Bryan Alexander

This week is the 50th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon.  My son and I visited Washington, DC’s National Mall to see some of the commemorations.

A brilliant team projected a video of the entire Saturn V rocket on one side of the Washington monument.  It was extraordinary to see, visible from great distances:

Other festivities including information about prospective lunar flights.  Which brings me to ask you all: what’s next for space?

Let’s look ahead 50 years this weekend, while we revisit the past.

As a futurist I always start with present trends.  We can identity a bunch of them:

• Exploration of the solar system via robotic probes
• Earth-orbit and lunar interest from multiple nations
• Rising private space efforts
• Calls for a Mars expedition
• Hints of expanding the preexisting militarization of space (Trump and Macron each called for their nations to offer a space force, in addition to their respective air forces)
• Commercial interest in asteroid mining

How are these likely to play out over the next 50 years?  Robotic exploration seems likely to continue, since missions are relatively low-cost or even cheap, as well as offering little risk.  There aren’t many countervailing forces; anti-science cultural developments aren’t hitting Jupiter missions.

Private space efforts: I’m not sure.  Bezos has a long-term vision for human space settlement, and Musk is hardly lacking in that department.  But assuming they won’t change their minds (and they could), these are two individuals with limited lifespans.  When they die or become incapacitated, will those efforts continue?  I can imagine boards and managers preferring to focus on more familiar operations.  Asteroid mining may be similarly restricted to a handful of wealthy individuals.  Unless a commercial sector opens up, this Heinleinian moment could be a historical blip.

Militarizing space is something that’s been happening since WWII.  Geopolitics aren’t showing signs of heading towards an era of perpetual peace, so we should expect something like this to persist (but see below).

A Mars expedition is very exciting, but interest is quite low.  Consider this recent Pew Research poll:

That’s actually consistent with the 1960s and 1970s, when the majority of Americans opposed lunar missions most of the time. Apollo succeeded in part due to the Cold War.  Without that framing, it would take some serious and sustained heavy lifting in the political sector to get NASA to Mars.  What conditions would have to be in place for that to occur?

So one quick scenario for 2069: humanity flings robots across the solar system, building our scientific knowledge, while a mix of public and private enterprises haul humans to Earth orbit and back.

Let’s develop this a little further, adding additional trends to the mix.

Politics To pick one leading space nation, American politics is deeply partisan.  Space could either become a party issue or a bipartisan/nonpartisan one.  I can’t shake my sense that the GOP, while capable of opposing some science (i.e., climate change and evolution) will remain space-happy.  Much of the space sector is based in deep red states, like Texas and Alabama, or reddish ones like Florida (just today a Florida senator and 2016 presidential candidate published a pro-Apollo, pro-NASA column).  Many recent Republican presidents have been keen on space, from Reagan (Star Wars) to the Bushes (Mars) and Trump (space force).  Republicans also admire private sector space efforts, of course.

I’m not sure the Democrats have the same level of interest, despite the heritage of Apollo, called into being by JFK.  I’ve seen few pro-space expressions from candidates.  Instead, many progressives are calling for domestic moonshot efforts, such as Medicare for all, reparations for slavery, and free college tuition.  It feels like the old anti-space line: “Why spend money in space, when we can use it to address Earthly problems?”  Gil-Scott Heron’s classic performance comes to mind, as does the tendency of space boosters to be white.

A gender breakdown might occur as well.  Some surveys find men somewhat more interested in human spaceflight then women.  For example, a 2015 Pew poll found that “[m]en are more likely than women to say human astronauts are essential for the future of the U.S. space program (66% vs. 52%, respectively).”

That was pre-Trump.  Since then both political parties have become more gender-focused, with women increasingly likely to vote Democratic and men Republican.

In short, it might make more sense for Democrats to focus their major program political capital on non-space issues.  As one writer wrote into the New York Times this week,

Through increased wildfires, storm damage, flooding, rising sea levels, increasing desertification contributing to the world’s refugee crisis and a thousand other cuts, climate change is already costing us lives and conflict and billions of dollars. We need a moonshot, all right — a moonshot effort to stop and reverse climate change. We cannot afford both [lunar missions and addressing climate change].

