Temperature and pressure fiction, 3/3

Part 3. Attempt to summarize

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I like to compare these two pictures:



Left - “Landscape of Mars near the polar cap” by Soviet science fiction artist George Kurnin. Presumably in the 1960s, not significantly later than 1974. On the right is the work of either Xinhua / Reuters Photo, or NASA, made in 2008, shortly before the landing of Phoenix station on Mars. Representing, oddly enough, also polar regions of Mars.

I love the picture of Kurnin very much. This is a skillfully executed, highly artistic landscape, which can be watched for hours. As a work of art, it has great value. But zero - as a source of information about Mars. Today we know that Mars does not look like that at all. The author of the right-hand picture, no doubt, turned out to be much closer to reality, as the real pictures of Mars from Phoenix station show:


[Image credit: NASA \ NSSDCA]

The first obvious conclusion is that astronautics brought disappointment. We expected the rich beauty of the cosmos, like Kournin, and saw a dull desert, like the Reuters.

The conclusion is incorrect. Everything is exactly the opposite.

Let's look at one more example.

Here is a Disney (!) Cartoon from the 1957th (!) Year about a hypothetical Martian life [ 860 ]. Where, by the way, no one is afraid to openly declare that life has evolved, but this is a completely different story:



Elegantly drawn! With the richest imagination, four minutes of interrupting the attempts of other series. But at the beginning of the video, in the first 30 seconds, the authors make a very entertaining reservation. I cite it in full: “Although scientific evidence indicates that Mars is a cold and abandoned world, many scientists today are thinking about what it could be if the conditions there were slightly different . With a slightly higher than expected water and oxygen content, the diversity of life on Mars can be truly stunning! ”

Selection is important. The authors did not invent life for the real Mars, which (as was already suspected then) is dry and deserted. They preferred to fantasize about another planet. Probably not existing in nature. But much closer to us in pT-space.

For human fantasy, as we have seen, is effective only in a narrow range of temperatures and pressures, not too far from normal. Where matter is familiar to us, and causal relationships are obvious.

Mars was not poorer than we expected before the first flights to it. He was richer. However, this wealth requires special knowledge. Having gotten beyond the limits of “normal” perception, it turned out to be too big for us. All these atmospheric circulation and soil microseismograms are too boring for most. As rightly pointed out ^{[ 850 ]} Fenyx_dml , " Actually, pressures below 0.1 atmospheres are HUMAN BEING the same vacuum. Temperatures above a certain limit, say, plasma, are also indistinguishable. This is only for physicists who deal with the problem of controlled synthesis there is a difference between 1 million and 100 million degrees, the rest is the same. "

But this diversity exists objectively, even though we don’t see it!

Take a look at the scientific work. At least about the same Mars. On the Archive alone, for the past year alone, there are 45 articles mentioning “Mars” or “Martian” in the title http://arxiv.org:443/find/astro-ph/1/ti:+OR+Mars+Martian/0 / 1/0 / past / 0/1 . In total, there are thousands of works on this planet, I think. And the diversity of phenomena, events, concepts and ideas presented to us by lifeless Mars is not inferior to science fiction from the year 1620, if you look from a physical angle.

People study the mechanisms of electrification and transfer of dust in a rarefied Martian atmosphere.

People study the chemistry of the soil of Mars.

They study the mineralogy, glaciology and history of the climate of Mars.

Some, naturally, specialize in deserts! Here is a symposium dedicated exclusively and only to the planetary dunes [ 630 ] - and it is already the fifth !

People launch interplanetary stations to study the behavior of impurities and plasma in the upper atmosphere of Mars. Look for pictures of the words "Mars ionosphere":



Nothing strange?

There are almost no photos here . Entirely shemki and drawings. The whole branch of science grows in an area that cannot be seen through the eyes, due to the ephemeral nature of its subject matter.

But in order to understand this diversity, in order to really be surprised, you need to step far beyond the “normal conditions” we are used to. This, of course, contributes to the study of the exact sciences. Some six years of torment - and you acquire the ability to see the world colorful and amazing. Before stupor. To religious ecstasy. Where others need drugs.

But six years is a lot. Previously, a similar effect, at least partially, could be obtained by reading adventure and fantastic literature.

