Luke Maurits

A few months ago I happened to catch an interesting documentary on television.  I don’t remember what it was called, but it was narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson and the focus of the show as the question: if the universe is so chock-full of intelligent life, as most scientists believe it ought to be, how come we have completely failed to detect any evidence of it, despite 25 years or so (the SETI Institute was started in 1984) of concerted effort to do so? (this situation sometimes referred to as the Fermi Paradox, although I don’t recall the show using that term)

The show was largely structured around the well known Drake equation, which tries to estimate the number of intelligent civilisations within the Milky Way galaxy, other than our own, which we should in principle be able to make contact with.  It does this by multiplying together estimates of a bunch of relevant terms, namely:

• the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy,
• the fraction of those stars that have planets,
• the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets,
• the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point,
• the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life,
• the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space,
• the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

The format of the show was basically to explore the most interesting of these concepts and what we know about them – for instance, how we’re starting to get pretty good at discovering exoplanets, planets outside our solar system, which helps give us an idea of how many stars have planets and what those planets are like, at least in terms of very high level features like size and distance from their sun.  What I found most interesting was the discussion of the 5th term in the Drake equation, which deals with the fraction of planets bearing life where that life eventually evolves to be intelligent.

The show’s discussion of this term was mostly centred around the fact that for intelligence to evolve from unintelligent life takes quite a lot of time, and this time may not always be available.  All kinds of events, ranging from asteroid impacts to strong tectonic activity, can very easily completely or almost completely wipe life off a planet (Earth itself has had 5 major extinction events so far, and some would argue, not unconvincingly, that it is currently going through a 6th, in the form of humans wiping out species at an alarming rate), and if these average duration between these events is shorter than the average time it takes unintelligent life to evolve intelligence, then that suggests that the jump from life to intelligent life will be very rare indeed.

There’s nothing wrong with the above analysis, of course: sufficiently frequent extinction events are both a reality (I recently finished reading reading Bill Bryson’s “A Brief History of Nearly Everything“, which was quite an eye-opener on just how inhospitable Earth is to life on long enough timescales) and a real obstacle to the evolution of intelligence.  But underlying all of the discussion on the show seemed to be an implicit assumption that this was all that was standing in the way: that if there was some particularly lucky life-bearing planet out there which was somehow shielded from asteroids and solar flares and supernovas, and had relatively stable, benign weather and tectonic activity, and basically was left completely unmolested by forces of great destruction, then it would be a matter of certainty that, eventually, intelligence would evolve.  To be fair, I don’t know if the producers of the show or Neil himself believe this, but certainly the show did nothing to explicitly dismiss this notion.

The problem with this is that it’s completely wrong, and yet it is surprisingly often overlooked.  I wouldn’t have noticed this oversight myself if I hadn’t previously read either Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” or his “How the Mind Works” (I forget which it was), which talks about this misconception in considerable detail (I can’t remember whether or not it was in the context of the Drake equation).  Although it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it is, evolution is of course absolutely not some kind of driven, inevitable progression from simple to complex organisms.  It’s about adaption to an environment so as to maximise reproductive success, and unless there is an unintelligent organism somewhere in an environment with the following conditions satisfied:

• intelligence is evolutionarily accessible to the organism (i.e. it already has necessary prerequisites, like a sufficiently complex nervous system, for a few mutations to lead to some kind of intelligence),
• evolving intelligence will give it the organism a significant reproductive advantage over its unintelligent companions,
• and there are no other evolutionary pathways open to the organism which will yield a better ratio of reproductive advantage to “cost” (in terms of energy requirements, etc.) than intelligence,

then intelligence isn’t going to just turn up for the sake of carrying life higher and further.  Those organisms will remain unintelligent, possibly extremely successfully, possibly for an extremely long time, until the next extinction event wipes them out.  Intelligence is not inevitable given sufficiently long time.  It needs a good reason to emerge.

The problem that this situation poses for accurately estimating the 5th term of the Drake equation is that we actually have no idea why humans evolved intelligence.  There are plenty of plausible hypotheses out there, but nothing for certain, and I don’t think there is likely to be anything certain in the near future, given that we know extremely little about the lives of early humans and their ancestors (something else, incidentally, which Bill Bryson’s book gives a good accessible account of) and that we really know extremely little about intelligence (to the extent that there isn’t even a universally agreed upon, objective definition of what intelligence even is).  If we have no idea how we became intelligent, we’re not really in a position to speculate reliably about how likely other organisms are to become intelligent, given the chance.  The 5th term of the Drake equation could, in fact, be arbitrarily close to zero: close enough to zero to completely counteract all the terms in the equation which are very probably quite large.

Of course, it’s by no means a new criticism of the usefulness of the Drake equation to point out that the uncertainty surrounding our best estimates of each of its terms is so great that the final answer can vary by orders of magnitude, and even reach zero.  However, as far as I know, the term relating to the likelihood of the evolution of intelligence is the only one which currently has no reasonable lower bound: you can push it as close to zero as you like and not really reach a point where you can compellingly say “come on, surely it has to be higher than that“.  Which means that no new discovery suggesting that one of the other terms is actually incredibly huge will be sufficient to guarantee a result of more than one.  Which means, somewhat sadly, that perhaps we are much closer to being alone than a lot of people, myself included, have always thought.

