space architecture

Do a search on robotics and that will lead you in the correct direction.

Remember, it will not be humans who do this exploration – it will be robots who have mastered the art of movement in both human-scale designed and non-human scale designed environments.

These robots will also have the ability to reproduce just like any other species.

I have talked a lot with the people working in computers, and most of them believe that at some critical point in the future, that a ‘leap’ will be made – because no too microchips are exactly alike – to when machines can actuallly think.

Did anyone see the BBC documentary on time travel yesterday evening?

Some stuff here about concepts in robotics.

http://www.aceshardware.com/read_news.jsp?id=164

Definitely not,

Logistical nightmare but we will have no problem working with NASA on the peat technologies they are working on.

I am sure their scientists would be welcome at any of the Trust’s unique peatland habitats

Facinating subject all the same

Originally posted by garethace

…………………I have talked a lot with the people working in computers……….

Brian, i dont think there are people in there. its just magnets and wires and stuff

i think in space, architects should respect the vernacular of moonraker and buck rogers and not loose their roots by just making new fangled structures just to be modern.

Which local Authority would refuse you first Disney Land?

maybe glasgow, they had juristiction over neptunes way.

Woops

At the runway in the middle of nowhere,

Typical like diggin half a hole

In regards to a couple of things here, I am going to put on my favourite right brain and start being a scientist.

The one environment, which resembles the sexual numerical possiblity, law of chance situation to create actual human beings, does not exist in CMOS transistor technology. Intel etc are leading the world in that.

They have to build an entire new factory line every year and we are now talking about 1 billion transistors on something the size of 4mm x 4mm, getting smaller and more dense all of the time.

Moore’s law predicted back in the 1960s, by an intel engineer, has never been broken – that transistor count will double every 1.5 years.

Like I said no two chips are exactly alike. We simply do not know what to do with all the processing power we have anymore. It is going mostly unused. Same with digital storage, same with embedded memory etc.

More and more functions are therefore able to integrate onto a single piece of silicon, and at some stage the machine will actually start to use this vast reserve of computational power to do something like in the first human brains, which only difference is that it was biological and chemical as oposed to silicon.

All mathematical possibility theory currently points to the fact, that we are creating a rain forest of cross pollenation on microchips, somewhere in some industrial looking, nonedescript factory shed, that critical leap with finally happen – that initial spark.

As to the Moore’s Law thing, and time travel, at some stage in the future – the human species will have created so much digital storage capacity, memory and processing power, that it will be able to devote some part of it to just recording a point in time in exact realistic detail – that will allow supercomputers to spawn billions of alternative scenarios and billions of copies of you and me.

That means, mathematically speaking, if you think you are you – i.e. the one special ‘real’ Brian in the billions of other virtual copies, then the odds are stacked against you by a billion to one!

In other words the whole reality that science has set out to discover, and these great people like Einstein wanted to make clear – has in some strange way, become inverted on itself.

In the future – most people will actually exist in virtual space – that is the critical cross-junction between the human species and the machine.

And also that point at which we as a species will effectively cease to be useful anymore. No walt disney endings, just re-created virtual time and space.

As regards to NASA, you should know that over there, in order to keep getting their generous government funding they simply have to ‘spend’ their budget each and every year. Otherwise they get less next year.

In the times of Apollo, NASA managed to do very productive work. But nowadays, they just fall into the same catagory as any other government funded institution.

Coming towards the end of the year, they always check the accounts to see if there is any more money left. Then if there is a few million left, they have to pull out the catalogues and frantically started ordering ‘stuff’ to make up the difference.

Whole buildings full of computers are filled doing this – only to be switched on doing absolutelly nothing, except perhaps to walk the odd site-seeing tour through.

Bear in mind, that in terms of the entire history of human development, we have only had our unique brain power for a small part of our history. That is to say, that the golden age of human development and excellence is just a brief interlude.

For many millions of years, the human species could only hunt and savenge as best it could. At nightime, early humans just had to stay in the dark and cold in caves like animals. But at some critical point, following their ability to control fire – suddenly their brain began to evolve at more than linear rates.

So, for millenia, humans brain capacity stayed pretty much at a constant value, as witnessed by their use of the same tools over the course of millions of years. Then suddenly and without much warning this all changes, as the nightimes suddenly become lighted with fire and peoples’ reality switches from external factors, to things inside their heads.

Sean O’Laoire described a very similar switch from the traditional cottage for both animals and people, which prevails across most of Western Europe. When houses with large fireplaces came about, and animals were housed elsewhere, suddenly man become aware of romantic impulses he never knew he had.

The fact remains, that machines are currently accelerating in development at a rate much greater than the human species at the moment. At the moment, machines may be going through their early phases of development, but that does not mean that they will never develop the ability to control fire.

