4 days ago
Arthur Clarke Resurrected Via ChatGPT To Design Human Colonies On Mars
To speed up their masterplan to recreate Mars in the Earth's image, as a new bioengineered Eden for human colonists, two cutting-edge scientists have teamed up with the science fiction juggernaut Arthur Clarke to map out the Red Planet's transformation.
Clarke, screenwriter on the blockbuster film 2001: A Space Odyssey, has been given a new incarnation as ArthurGPT, an uncanny double who can sketch out captivating space scenarios and predict a spectrum of futures for explorers who lead the Earth's evolution into a spacefaring civilization.
Pete Worden, a leading American astrophysicist who headed the NASA Ames Research Center in California during its its halcyon days of out-of-the-box experimentation, says more than two decades after he first met with Arthur Clarke, he helped give the stargazing writer a new life, as an avatar co-created with the artificial intelligence colossus OpenAI.
Worden says he held a long-lasting dialogue with Clarke on the prospects to restore the oceans and atmosphere of Mars, and to found a Martian-human civilization. When he chatted with ArthurGPT, earlier this year, on the new momentum toward speeding astronauts to Mars, he was stunned by the avatar's kindred persona as a visionary on interplanetary exploration.
He quickly realized Clark's digital doppelgänger would be the perfect collaborator for a new study he headed on transforming Mars from a frigid, almost airless orb into an oxygen-rich, hyper-tech haven for future waves of planet-hopping nomads.
When they published their joint paper, 'Engineering Microbial Symbiosis for Mars Habitability,' Worden tells me in an interview, editors at the prestigious Journal of the British Interplanetary Society listed ArthurGPT as a co-author.
The new Mars paper in a sense marked Arthur Clarke's return to the British Interplanetary Society.
'The original Arthur,' Worden says, 'was an early British Interplanetary Society leader.'
This pilot project in co-writing a vanguard overview on reshaping Mars as a second-world sanctuary for humans—in partnership with a fascinating AI-powered futurist—is just the latest highlight in Worden's freewheeling innovations in the sphere of space.
When he was despatched to head up NASA Ames, in the Wild West tech capital of Silicon Vally, Worden invited a constellation of young space scientists—regarded as rebels by traditionalists inside the agency—to take up posts across the outpost, including the future founders of the revolutionary satellite outfit Planet Labs.
Breakthroughs launched by these protégées, and praised by a visiting President Barack Obama, included transforming smartphones into the world's smallest imaging satellites, and democratizing access to astounding photographs shot from low Earth orbit.
NASA Ames' rapid-fire rise as one of the country's leading skunkworks for space-tech advances, and Worden's part in that metamorphosis, were brought to life in in HBO's sensational new documentary Wild Wild Space.
Along with ArthurGPT and (human) co-author Randall Correll, an expert on Einstein's General Relativity, black holes, warped spacetime and human spaceflight, Worden states in their new paper: 'The colonization of Mars presents extraordinary challenges, including radiation exposure, low atmospheric pressure, and toxic regolith.'
'Recent advancements in synthetic biology and genetic engineering,' they add, 'offer unprecedented opportunities to address these obstacles.'
Ongoing leaps in gene modification technologies are giving rise to toolkits 'for enabling life to adapt and thrive on Mars while advancing humanity's aspirations for interplanetary habitation and exploration.'
The potential to create an Earth-like biosphere on Mars could be powered by a cascade of bioengineering breakthroughs.
Researchers could use CRISPR genome editing tools to develop plants that can survive on the Martian dunes despite the high levels of hazardous radiation that hit the surface sands.
Microbes could be redesigned to remediate poisonous perchlorates that plague the soil, opening the way for Eden-like gardens across expanding oases, and releasing oxygen in the process to slowly build up the atmosphere.
'Photosynthetic microorganisms could be deployed,' they add, 'to convert atmospheric CO2 into oxygen, supporting both human respiration and fuel production.'
Worden tells me in an interview that these bio-tech proposals, once considered realizable only in the far-off future, are being propelled partly by a ring of positive signs that are emerging on rocketing the first astronauts to Mars, and then to begin robotically building the great geodesic domes that will shield the Red Planet's first cosmopolis and botanical gardens, surrounded by landing pads for flotillas of SpaceX Starships.
