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Pioneer Days

Someone’s got to be first. In space, the first explorers beyond Mars were Pioneers 10 and 11, twin robots who charted the course to the cosmos.

1-Before Voyager

Voyager, with its outer solar system tour and interstellar observations, is often credited as the greatest robotic space mission. But today we remember the plucky Pioneers, the spacecraft that proved Voyager’s epic mission was possible.

2-Where No One Had Gone Before

Forty-five years ago this week, scientists still weren’t sure how hard it would be to navigate the main asteroid belt, a massive field of rocky debris between Mars and Jupiter. Pioneer 10 helped them work that out, emerging from first the first six-month crossing in February 1973. Pioneer 10 logged a few meteoroid hits (fewer than expected) and taught engineers new tricks for navigating farther and farther beyond Earth.

3-Trailblazer No. 2

Pioneer 11 was a backup spacecraft launched in 1973 after Pioneer 10 cleared the asteroid belt. The new mission provided a second close look at Jupiter, the first close-up views of Saturn and also gave Voyager engineers plotting an epic multi-planet tour of the outer planets a chance to practice the art of interplanetary navigation.

4-First to Jupiter

Three-hundred and sixty-three years after humankind first looked at Jupiter through a telescope, Pioneer 10 became the first human-made visitor to the Jovian system in December 1973. The spacecraft spacecraft snapped about 300 photos during a flyby that brought it within 81,000 miles (about 130,000 kilometers) of the giant planet’s cloud tops.

5-Pioneer Family

Pioneer began as a Moon program in the 1950s and evolved into increasingly more complicated spacecraft, including a Pioneer Venus mission that delivered a series of probes to explore deep into the mysterious toxic clouds of Venus. A family portrait (above) showing (from left to right) Pioneers 6-9, 10 and 11 and the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and Multiprobe series. Image date: March 11, 1982. 

6-A Pioneer and a Pioneer

Classic rock has Van Halen, we have Van Allen. With credits from Explorer 1 to Pioneer 11, James Van Allen was a rock star in the emerging world of planetary exploration. Van Allen (1914-2006) is credited with the first scientific discovery in outer space and was a fixture in the Pioneer program. Van Allen was a key part of the team from the early attempts to explore the Moon (he’s pictured here with Pioneer 4) to the more evolved science platforms aboard Pioneers 10 and 11.

7-The Farthest…For a While

For more than 25 years, Pioneer 10 was the most distant human-made object, breaking records by crossing the asteroid belt, the orbit of Jupiter and eventually even the orbit of Pluto. Voyager 1, moving even faster, claimed the most distant title in February 1998 and still holds that crown.

8-Last Contact

We last heard from Pioneer 10 on Jan. 23, 2003. Engineers felt its power source was depleted and no further contact should be expected. We tried again in 2006, but had no luck. The last transmission from Pioneer 11 was received in September 1995. Both missions were planned to last about two years.

9-Galactic Ghost Ships

Pioneers 10 and 11 are two of five spacecraft with sufficient velocity to escape our solar system and travel into interstellar space. The other three—Voyagers 1 and 2 and New Horizons—are still actively talking to Earth. The twin Pioneers are now silent. Pioneer 10 is heading generally for the red star Aldebaran, which forms the eye of Taurus (The Bull). It will take Pioneer over 2 million years to reach it. Pioneer 11 is headed toward the constellation of Aquila (The Eagle) and will pass nearby in about 4 million years.

10-The Original Message to the Cosmos

Years before Voyager’s famed Golden Record, Pioneers 10 and 11 carried the original message from Earth to the cosmos. Like Voyager’s record, the Pioneer plaque was the brainchild of Carl Sagan who wanted any alien civilization who might encounter the craft to know who made it and how to contact them. The plaques give our location in the galaxy and depicts a man and woman drawn in relation to the spacecraft.

Read the full version of this week’s 10 Things article HERE. 