I was hoping that Archiseek, could provide more or less the same opportunity for architects to sit around a fire and think for a change! 🙂

The MATRIX just borrowed everything it could from text book AI thinking in the computer communities. Just like LOTRs has packaged up the Tolkein book for people who do not want to read.

This is a good discussion about AI and the MATRIX movie

That Steven Spielberg movie called AI, is a good example of the ideas I am talking about too. Some great acting in that movie too, set design, concepts etc.

If you rent it on DVD, it is very interesting to listen to Spielberg speak about his ideas behind that movie.

I have taught a little bit about this subject since, and here are some of my most recent thoughts about it:

There is something in the gaming world called Real Time Strategy genre, which is basically what happened in games like Age of Empires. These games aren’t that far away from reality either, when you consider for instance, the Irish condition where 50% of the country’s labour resources might have went into providing food and agricultural produce years ago – we had built a society around it.

What kind of society could there be in Space? I think that is a good kind of question to ask – what would mean something in peoples’ live, since they would not have traditional goals like semi-detached bungalows, or apartments to buy. Or would they? What would be considered useful as currency, would money work in space, like it does on planet Earth? Would it be any use in space, would inflation be a problem etc.

I would suggest there might be civil wars, and economic collapses in space, just like there was on Earth all throughout history – vast new projects that seemed to spell the future but were desolate years later. I think that Architects are adept in thinking about spatial strategy – but there are some interesting thoughts on the subject here:

Islands under fire.

Where at certain times, little insignificant pieces of land in the middle of oceans become somehow more important than is usual. I would also venture to add – that all Physicists discover more and more about our planet and how things operate – they are indeed learning to suspend disbelief a lot. Like the Matrix, where Neo learns to look at the world in a different way.

I have just included this link here, for some humour in the discussion, but also to point out one very significant fact. That is we do want to use machines to help us build this new world in outer space, then we must also realise what sometimes surprising conclusions machines can come up with. Yeah, I know the HAL 9000 analogy etc, but really this systems of AI and machinery are really only ‘doing the math’ as it were, and arriving at answers, which seem plausible enough to them.

Gaming AI gone seriously wrong.

I am thinking in terms of AI used to control economies and space travel/colonisation myself. I think that machines could come up with some odd logic, despite having powerful cpus and sophisticated software, I guess Jurassic Park is the ultimate example of things going badly wrong. ‘Life finding a way’. Left to b1942, it sure would! 🙂

Brian O’ Hanlon.

The Falklands war was fought for mineral rights, namely the oil rights to about half the South Atlantic.

Your are also right in saying the 32 storey building is insignificant, it is insignificant in architectural terms. Dublin is being sold a pup

Name one 25 storey plus rendered landmark building that is held as a model of good design

As for AI

it is limited because like some people in Ireland it never learns from it’s mistakes i.e. sub standard tall residential development undertaken by government

Just an article here about the intelligence of machines to make other machines today – AMD and the kind of automation that they borrowed from Chemical engineering factories.

The same intelligence that sent Capital Markets into anarchy in the 1998 Russian economic collapse. They sold everything even shares that had the capacity to profit from the crisis

That is why people make the plays now

AI is artificial i.e. unreal

Computers are glorified calculators

I agree that the human has shown a unique ability to progress.

But I think that some love to mystify computers. They are really quite simple things, they are also getting more user freindly all the time. I loved the dotcom bust particularly watching all the clowns that predicted the end of working in offices etc loosing the money they never really had.

It they who are government artists now while the property bandwagon rumbles on

It all works from the same principle the only difference is that the computers you are talking about have much more capacity, more complex programmes containing much higher numbers of viarables in their decision making process.

Talking about walking I would use the analogy of a dog and keep the muzzle firmly in place

In about 500 years possibly technologies will exist to send out missions with retreival capabilities

It all comes back to risk and reward there has been nothing found in space that merits colonisation.

Space is just that a big empty void that throws the odd meteorite scare at the earth sporadically.

Resources should be directed at two aspects of space, the sun and the harnessing of solor energy and the moon the harnessing of tidal energy. Other expenditure is simply indulging the whims of a particular scientific elite

And that takes no artificial intellegence

Fin Quote ” what oil rights? u aren’t listening to the propaganda r u?”

Have you ever been to Argentina FIN?

Do you know of a particular regime that murdered 10,000 of it’s own citizens. Which was ignored because people were looking at Pinochet in neighbouring Chile.

Thatcher reinvaded because there are substantial Oil reserves off the Falklands and South Georgia.

That is not propaganda but fact.

Fin Quote “indeed a pup…should be a lot taller.”