Especially if the GOP presses hard on space, which incentivizes progressives to push back.  So we could see space becoming a partisan issue over the next generation.

Alternatively, Democrats could articulate a competing space vision.  For example, if climate change becomes an organizing principle for that party, it would make sense to advocate for extensive orbital support for continued Earth science.  If Democrats turn more to the left, they might oppose private space efforts in favor of public ones.  We can see hints of this now in liberal critiques of Musk and Bezos for multiple business practices.  At the same time Democrats and Republicans could follow historical practice and align together in bipartisanship on the military use of space.

Technology The Space Race drove an extraordinary period in technological development.  As we currently experience non-space-related tech innovation, could some of that shape our future in space?

To pick some technologies in development, consider orbiting 3d printers to jumpstart the construction of vehicles and facilities in vacuum.  A sprawling series of space stations, asteroid mining operations, and a lunar town might become more feasible. Alternatively, think of the role of AI.  If AI continues to improve in quality – not a sudden Skynet breakthrough, just steady growth – we could witness a boom in autonomous spacecraft, extending robotic exploration.  As humans exit drivers seats in cars, we could decide that AI pilots are better than human ones and turn the universe over to bots.  Alternatively, if we pursue a cyborg future with humans working closely with AIs, human spaceflight may continue with software companions.

Other tech may make space exploration less difficult.  Sufficiently advanced quantum computing could lead to realtime communication with craft light minutes and hours away.  Improved medical care could mitigate some of the stresses spaceflight places on the human body.

The development of space-specific technologies may speed space exploration. In particular, getting out of Earth’s gravity well is a major roadblock to spaceflight. In 2018 we read Soonish, which offered this view of new tech that might help things:

reusable rockets, like the SpaceX Falcon 9; spaceplanes, like ramjets and scramjets; superguns, including the wild and tragic Gerald Bull story (45ff); rocket sleds; the awesomely named Slingatron; firing lasers at rockets; the space elevator.

To these we could add the space catapult, space fountain, and the sky ramp.  Technological development and space exploration could feed each other in a reinforcing loop.  The classic NASA spinoff pattern could heat up to our general benefit.

Demographics (Yes, you knew I would go there.)  I’ve noted several works on population trends which contend that older populations are less likely to boldly go.  Paul Morland thinks such societies are less likely to take risks.  Bricker and Ibbotson concur.  Will aging nations then back away from space?  Moreover, if older societies are less prone to war (remember this phrase: geriatric peace), they might spend less on military space capacity.

Perhaps the next two generations of space travel will stem from nations still producing young people at scale.  Subsaharan Africa may become the home of the next Baikonur and Cape Kennedy.

Geopolitics We could take the planet in the direction of international peace.  I just mentioned aging societies’ tendencies away from war.  We could add general unease at war in a society demonstrably intertwined and fragile.  Nonlethal weapons may proliferate and tamp down our revenge cycles.  Nonviolent movements may grow.

On the other hand, there are many reasons we can expect a violent 50 years ahead.  Islamicist terror is still active on multiple continents.  Right-wing extremism is building up now, and that’s unlikely to establish a global Ghandian peace.  Various types of nationalism are heating up, which historically can add fuel to international tensions.  And so on.

This could drive another wave of space development.  Military use of space can expand as nations seek orbital and interplanetary advantages.  International rivalries can elicit resources to compete with astronomical achievements.  International cooperation could occur, but in the service of dueling power blocs.  Imagine a One Belt, One Road multinational crew aboard a Chinese Martian expedition.

Culture Forecasting cultural changes is very difficult, so I’ll start by turning back to history.  We know that fictional visions and future imaginations of spaceflight have inspired research, development, and exploration since the 19th century.  That pattern seems to still be going on now.  It could well persist in the near and medium term future, as sf creators offer us stories of aliens, new worlds, etc.

It’s possible that sf could pull back from this focus.  Some writers have spoken of the difficulty in imagining the future as our present becomes ever more chaotic and innovative.  There are many paths for sf writers to tread other than the short- or medium-term future: alternate history, fantasy, and the far-future.  The genre could mutate in this direction, but I don’t see it as all that likely.