On a related note, I recently read this BBC article, which discusses the opinion of one SETI astronomer that we should stop structuring the search for alien intelligence exclusively around the assumption that said intelligence will be biological in nature (which is an implicit assumption – and not the only one – of the Drake equation’s structure) and instead start to consider the possibility that a lot of that intelligence will – in its own version of our own transhumanism movement – have become non-biological in nature; that we should be looking for civilisations of intelligent machines, which are likely to hang out in very different places to intelligent meatbags.  I think this is a fairly persuasive argument.  Eliminating the problem of the mind-blowing slowness of interstellar travel (which is essentially a necessity for a civilisation to be truly long lasting) by figuring out how to transplant our consciousness into machines is probably considerably easier than the alternative of getting around the slowness directly with some sort of sci-fi-esque wormhole stuff.  At the very least, a lot of people who are experts in the relevant field believe that the former may be possible in principle, whereas, as far as I know, the latter is purely speculative.

Someone recently posted this incredibly detailed history and analysis of Pac-Man to Reddit: I was surprised and embarrassed to have some of my ideas about early gaming history challenged.  I had no idea that Pac-Man and Space Invaders were both Japanese creations!  I had always assumed that these games were American, and that Japan didn’t really become a major player in the video game world until later on.  Apparently instead they were leading the way from the get go!

I’ve decided to undertake the project of building myself a Remotely Operated Vehicle, or ROV.  Despite sounding quite general, the term ROV appears to be applied exclusively to remotely operated underwater vehicles – basically, robot submarines – rather than just any kind of vehicle which is remotely operated.  ”Real” ROVs, like the Seaeye Falcon, pictured below

are capable of diving hundreds of metres under the surface of the ocean and find a wide range of applications in both the commercial world (underwater oil drilling operations being a topical example) and the scientific research community.  They’re fairly pricey too, with even the most basic models – which basically consist of a camera and some light – costing tens of thousands of dollars.  However, a surprisingly large number of hobbyists have managed to build capable “hobby ROVs” for only a few hundred dollars, such as the Seafox, pictured below:

The precise designs of these hobby ROVs varies somewhat, but there are a few things that they all seem to have in common, which contribute to their simple construction and low cost:

• They use standard PVC pipe and fittings as their main structural components
• They use small 12V DC electric boat bilge pump as their main means of propulsion
• They use common, non-waterproof devices like webcams mounted in watertight containers for the onboard electronics

I’ve done some fairly thorough scouring of the web for resources on how to build these things.  As near as I can tell, the hobby ROV movement began, or at the very least was widely popularised by the book “Build Your Own Underwater Robot And Other Wet Projects“, which includes complete designs for two PVC ROVs, the Seaperch and the Seafox (pictured above).  The book is fairly cheap, but there is so much information about these kinds of vehicles online now that you probably don’t need to buy one unless you’re unfamiliar with basic electronics, like using relays – I don’t plan to buy the book unless I run into trouble.  Far and away the best online resource for building hobby ROVs seems to be the Homebuilt ROVs page by Stephen Thone, who has built a number of ROVs, most of them of his own design.  The image of the Seafox above is of the Seafox he built.  Some other decent resources are:

• Hobby Submarines (featuring a slightly modified Seafox)
• Underwater ROV at instructables.com
• How to build an underwater robot, at eHow (the ROV shown here is named “Bob”)

There’s also a Yahoo Group called Robotrov which seems highly regarded in the hobby ROV community, but I haven’t checked it out yet (I’m not partial to Yahoo Groups).

In some ways this is a bit of an odd project for me to undertake, in that I’m not much of a water person.  I’m not afraid of water by any means, but I’m not really into fishing, boating, swimming, diving, etc. like a lot of people who build these things seem to be.  However, while most of my projects are software-based, I have always enjoyed making “real things”, and for a long time I’ve wanted a project I could use to deepen my understanding of electronics (which was probably my first serious hobby when I was a young kid, before I had access to the internet or even computers).  In particular I’ve always wanted to have an excuse to buy and learn to use something like the very popular Arduino boards, but nothing has really grabbed me yet.  ROVs seem like a great candidate for such a project, though, in that they don’t require a lot of space or tooling to construct (I don’t currently have regular access to a large shed or any tools, I don’t know how to weld, etc.), they don’t need to be precisely built (unlike, say, UAVs, which would otherwise be an awesome hobby and for many people are), none of their components require special training or licenses (unlike model rockets), there aren’t any issues with government regulations (unlike the high-altitude balloon projects which are currently extremely popular), and it seems unlikely that simple mistakes could result in catastrophic failures: most ROVs are designed to be slightly positively buoyant, so that a broken tether or flat batteries means the ROV will slowly rise back to the surface of the water, rather than sink to the bottom.

I’ve decided to build a very simple ROV first to get my feet wet (figuratively and literally!), probably just something with the bare minimum number of thrusters to get around, a camera and some lights, before moving onto something more complex.  Rather than strictly following the Seafox design like lots of other people do, I’ve decided to use the “Bob” ROV as a starting point, because its frame/shape strikes me as more efficient than the Seafox, which is really rather chunky.  So today I headed to my local hardware store and bought a bunch of 15 mm PVC pipe and fittings to use for the main frame of the ROV and some 90 mm PVC pipe to use for buoyancy pods, as well as other associated stuff like PVC cement, a hacksaw, sandpaper, some cable ties, etc.  I’ll try my best to make regular posts about the construction process.

After testing the water with a really simple ROV I might have a go at designing something more complicated, from scratch.  I’m particularly interested in building a complex navigation system: GPS doesn’t work under water, since EM radiation at the appropriate frequency only penetrates water a few centimeters deep.  This means ROVs need to rely on things like digital compasses, accelerometers, gyroscopes, sonar and laser rangers to find their way around underwater – lots of fun stuff and plenty of opportunities for learning.