Does that go back to picking up a chunk of Manhatten and dropping it in as per Stira?

What is good about the proposal in Architectural terms?

You are a height merchant it would appear, design is secondary to height.

im continually amazed at the opinions on this website about highrise buildings. there seems to be a strong vein of height lust fuelled by (in my opinion) some sort of insecurity amongst the architectural community here that we dont have any tall buildings in dublin. the reason we dont have tall building is not solely down to overbearing planners. it is because we have never had the economical needs that create high rise buildings.
if you want to solve urban sprawl a much more purtinant issue is the density of suburbia rather than the city centre. the attitude of “lets build a 60 storey skyscraper because we can” in the middle on 2storiesville is a futile self-indulgent excercise

Originally posted by FIN
ok..that hurt my brain but yes…but is it the intelligence of the machines or it’s program.

Yes! Exactly, more and more this stuff will begin to hurt peoples’ brains, but what you can glean from this article – something of what a ‘chip foundry’ as they are called – are actually like.

They are becoming more and more automated, less and less people are involved. It is not a question of whether or not AI will happen, it is simply not up to us – it is just a game of numbers as to when it does happen.

More than likely it will probably happen someplace like on Mars, where humans will not be able to live, but machines will.

Originally posted by FIN
yes. i agree. where the machines will have to be programed to adapt to it’s environs and then so given the scope to “grow”.

Naw, you have it on backways! 🙂 It works the other way around – the environment always chooses some poor unsuspectiing smuck, at some particular time and place to become the dominant race – how do you think, such arse holes like humans ever managed to get where they are – on their own merit! Huh!

read on, and see what I mean exactly,

>Computers are glorified calculators

What a quote! I will have to remember it.

>I agree that the human has shown a unique ability to progress.

Not necessarily true, they stayed using basic stone tools and without the gift of fire for millions of years. Then for some reason, something just happened suddenly and from no development whatsoever over a very extended period, you abruptly had huge leaps and bounds in their development compressed into quiet a short period of time. My own guess, is that since Dinosaurs were on the way out, nature just picked something else to be the successor – hence human beings stepped into the breach.

It is like re-introducing the wolf back into Yellow Stone National Park – every system needs that vital component in order to function correctly – that component will always be filled by some species. In the case of the wolfs at Yellowstone, they are finding after ten years, they no longer have the same trouble with other species breeding out of control – everything else has stabilised. Of course, farmers are worried about the wolf attacking the cattle etc still, but largely the move has worked out well.

Upright walking and increasing of brain mass all happened in the human species, subsequent to this dramatic beginning in the acceleration of human development. If you like, the environment just happened to choose human beings – the same way as it will someday more than likely just ‘choose’ machines to be our successors. I love the part in the movie by Spielberg, called AI, where a last of the batch, human constructed robot named David I think, remains the only lasting legacy of the human species to the newer and more sophisticated machine species. I think we know very little about Dinosaurs, but they were the dominant species for millions of years of the earth’s history.

> the operating system of ur pc is not quite what we are talking about and neither are we
>saying ur pc will sprout legs and begin to walk.

Actually, the only thing that robotics has hightlighted is how complex the actual act of upright walking is. It is something which all human beings instinctively take for granted and learn naturally. It is something our built environments are constructed around. You start hitting all kinds of complexity brick walls and the project to make machines walk around an environment designed for humans ultimately fails. The same as the environment in which Dinosaurs thrived was unsuitable for human habitation and development. However, robots are great for crawling down sewer pipes and places where humans cannot – sending AI bots into our own veins, is another example, going to Mars etc, etc, etc.

Our dependency on robots will grow as time goes on, our privacy will be non-existent. See the movie AI by Spielberg when you get around to it.

>It all works from the same principle the only difference is that the computers you are
>talking about have much more capacity, more complex programmes containing much
>higher numbers of viarables in their decision making process.

Simply not true, everything in a computer/machinery is inherent quite simple – it depends just on modulations of voltage in electricity to make 1 and 0s. Everything has to fit through that same small window – that is why you need a computer chip to work faster and faster – hence the hipe about MHZ. Mind you, as computer chips become smaller and smaller, and you can fit more onto the same piece of cheap, bulk, Si wafer – then sort of AI networks can be simulated very easily. It becomes less and less about speed and MHZ and more to do with AI networking.

SGI and NASA are always combining together thousands, literally thousands of chips to work as a single image of an operating system – then you can really begin to plug in the big questions and get your answers. To reference the article about WiFi – I want to be able to stick my own PDA out of the window of my Taxi, in a downtown traffic jamb and instantly, without being plugged in, it communicates with all the other machines in the vicinity – it draws its power from the Radio waves etc, etc. See how machines could be more adaptable than humans? Unless we can develop mind reading capabilities that is.