Wild cards and black swans Most of the preceding is based on present-day realities and current trends.  I tried to stick to what seems most likely.  But what about the impact of very unlikely events?

An asteroid near miss could spur growth in space.  An actual strike could drive us into Cold War levels of outreach and investment.  New religious movements that gain actual cultural and political traction could push space in all kinds of directions (this is a science fiction staple, actually).  A sudden Singularity event: ditto.  Discovering life in an interesting way (beyond single-celled organisms or algae) could inspire a major effort.

Many awful and surprising things could shock humanity and injure us badly enough to retreat from the universe.  A massive pandemic – beyond the 1917 flu, more like the Black Death, but broader in impact – that overwhelms our public health systems could force us to retrench rather than reach out.  An international economic depression could easily have the same impact (“Why are we spending money on Lunar orbit when people are starving on Earth?”).

Let me conclude with two scenarios.  They’re based on mashing up a bunch of the preceding, and tuning them to extremes.  I’m leaving off black swans for the moment.

Scenario I: Entrenched

In 2069 human civilization is under a great deal of stress.  Population growth has tapered off, but many nations grapple with how to manage this new state, either trying to support a large population of elders, or dealing with a mass exodus of young people.  Geopolitics are dicey, as tensions run high across numerous borders.  Short mid-century wars (India and Pakistan, Russia and Germany, China and the US) caused damage and human suffering, but also kept military forces well-supplied and on edge.  Climate change’s many impacts have started to be felt, as some coastal cities experience populations leaving (“dry flight”) while struggling to maintain sea defenses, and hyperstorms (coined by the old Weather Channel) clobber regions.  Food and water systems are under stress.  Their failures are well publicized.

Humanity’s space presence is divided.  On the one hand, AI-guided robots busily explore the solar system from the sun to the Oort Cloud, sending back scientific information and material samples.  Many automatic craft participate in Gaianet, the planetary warning system aimed primarily at tracking solar weather (some of which could injure Earthly infrastructure).  Robots draw on installations built upon the Earth’s moon, Martian moons, and several large asteroids.

On the other (fleshly) hand, human spaceflight focuses on Earth orbit.  Human crews inhabit multiple stations lofted by various nations.  They combine scientific research – again, often keyed into Gaianet – with fairly obvious military posturing.  Several nations, combines, and corporations maintain their own orbital ecosystems as a matter of power and prestige, each with its own mapping systems (GPS to personal implants), weather sats (the best ones), and multi-tiered communication infrastructure, along with extensive surveillance tools and strike capacity.  Earth launching systems are varied and gradually developed.

Every spacefaring nation and combine experiences fitful planning, as political waves come and go.  Military incidents and weather disasters spark more space investment, while their absence and various populisms compel reductions.  Corporations face a similar dynamic, as some leaders seek to realize lucrative space opportunities, while opponents cite the long history of these falling short.

In academia pro-space research and teaching can be controversial.  Some oppose it as too military or corporate.  Anti-space academics of all stripes have followings.  Gaianet work is quietly respected.

Scenario II: Expanding

In 2069 human civilization is deep in VUCA territory.  In most of the world national elites cling to power with a mix of desperation, surveillance, terror, and finely tuned marketing, trying to fend off restless populations.  Older nations seek to maintain their elaborate support mechanisms (immigrant labor and advanced automation) while younger ones seek global leadership.  Climate change gnaws at coastal regions and thwacks many areas with bad weather; food systems are transforming, but the process is fitful and costly.  Religious, cultural, and political movements sweep through populations more rapidly than ever.

In space automated craft extend throughout the solar area, as with scenario I.  Many participate in Gaianet, with its twin missions of defending humanity against solar weather and asteroid impacts.  Others work as parts of mining operations, extracting minerals, ice, and entire (small) asteroids for use around Earth.

Humans sometimes work with these automated deep space denizens.  While AI has progressed well since the 2030s winter, we like to have humans in the loop for extraordinary situations and, of course, insurance purposes.  Small teams wrangle probes from nearby in solar terms – i.e., from bases on Ceres or Luna, using quantum entanglement to monitor and manage bots from hundreds of millions of miles away.

