even if you would like to extend a mission, or even significantly reprogram it, you can't. All that stuff that is necessary to keep people alive doesn't let you make big changes in the mission. Finally, there's that ultimate inflexibility. All your astronauts have to make it back and make it back alive.
What I am now going to do is look at robot missions that are notable for their flexibility, missions that were drastically reconfigured from their original mission plan after they were launched. And I am going to start with the mission that figured in the first Star Trek movie in 1979, the Voyager mission. When launched in 1977 Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were just supposed to visit Jupiter and Saturn. After launch the missions were reconfigured. Voyager 1 was reprogrammed to also fly by Titan, a moon of Saturn. Voyager 2 was reprogrammed to fly by Uranus and Neptune after completing its flyby of Jupiter and Saturn. Finally, both Voyagers were reprogrammed to research the edge of the solar system. This final reconfiguration was made over 12 years after the missions were initially launched. In 1990 Voyager 1, which was 3.7 billion miles from earth at the time, took a series of "family portrait" pictures of the Sun, Earth, and other planets. From this distance the Sun looks like just another star of unspectacular brightness. And the Earth is so small and dim that you can't make it out in the picture unless you know exactly where to look. The Voyagers are continuing to collect scientific data but the "family portrait" pictures were the last taken by either spacecraft.
The NEAR (later NEAR Shoemaker) mission was designed to investigate the Asteroid Eros. The initial plan was for the probe to go into orbit around the Asteroid. Photographs would be taken and various other readings (e.g. radar, magnetic field measurements, etc.) would also be made. The mission was launched in 1996 and went into orbit four years later. The package weighed 800KG at launch and just under 500KG when it went into orbit. So it consumed only 300KG (about 700lbs) in four years. Just try keeping a human alive for 4 years on 700lbs of anything. The power supply for the mission could generate 1800 watts, less than would be consumed by 20 100 watt light bulbs. The instrument package weighed 56KG, about the same as an astronaut, and consumed 81 watts of power (less than 1 100 watt light bulb). Try to keep an astronaut from freezing to death in deep space by letting him snuggle up to a single light bulb. The mission spent about a year in orbit around Eros. During this period many changes were made to its orbit to get a better look at some feature or another. But that's not why I picked out this mission.
After the probe had entered orbit and after a lot of science data had been collected a drastic change was made to the mission. A decision was made and implemented to land (well technically crash but the impact was so soft that none of the instruments were damaged) the probe on the Asteroid. The spacecraft operated for 16 days after the crash before being shut down. Bear in mind that the probe was never designed to land. All the design work was based on the probe NOT running into anything, let alone crash landing into an asteroid. But it was landed successfully and operated properly for more than two weeks after the landing.
The Deep Impact probe was launched on January 12, 2005. The plan was to rendezvous with Comet Tempel 1 (formally 9P/Tempel). An "impactor", essentially a large chunk of copper, would be crashed into the comet. The ejecta would be studied to learn more about the internal structure of comets. The plan was implemented successfully with the impactor hitting on July 4, 2005. So we're all done here, right? We did everything we were supposed to so that's it. Well, not exactly. The probe had some fuel left and was working fine, except that it no longer had a chunk of copper that could be crashed into something else. But instead of shutting everything down and forgetting about the probe the mission was reprogrammed to do a flyby of comet Hartley 2 (formally 103P/Hartley). The Hartley flyby was completed on November 4, 2010. And, oh by the way, since they had this really cool camera that wasn't doing anything most of the time, they tacked on another mission called EPOCh. EPOCh took pictures of the solar systems of seven stars that were known to have planets orbiting them and, just for fun, took a bunch of pictures of the Earth and the Moon. The probe is still going strong. There is no word yet on whether the probe will be given still more missions.
I have skipped over many examples of robot probes executing complex missions roughly according to the original plan. I have skipped over examples of things going horribly wrong and robot probes being successfully reprogrammed to recover and fully complete the original mission. These things have happened many times over. And it is possible that some missions have been lost that could have been saved had an Astronaut been on board to fix whatever went wrong. But configuring the mission in the first place to include an Astronaut would have made the mission impossible (all of the missions I have discussed above were "one way" missions, for instance) or made the initial cost of the mission prohibitive. Just sending one set of Astronauts to the International Space Station, let alone billions of miles beyond, costs more than the cost of a number of of the individual missions I have discussed.
What I have hoped to demonstrate is that taking the man out of the can does NOT mean taking the flexibility out of the mission. Because although we have taken the man out of the can we have not taken the man out of the mission. All of these missions have been directed by people from the ground. These people are not in a position to lay hands on the hardware. But they are in a position to do a lot of things. What is given up besides the ability to lay hands on the equipment is the ability to react quickly. But what is missing from manned missions is the ability to react slowly. With robot missions the people on the ground can spend days, weeks, sometimes months figuring out what can be done and how to do it. They also have ready access to colleagues, libraries, experts, etc. who can pitch in to help.
Robot missions give you the ability to do long duration missions. Voyager is still going decades after it was launched. Missions have been reconfigured years after they were launched. The warranty for the mars Spirit and Opportunity rovers was 90 days. The "edge of the envelope" estimate was that they might keep working for 270 days. The Spirit rover may no longer be working but it was known to be working on March 22, 2010, or 2210 days after landing. This represents a lifetime that is almost 10 times the "edge of the envelope" longest forecast lifetime. As of December 15, 2010 (day 2450) the Opportunity rover is still going strong. There is every reason to believe it will break the "10X" barrier. These kinds of things are just not possible with manned missions.
It is also important to understand that the capabilities of the "robot" part of robot probes are improving exponentially. The "computer" in each of the Viking probes had less capability than is now typically found in watches. By the time Spirit and Opportunity were built (circa 2003) the capabilities of the on board computers had improved tremendously. In early 2007 a major software update was downloaded remotely. This update made the rovers far more autonomous. They now make a lot of routine decisions locally without having to check in, and therefore without the delay. And the hardware used in space probes follows the "ground based" market but lags it by several years due to reliability and other concerns. So by looking at what's currently available here on the ground we know what the on board capacity of the computers on future probes will look like in a few years.
Today "quad core" processors running at 3 GHz are available inexpensively. Loading 64GB of RAM into a "server" system is normal and Flash Drives holding up to 256GB are available for less than $1000. These "available now on a desktop near you" capabilities represent what we will see in probes launched a few years from now. And it will all fit into a few cubic inches of space and use little power, almost no power when hibernating. This is enough computing power to enable some serious local decision making. Lack of local computing power will continue to be less and less of a constraint on future probes. The biggest constraint on outer solar system probes will not be computer power but the fact that you need a large dish to keep the power requirements of the on board transmitter reasonable.
The match up between manned missions and robot missions already heavily favors robot missions. And the balance will continue to tilt even more steeply in favor of robot missions. In spite of this the case for robot probes is rarely made. Some wise old man, frequently a retired astronaut, shows up regularly in print or on TV to extol the virtues of the manned space program. I can't remember any print or broadcast outlet giving time to someone to advocate for more robot exploration and less manned exploration. And that's too bad.
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