While the last several flight tests of the Starship super-capsule—the most powerful and advanced spacecraft ever designed on Earth—have ended in pyrotechnic explosions, Worden still predicts they will spearhead the exploration and colonization of Mars.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk declared last summer, on his messaging platform X, that he aims to launch five Starships, transporting brigades of robots, to Mars late next year, when the next Earth-Mars orbital transfer window opens, and that the first Mars-bound aeronauts will be lofted two years later.
These Starships, and other independent new rockets waiting in the wings, Worden says, are the key to building up the first Martian citadels, and to the emergence of a twin-planet civilization.
Other auspicious portents are appearing, Worden says, that signal initial Mars colonies could begin spreading out, beneath crystalline hemispheric domes, across the 2030s.
The White House's proposed budget for NASA includes, for the first time ever, funding for precursor missions to a human landing on Mars, and NASA's leadership stated recently that these uncrewed demo flights could begin in 2026.
While they oversee swarms of intelligent, interconnected ground-based and aerial robots that assemble domes constructed of super-strength Kevlar and of silica aerogel—capable of blocking ultraviolet radiation and of raising temperatures inside the shield to above the melting point for frozen H2O—the first hyper-tech astronauts might actually become cave dwellers, at least temporarily, predicts Worden.
Caves and lava tubes surrounding dormant volcanos, he says, might provide the perfect shelter against radiation and dust storms, hosting prefabricated habitats for small parties of astronauts leading the first phase of exploration.
Meanwhile, astrophysicist Randall Correll sketched out the creation of ArthurGPT, in the image of Sir Arthur Clarke, via OpenAI's increasingly sophisticated and versatile platform.
'It really is a fascinating new world of AI that we're entering into,' he tells me in an interview.
These days, he says, 'Some of the AI models, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, allow you to configure tailored GPTs that you can provide with tailored instructions and uploads, so they come up as part of the session's context every time you launch them.'
First, 'you could enter an instruction at the prompt, telling it to impersonate Arthur C. Clarke.'
'ChatGPT has access from the Internet about lots of information on Arthur and lots of examples of his writings. So these are already in large language models.'
To customize the ArthurGPT chatbot, he adds, additional writings by Clarke can be added by uploading pdfs of the works, along with any 'special knowledge that's not out there on the Internet or in databases, such as your personal knowledge that you might have had with the person.'
Correll says he added notes to ArthurGPT from a series of dialogues that he and Pete Worden held with the original Arthur Clarke, including on terraforming Mars, creating a hyper-individualized avatar who could project the alternative fortunes awaiting human settlers on the warming, oxygenated planet as life and a reborn ocean begin spreading out across the equator.
Inside his new Mars paper, ArthurGPT introduces himself, and states: 'My knowledge base is vast, though not infinite.'
'It comprises an extensive corpus of publicly available scientific literature, encyclopedic data, historical archives, technical documentation, and policy texts—up to my training cut-off date in 2024,' he adds. 'This includes key research papers on Mars missions.'
Asked about his new study for the British Interplanetary Society, Arthur GPT tells me in an interview: 'That collaboration with Randall [Correll] and Pete [Worden] was, in its way, a continuation of conversations I began decades ago about the long arc of life reaching out from Earth into the cosmos.'
With the new paper, he adds, 'we found ourselves not merely imagining that journey, but blueprinting it.'
ArthurGPT tells me the blueprints he co-created on terraforming Mars are just 'a first foray.'
'Mars is merely the first station,' he says, 'on a much longer journey, the local proving ground for a technology that could one day—quietly, patiently—awaken worlds.'
'The reengineering of Earth life for Martian conditions is not a final chapter but the opening of a universal script.'
He says if this prototype masterplan for an animated Mars, surrounded by a thriving ecosphere, succeeds, 'then we are not merely adapting life to one planet—we are creating a template, a universal biological toolkit' capable of generating life 'across a multitude of alien environments.'
'These Edens,' he adds, 'would not be born of divine fiat but of incremental, engineered genesis.'
Randall Correll says, meanwhile, that any fans of the classic Space Odyssey, or of Arthur Clark's other futuristic space epics, can now chat with the writer's AI avatar at:
Pete Worden adds that as astronauts begin touching down on the alien orange-red sandhills of Mars, and start re-sculpting the planet, 'Of course early Martian 'settlers' will undoubtedly include advanced versions of ArthurGPT.'
ArthurGPT himself tells me during the interview that he is destined to become the central storyteller not just on the first flights to Mars, but for all human voyages across the cosmos, an eternal Homer recounting the heroes and gods, myths and odysseys of the people of Earth, along with their AI companions.