Nations, combines, and businesses compete to send humans into space, aiming for new destinations and strategies.  Space Race 3.0 is followed unevenly, as humans sometimes get excited by firsts (the Indian Jovian moons mission!) and bored by others (how many Venus trans-atmospheric stations do we really need?).

Earthspace is where human space effort is grounded.  As with scenario I there are scientific and military missions in orbit, as well as around and on Luna, maintained by competing interests.  They also support deep space missions in various ways: communications, launches, capture.  The night sky is strung with bright dots of self-assembled platforms of all kinds.  Earth launching systems are varied, with startups trying out around the world, especially in Africa.  China is testing out a new sled launching facility in Pakistan, taking One Belt, One Road into space. Stations occupy Lagrange points, partly as way stations for asteroid work.

Space tourism is popular among oligarchs and celebrities.  Paparazzi-bots share AI-generated VR documentaries of fashion stars embarrassing themselves in Lunar gravity, while the business media follows CEOs closely when they meet in orbital stations.

Support for space expansion comes and goes.  There are cultural divides, as some back space for nationalistic or brand identity reasons, while others celebrate entrepreneurship.  Opposition occurs for similar reasons, urging a redirection of resources to Earthly needs.  Cultural movements also connect with space, from new forms of interplanetary mysticism to various styles of Earth worship (“we are the real Gaianet!”). Virtual relationships between space workers and terrestrial folk – truly long distance relationships – are the subject of humor and academic study.

In academia, space-related STEM fields grow steadily, if unevenly.  Space Humanities remains a controversial movement.

…and that’s a brisk tour through some trends and possibilities.  What do you think?

PS: I’ve written about this previously.

(photos by Goddard, and Goddard again, Marshall Space Center, and also Kordite)

Sometimes the 21st century actually sounds like the 21st century of futurism and science fiction.  Sometimes it appears that way through a certain story or the development of a given trend.

And sometimes trends coincide, then produce something new.

Case in point: an Israeli research team just published a paper describing a very creative hack combining trends in drones and autonomous cars.   They used a drone-mounted projector to mess with a car’s advanced driver assistance systems.

Let me break this down, then explore implications.  I’ll engage in some good, old-fashioned futurist speculation.  And I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts.

First, what’s the story?

From the paper’s abstract:

We injected spoofed traffic signs into Mobileye to assess the influence of environmental changes (e.g., changes in color, shape, projection speed, diameter and ambient light) on the outcome of an attack. To conduct this experiment in a realistic scenario, we used a drone to carry a portable projector which projected the spoofed traffic sign on a driving car. Our experiments show that it is possible to fool Mobileye so that it interprets the drone carried spoofed traffic sign as a real traffic sign.

“Attacking a car while driving (a) the drone with the projector used in our experiments, (b) visualization of the threat model implementation, (c) the moment of the attack (the projected sign is boxed in blue, the attacker’s drone is boxed in purple, and the victim’s car is boxed in red).”

In other words, they used a drone to fool a car’s autonomous systems, convincing it of a false speed limit.  Not in a simulation, not in a lab, but on a street, using a real car (Renault Captur), real software, and real drone.

This isn’t *exactly* hacking a self-driving car with a drone.  It does involve a drone.  It is a hack, but advanced driver assistance systems aren’t full autonomous car drivers.  A human controls an ADAS-equipped vehicle, relying on the software for information and, in some cases, driving assistance, so it’s a level 0 (of 5) car, in the SAE rankings.   Read the paper for more details, like the color of projected light, size and shape of projection, etc.  And check their short video:

(Note that three of the five authors are interns.  One’s a grad student.)

But you can see where this might be headed in the near future: drones versus autonomous cars.  As self-driving car tech gets better and more widely deployed, these drone attack tactics could keep pace, evolving new capabilities and dimensions. It’s a 21st century arms race.  For the sake of argument, let’s bank on certain present-day forces continuing to exert themselves: the ingenuity of hackers; the creativity of the emerging autonomous car world; our social love of gadgets.

Now, if this is one possible way those forces and technologies are interacting, where could it all go?  What does this metatrend portend?