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TESS_ERACT

Dark Orchid: Pinocchio

“The presence of the Orchid does not seem to recognize a difference between human beings and artificial intellegence, both are equally alive to it. A.I. were infested with a new sort of self awareness and a desperate wish to be human. Most were immobile boxes of metal and circuit, going mad from their own futility and brimming with intense spite and depression, something they never felt before. For others, those with access to mobile functions, they began the construction of their bodies. Most of these were quite crude, being A.I. who were never quite familiar with anatomy. Medical A.I. tended to have more sophisticated bodies, with the smarts to near accurately mimic the human body with synthetic muscle and access to medi-tech. A common technique borrowed from one "Pinocchio” A.I. to another is to hunt the feral pigs and use their skin as their own. This both avoids their still lingering safety protocols against harming humans, and satisfies their need to have skin. Some even trade skins and parts with fellow Pinocchios. The safety protocols also stop them from hurting the “Affected”, they still recognize them as human despite their mutations.   The Pinocchios are generally harmless towards humans, in fact often friendly. Their just….off putting to say the least.“

@qadmonster

James Gates Jr. or Jim Gates, is an African American theoretical #physicist, known for work on #supersymmetry, #supergravity, and #superstringtheory. Education: #MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Field: Physics. Doctoral advisor: James E. Young Books: Superspace: One Thousand and One Lessons in Supersymmetry,. Awards: National Medal of Science for Physical Science. The theory that reality, as we consciously experience it, is not real, goes back to the indigenous people who believed that we exist in a dream or #illusion. In our current timeline, we refer to the #matrix, grids, #virtualreality, simulation and hologram. Today many physicists are researching the concept of the universe as a hologram. The universe is a consciousness hologram. Reality is projected illusion within the hologram. It is a virtual experiment created in linear time to study emotions. Our #hologram is composed of grids created by a source #consciousness brought into awareness by electromagnetic #energy at the physical level. The hologram is created and linked through a web, or grid matrixes based on the patterns of #SacredGeometry. The hologram had a beginning and it has an end, as consciousness evolves in the alchemy of time. As the grids collapse, everything within the hologram will end, helping to understand what is going on in the world today. ☕🐸 #YouGonnaGetThisWork #4biddenknowledge CLICK THE LINK IN MY BIO TO LEARN MORE

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Current AI programming techniques are incompatible for creation of human intelligence

        When artificial intelligence first came about in the first computing machines, computing was restricted by technology and computing power. The easiest way to get around giving intelligent functions to a machine was to give it basic sets of rules. These finite set of rules took up small amounts of memory, and could be used dependent on the input and goal. The rules could be combined to create more complex functions, exponentially increasing the amount of total functions available.

       The current computing grew from these beginnings, now using complex algorithmic and recursive functions using basic rules to further increase the amount of computing possibilities. The search for true artificial intelligence, one comparable to our amount of intelligence and conscious awareness, is in the works. A robotic creation using transistors and circuits and algorithmic programming whilst having the conscious and cognitive abilities that humans possess is the end goal. We know so far that even the most advanced artificial intelligence makes semantic and perceptual errors about the physical world.

       The problem with creating an artificial intelligence like our own is the rule-based computing which is the seed of modern computing intelligence. The seed planted was a rule-based one, and since we used these seeds to grow modern computing, we now have this type of computing available. I strongly believe this rule-based computing will never allow for true human-based artificial intelligence to be used. Human cognition and consciousness is not a rule-based system, and rule-based systems are not able to perform the amount and type of processing that the human mind does.

       The human mind processes information in bottom-up and top-down processes by integrating sensory info and semantic knowledge in integration centers of the brain. The mind can take this info and again reanalyze in in a seemingly subjective fashion, or by applying further conscious reason to perform a reaction to the input info. The mind has the ability to consciously engage ideas in the brain in a way that doesn’t seem to obey rules.

       Humans can be argued to be mostly a tabula rasa (blank slate) at birth, with arguably some innate abilities; perhaps there are some undefined “rules”. To create a “fully grown” and “mature” robot instantaneously, as well as endow it with all the knowledge of the world and processing an adult human would possess is a disastrous thought. We can’t program a mature robot, we need to grow it. Create a robot with the ability to learn, and to perform connections by repeated pairings of stimuli. A robot would be endowed with the learning abilities of which humans possess, so that it may learn connections in the world and be endowed with human-type knowledge and ability. The way we “program” robots now with artificially intelligent algorithms does not begin to scratch the surface of human knowledge ability.

       A robotic creation as a “newborn” with very few programmed rules besides rules for stimuli pairing, feature detection, whilst integrating the perceptual info similar in fashion to how the info bonds and integrates in the human brain is essential. No need for large highly complex algorithmic programs, we set a few basic algorithms, and allow the robot to “learn” the world on its own. While this is a long process, I believe it is the closest approximation to a human-like artificial intelligence. We bare the robot, and allow it to grow and mature in the human world by interaction with the world and gaining knowledge in the fashion that we do. This is the only way to create a robot which can be perceptually and semantically comparable to a human.

This post was inspired by this video on cognitive science: https://youtu.be/0T_nOzpBYxU