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| ROBOT EXPLORER - Qualifying as intelligent life? It's hard to imagine at this early stage, that a bucket of bolts and hardware, with some electrical parts thrown in for good measure, can become an intelligent life form, but this is exactly what will happen over the next several months. How long does it take to create a new life form? It doesn't take place overnight. Like the birthing process of humans, several months are required to cook up the ingredients (parts assembly) and then educate (program) the new being. This new brain may be trimmed with over 16,000 processors, controlling hundreds and thousands of functions. SPACE - THE NEEDED FRONTIER: Run out of desk space? There's a desk next to the desk shown in the above photo, and a desk above it. So it's desk X3, yet the space is already filled and overflowing. It's the Lab's special way of gaining more work area from the same amount of space within a finite room. |
CREATING INTELLIGENT LIFE
"We're not only looking for intelligent life in the Universe, we're also creating life and sending it out into the Universe."
CREATING NEW LIFE
Creating new life forms is nothing new for the Lab. Work began in 2002 for developing a powerful new humanoid brain. This led to a life form with limited cognizance. When the Lab's first humanoid was created in 1955, it became the robot model that led ultimately to new life form experiments in the 1980s. Although these award winning robots had intelligence, they were nothing like their new counterparts after the year 2000.
LIFE EXPERIMENTS
Experiments with neural nets and new ways to enhance processor chips (Supertronic) paved the way for a more intelligent brain. Eventually, in 2013, these brains found their way into the Robot Explorer (RE), an intelligence planned for trips to the outer fringes of the Solar System, and potentially beyond. Intelligence, neural net, and life will be instilled into RE step by step.
TEN POINTS OF DEFINING LIFE
What constitutes an intelligent life form? Some precursor things to think about are 1) ability to make decisions, 2) self preservation, 3) the attainment and/or reaching toward goals and objectives, 4) autonomous behavior, 5) ability to learn, 6) ability to communicate, 7) ability to sleep and regenerate, 8) mobility, 9) self aware, and 10) ability to memorize and recall memory. In the past, it was believed that intelligent life forms needed the ability to procreate, however, we clearly know today that people who are sterile are still very much alive and qualify as life forms.
SENDING LIFE INTO THE UNIVERSE
Thus far, we've sent various intelligent life forms into space: insectronauts into Micro Space, Robots and humans into Next Space, and human astronauts into Near Space. As the distance from Earth increases, more dependence will be placed on machines that have life and can make their own decisions to explore other worlds and places in space and time.