Not today. And not because science fiction writers began to write worse. Excellent they write. The thing is different. Simply, the Universe is full of places where not only the body, but also the human imagination does not work. Where there is no place for the plots of beautiful paintings ^{[ 640 ] [ 642 ]} of science fiction artists, because there are no people, no transparency, no light, no familiar matter and no thing that can be seen otherwise than with instruments.

The decline in interest in astronautics after the 70s did not happen because the delivered pictures and results were less than our imagination. On the contrary. They were bigger . Much more. Going far beyond the limits of everyday life on the pT-diagram, they fell out of the range of intuitive perception, becoming an abstraction. Heroic, sad and sad attempts by NASA staff and astronautics popularizers to convey in a simplified form all these discoveries to the “general public”. Delivery by parachute bridge does not replace.

There is an exit?

Since the days of Giordano Bruno, we have been hanging on the idea of ​​searching for inhabited worlds in outer space. Idea beautiful, I do not argue. But isn't it time to think about finding habitable environments ? Search for life and mind not only on the surfaces of Earth-like planets, which represent only 0.01% of the diversity of the conditions of the Universe? Colonize not so much space as new states of matter?

But there is one obstacle here.

The human body can be delivered to Mars. But how to bring his soul there? How to make it so that he does not wait for the apple trees to “bloom” there, and perceived Mars in all its fullness that is alien to us?

Today, only a handful of enthusiasts are capable of this. There are enough people who fit enough in the subject to, say, appreciate the beauty of work [ 800 ] or laugh through tears over [ 810 ]. All this is the neuron connections in the head. Only a being who has such connections can be a “Martian” capable of adequate perception of the monotonous (in our opinion) landscapes of an alien planet.

Physicists, chemists, mathematicians, programmers are also examples of such beings living in other states of consciousness, from which one can see something that is accessible only to them. For a long time we knew only one way to create them: training people, long-term and with high dropout rates.

But for some time we have learned to encode elements of consciousness in artificial neural networks. And not so small. Here, for example ^{[ 820 ]} : training the network with pictures of chemical compounds in order to teach it to predict their toxicity. It is a working materialization of "chemical intuition" in an external medium.

An artificial consciousness that is sensitive to subtle variations of the lunar exosphere is certainly possible. But one more thing will be required of him: the ability to bring his perception to us, and on an intuitive level.

Fortunately, there are historical precedents for the transformation of information that preserves its intuitive perception. Let rudimentary, but demonstrating the fundamental possibility.

The oldest is a literary translation. Marshak sought ^{[ 160 ] to} “faithfully express the thought and feeling” of the original, even if to the detriment of literalness, and it is his works that are considered the benchmark.

^{[Article written for the site https://geektimes.ru/ . When copying please refer to the original. The author of the article is Evgeny Bobukh. To express gratitude to the author of cryptocurrency is possible at the addresses indicated in the profile .]}

A more close to machine learning example is self-organizing maps ^{[ 825 ]} . They display objects from a multidimensional space into a two-dimensional one in order to preserve as much as possible the proximity between them, and thus not destroy the intuitive perception of their relative position:


[Display multidimensional word space on a two-dimensional map. Image credit: Wikipedia ^{[ 825 ]} ]

Another example is the visualization of data by the method of Chernov’s faces ^{[ 840 ]} , in which elements of a multidimensional space are mapped to features. The method is often criticized, it has many flaws, but one cannot be taken away: relying on our ability to recognize even small changes in facial expressions, it allows you to quickly grasp similarities and differences between very multidimensional objects (by the way, Peter Watts mentions this).

Therefore, I think the future is for artificial "intermediaries" for environments and situations that fall outside the boundaries of our imagination. For “guides of imagination”, whose intuition works well in the depths of Jupiter or the deserts of Venus, but which are able to translate what is perceived into our usual images. After all, if an artificial eye can be a scout in another world, then why can't it be an artificial consciousness?

In this I see the role of machine learning, which can resolve the conflict for the attention between the space program and the development of computer systems. The one who succeeds first in this will largely determine the direction of the expansion of humanity.

And who knows, maybe we will find something surprising not for hundreds of parses from another star, but simply by looking at the “strengthened” perception of something present next to us and, well, we are familiar?





PS Grateful readers added to me in the comments as many as 43 (forty three!) Titles of works with extreme conditions. Annual stock still unread! Thank!