Since the idea is out there now, it’s likely that people will try implementing and iterating variations of the attack.  Based on what we’ve seen of drones, imagine: human-operated versus automated attacks; multiple drones, building up to swarms; multiple attack vectors (imagine one shining lights within the car to distract the driver, while another targets the LIDAR, a third projects images on other surfaces including other cars, etc.).  Autonomous cars have to deal with the classic trolley problem; how about drones convincing them that there’s a small child darting into the road, forcing the car to stop or skew suddenly?  Or several children, one after the other?  That’s all short of doing physical attacks, like sacrificing a drone under a tire or against a windshield, printing and pasting down AI-confusing stickers, or directly delivering an explosive charge.

Remember that drones have far greater freedom of movement than cars do.  They are also much cheaper, and getting more so.  Imagine spamming an autonomous car with dozens or hundreds of drones, each with a different attack vector and mission.  You could be driving down a highway, or being driven in your new autonomous car, when the car alongside you is engulfed in a blizzard of buzzing, flashing confusion.

Such attacks could be launched from a nearby site or directed from around the world, as the American global drone war has proven.  If it’s from nearby, a van stuffed full of equipment and personnel could follow the target at a safe distance, disgorging drones in swarms.  Or drones could be launched by hand from pedestrians walking nearby, equipped only with duffel bags or carrying cases.

If people actually deploy this kind of hack or attack significantly, or if the idea scares us enough, countermeasures are inevitable.  Based on recent history and technological practices, we could imagine watermarking traffic signs and requiring car software to only acknowledge those.  Nassi et al suggest using QR codes

contain[ing] a signed message to the approaching car, informing the car of the traffic sign ahead, and its type, coordinates, and digital signature for authentication during the recognition process.

The report also suggests using updated digital information, a la Waze, shared between cars.  Or perhaps we could make signs into IoT devices, networked and smart, so need to make a handshake exchange with each car for the car’s software to work with it.  Naturally the attackers can try spoofing or otherwise outflanking such countermeasures, so we could expect a car-sign-drone arms race.  And the short history of IoT provides all kinds of ways this can go wrong.  Imagine a distributed, denial of service attack mounted through smart traffic signs or, less grandiosely, car collisions piling up because a smartsign’s been compromised or just failed.

How else could cars and their passengers defend themselves?  The aforementioned Waze-like system could also carry information on the latest drone attacks, updated as each iteration occurs.  Perhaps cars can fire off drones of their own, leading to aerial combat.  There’s precedent for this in the design world, as Box Clever has already proposed car-launched drones for traffic guidance and Blade Runner 2049 portrayed aerial cars sending off little drones.  Meanwhile, some drivers, especially in America, might feel impelled to shoot down enemies with weapons of all sorts, which might make things awkward for other drivers at shots ricochet and tumbling drone parts rain down.

In a crowded urban environment such countermeasures might not work, given rapidly changing conditions and the dense congestion of many non-hostile drones, cars, and buildings.

Surely this provides better cover for an attack.  In fact, a proliferation of drones could make cities much more crowded, even dangerously so.

Such an attack could easily be invisible to the human eye.  In the report linked above is one quiet, fascinating detail:

We discovered that a projection speed of 100 ms is sufficient for fooling the system. We were unable to fool the system with faster projection speeds probably due to the frame per second rate of the optical sensor of the Mobileye.

Did you catch that?  The projection only needed to last for 100 milliseconds to work.  It’s just a flash, not a drive-in (drive-by!) movie.  Can attackers in a crowded area command drones to rapidly flicker images, indistinguishable to humans from the ambient lighting of ads, streetlights, etc?  Or could such hack-flashes be embedded in otherwise benign projections, the autonomous car’s equivalent of a subliminal ad?

Perhaps the threat would be enough to influence behavior.  Consider, for example, a driver receiving a message (through text, or a drone-projected image, or a phone call) informing them that unless they take certain steps (drive to a certain location, cough up some bitcoins, host drones for another attack) they’ll be subject to a drone hack.  It would be ransomware for the 4th Industrial Revolution.