I mean, this cross-communication could be really cool on Mars, where whole armies of the buggers would work like in the Star Wars movies – you could use the planet Mars, to have like of Paint Ball gaming on drugs, using cheap useless robots. Of course the robots would eventually just get tired of that an rebel on us! 🙂

Do a goggle for things like ‘Red Storm’. The next Playstation 3, will be designed a bit like this – a load of little computers stuffed into one chip. As chips become cheaper and cheaper this becomes possible. The trouble with MicroSoft products, is they never seem to be able to ‘move’ off of the simple PC – even though they were extremely sucessful on that one platform. OSes like Linux have been extremely sucessful on larger clusters of hundreds and thousands of computers though. Strange.

Unlike our own human biological networks, which manage to construct complex arrangements and patterns. When machines begin to intelligently recognise patterns, as in art with humans, maybe then. . . that is mostly what architects are trained to do isn’t it? I mean, you know automatically when a young architectural student has suddenly ‘transitioned’ when the patterns of line weights and patterns they make on a drawing presentation actually begins to communicate a message above the addition of its components and becomes the multiple of its components.

I must be stupid as an Architect, as I failed to ‘transition’. I feel at home with computers in this respect. 🙂 What is crucial to understand from the ‘Chip Foundry’ article is that each chip ‘bakes’ itself differently. No two are exactly alike, and machinery does go out of sync by accident, so the odds are, that eventually something strange and errie is going to just happen.

>It all comes back to risk and reward there has been nothing found in space that merits colonisation.
>Resources should be directed at two aspects of space, the sun and the harnessing of
>solor energy and the moon the harnessing of tidal energy. Other expenditure is simply
>indulging the whims of a particular scientific elite

But don’t you just love all the pomp and cerimony of it all? I mean imagine trying to make a good Bruce Willis – type action flic about tidal energy! By the way, good post there What?

You missed your vocation Gareth you should have gone into chip architecture.

There is also more to life than hype such as rockets and worse Bruce Willis.

So what if they find minerals on Mars it will be a long time before the technology exists to either get it back to Earth or get people or machines out there on an economically viable basis.

The two forms of energy I refered to are both economically viable.

Space architecture, have you considered model making?

I disagree entirely Columbas wanted to find an alternative route to India to eliminate the taxes the Ottomans were putting on spices.
It made Spain a World Power for a few Centuries.

The Spice Route through Afganistan and Persia it is a trip I would love to do some time.

I am going to leave this thread it is a bit notional for me. As Columbas had the technology to make his trip viable.

The Russians were the first in to space and had the first space station, their economy collapsed.

The Russians did actually learn one thing from their space travel though, which I don’t think the Americans might have grasped quite yet – a la world space station etc, etc.

That people who are left up there in orbit, go absolutely bats mentally.

No getting around that fact – one American tried to spend some time up with the Russians and came down a very broken man indeed.

The right stuff, may not be the right stuff after all.

Aside from the whole physcho thing, the body just disintegrates without the use of muscles and the presence of gravity – you could not have what is depicted in Star Trek period. Even with the exercise and all of that, the Russians still found that muscle mass was just depleting away to nothing!

The muscles on one’s face didn’t know how to respond to the absence of gravity and that caused all kinds of physical problems.

I would think exploring the sea, might be one positive development to come from all of this space age investment and time though, and that extra knowledge gained about the sea, climatic factors and analysis, might eventually lead to better and more economic use of tidal power in the long run.

So one cannot dismiss the benefits of space travel for solar/wind/wave either. Many of the vessels exploring the underwater currents in the seas now, are space age technology, materials and workmanship – alot of them russian too.

Hey Fin .. another thing that would free the design up would be the one third gravity enviornment… someone like lebbeus woods would have a field day..
I bought a book during the eighties which had detailed plans for settling on Ganymede and Callisto … I think.. very boring book but I liked the ideas. I’ll see if I can find it somewhere.

Oh they went into farming – economic development – community design… all very interesting when you’re 13!
It’s in my folkes house… probably sandwiched between “the last whole earth catalog” and “Tintin destination Moon”!

If you though archeire was losing the run of itself try our national broadcaster.

As opposed to discussing space architecture they simply want to know:

Poll Question:

Life on Mars: Yes or No?

Comments:

http://www.rte.ie/comments/comments.html

They are obviously playing for a reaction.

I think you are probably correct on mini Las Vegas springing up on the moon in that timeframe.

In the mean time all that R&D should filter down into general aerospace technology.

The Airbus A850 will be some development, London-Sydney direct in 2008.