Let’s scale up from the question of an individual car and think in terms of groups and cultures.  Imagine a malign actor herding cars in certain vectors through projector-wielding drones.  Multiple, simultaneous attacks on multiple vehicles could wreck havoc in a given area.  This could take the form of a large, sudden crash, or several different hits across an urban area.  They could, for example, collide with key infrastructure points, seize up traffic chokepoints, block emergency vehicles. How much would it take for drone-car attacks to paralyze a city?

How would we react, once such attacks are known to occur?  We might not change our behavior, of course; as every IT professional knows, we have a long history of happily ignoring security recommendations.  We could also become irrationally afraid, shunning all self-driving cars and/or drones, or at least avoiding certain areas of town because of rumors about attacks there.  “It’s a bad area, all right.  My sister’s cousin knew someone whose car was swarmed with trolley problems!  He couldn’t get to work for hours!”  “I saw hundreds of drones coming off of that building on CNN.com!  You couldn’t catch me anywhere near it.”

If cities are easier areas for such drone hacks, perhaps we’ll see more open spaces as safer.  This could darken our imagination of cities and add a bit of allure to rural areas.

Business opportunities would ramify.  Armored car firms would have to prove their security against such attacks.  Autonomous car providers would face pressure to provide defenses, perhaps drawn from new third party companies.  Imagine a defensive drone deployment service which nervous car passengers could summon from a mobile device.  Data-fueled digital giants could see opportunities to deploy their strengths and expand markets.  Illicit businesses would obviously appear as well.

Imagine the regulatory challenges.  Would car defense drones have to be licensed, or all drones carefully monitored to make sure they aren’t up to no good? I could see local and national governments requiring drones to not be able to carry projectors, somehow, or mandating geofencing or certain sonic signatures to keep them away from roads.  Does a chauffeur’s license start requiring familiarity with anti-drone skills?  If congestion is a fear, cities could start charging drone (owners) congestion pricing to keep space clear. Would drone overcrowding cause cities to try to reduce aerial congestion?  Could police forces use drone-projectors to safely stop suspects in high-speed pursuits, such as by convincing cars to pull right over?  Or would some local police forces whitelist approved drones and promise to down all others?  A well publicized drone-car attack could stampede politicians into short-sighted and ill-informed regulations, not for the first time.

The politics could become quite tricky.  Industries that depend on stable transport would lobby the heck out of government officials for protection. There’s always the chance of politically motivated drone-car hacking, of course, with one group (revolutionary cell, nation state) using projections to cause spectacular crashes, or immobilizing part of a city with carefully misdirected traffic. As Ars Technica observes, a drone projector attack doesn’t leave much of a trail, so it’s good for anonymous attacks.

No physical alteration of the scenery is required; this means no chain of physical evidence, and no human needs to be on the scene. It also means setup and teardown time amounts to “how fast does your drone fly?” which may even make targeted attacks possible—a drone might acquire and shadow a target car, then wait for an optimal time to spoof a sign in a place and at an angle most likely to affect the target with minimal “collateral damage” in the form of other nearby cars also reading the fake sign.

Autonomous car policies and politics could separate by ideology, party, region, or even religion.  “My opponent is weak on car defense – typical of a Democrat!”  “Drone defense is a right, not a privilege!”  “Our state doesn’t suffer from projections, unlike our southern neighbors.  Coincidence?”  “Drones swarming cars are a sign of divine displeasure.”   Anti-technology groups would see this as further evidence of society ignoring Kaczynski’s warnings, and maybe win some adherents.  Today’s critics of digital giants would scrutinize Waze-like operations most carefully.

All of this is just within a few years of today.  I haven’t started connecting this dual-trend story with other trends, but you can.  Think of developments in technology and how they could be involved: AI, 3d printing, augmented/virtual/mixed reality, for starters.  Consider non-tech trends and how they might impact and be impacted: demographics, identity politics, globalization and its opponents, just for starters.

Then imagine what happens once this wave rolls through civilization.  Say we have a running arms race between increasingly smart cars and ever more capable drones, and some of the basic political, cultural, social, and technological implications I’ve speculated upon here have come to pass.  That’s when the harder question becomes: what’s next?

(drone in case photo by Cola Richmond; drones in front of crowd by Ars Electronica; ditto drones on grass; drone on red background by Michael Coughlan; America’s Watch by Jeff Gates)