Britain seeks to join European satellite project

 

by Clive Simpson, Belfast

 

THE UK is seeking to join Portugal and Spain as a member of the Atlantic Constellation, a flagship global project of small satellites for Earth, ocean and climate monitoring.

Through an agreement procured by the UK Space Agency (UKSA), the country will build a new £6 million pathfinder satellite, designed and built by UK-based company Open Cosmos, that could become part of the constellation.

Announced on the opening day of the UK Space Conference in Belfast, the satellite is aimed at strengthening UK capabilities in Earth observation technology.

It will also compliment UK Earth observation (EO) contributions to the EU Copernicus programme, ESA projects and bilateral missions.

Clarifying the Belfast announcement a spokesman for UKSA said it had signed an agreement with Open Cosmos to build and launch a mission that "matches the requirements" of the Atlantic Constellation. "We are in talks with Portugal and Spain regarding a formal joining of the Atlantic Constellation governance mechanism," he added.

Rebecca Evernden, Director of Space with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, told conference delegates in the opening plenary that the UK had also increased its involvement in Copernicus, which had previously been uncertain following Brexit.

The new pathfinder satellite, of the same design and to be launched in the same orbital plane as three others from Portugal​, is being co-funded by Open Cosmos, which is based on the Harwell Space Campus in Oxfordshire.

Rafael Jorda Siquier, Chief Executive of Open Cosmos, said: “The UK joining Portugal and Spain in the Atlantic Constellation is a major step forward in our national EO strategy. Building a shared satellite constellation is a very effective way of having high revisit diverse data over each region of interest.“

New UK space minister Andrew Griffith, appointed as Minister of State at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology after prime minister Rishi Sunak’s government reshuffle the previous week, was not among the 1500 attendees at the three-day Belfast conference.

Chi Onwurah, the opposition Labour party’s Shadow Minister for Science, Research & Innovation, was scheduled to visit the conference on its final day.

In a statement issued by the UKSA, Griffith said: “Earth observation will play an absolutely vital role in tackling global challenges like climate change and disaster relief, providing the data we need at speed, while supporting key UK industries like agriculture and energy.

“By working with Open Cosmos on a new satellite and supporting our Atlantic partnerswe can harness space tech for our shared goals, while creating new skills opportunities and jobs for the future to grow the UK economy.”

If a deal is reached with Portugal and Spain the UK’s pathfinder satellite will help increase the frequency of revisit time in the constellation’s first orbital plane by a third, meaning more frequent observations can be made of the same point on Earth.

Key applications will include disaster relief action, early detection of climate change indicators, increasing agricultural productivity and improving energy use.

Spain and Portugal announced their agreement to develop a constellation of Earth observation satellites in November 2022. The baseline Atlantic Constellation, costing EUR 60 million, will consist of 16 microsatellites and be able to provide data about any place on Earth every three hours.

The UK is among four other countries (South Africa, Mexico, Brazil and Norway) to have expressed an interest in joining the programme as a partner. 

Having more countries involved will allow an increase in the data rate up to the point where satellite information is available every hour, improving the performance of the system without incurring a higher cost for the main participating states.

Chief Executive of the UKSA, Dr Paul Bate, said: “There’s no better way to open the UK Space Conference than by backing a new Earth observation programme.

“Space has been shaping our lives for decades but is set to become increasingly critical as we take the necessary steps to protect our planet, drive prosperity and push the boundaries of human knowledge.

“We are focused on catalysing investment, delivering new missions and capabilities in areas such as Earth observation and the low-Earth orbit economy, and championing the opportunities that our growing space sector brings to people and businesses up and down the country.”

The Atlantic Constellation is a concept for a cooperative constellation of Earth observation (EO) satellites, joining several private and public actors for a common effort to tackle a new EO data policy for territory monitoring and therefore the dynamics of climate changing.

The approach for this initiative was originated by Portugal in 2020 through two parallel studies that ESA carried out upon request of the Portuguese Space Agency (PSA). The initiative aims at developing a business-driven constellation of satellites, carried out in international cooperation, that responds to the needs of many coastal regions.

Since its inception, the goal is for the initiative to be a shared effort between different regions that face similar challenges, where each partner contributes with a reduced number of satellites while benefiting from the data of a broader constellation.

Spain was the first country to join Portugal in the Atlantic Constellation initiative. In 2021, the two countries decided to use EU Recovery and Resilience funds to develop a series of Earth Observation satellites. In Portugal, eight high-resolution satellites are being developed as part of the New Space Portugal Agenda, led by Geosat.

This initiative will provide valuable data for many end users, ranging from aquaculture, land use, or agriculture, but it will also allow the Portuguese industrial ecosystem to acquire know-how on developing and operating end-to-end space systems. On the other hand, Spain will develop eight additional satellites, a development that the European Space Agency will oversee.

Joan Alabart, Industrial Relations and Projects Officer of PSA, said: “The Atlantic Constellation is open to other countries and the UK has manifested its interest to contribute. And the terms of participation are currently being prepared. Other countries have also expressed interest in joining the initiative, which will be announced in due course.”

Portugal is also developing in parallel a series of complementary constellations for VDES, SAR and Very High-Resolution imagery that are expected to be operational by 2026, and these constellations will complement the national effort in the Atlantic Constellation to use all kind of data to foster the development of new satellite based EO data applications.

 

Empire of darkness

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak called for honesty and openness ahead of this week’s AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park for global politicians, tech executives and experts. But warm words and loose promises may not be enough to stem the AI tsunami.

by Clive Simpson

Several days prior to the attack on Israel by Hamas, the renown Israeli author, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari was in Azerbaijan, its own territorial dispute with Armenia having flared up only a week earlier, to give a keynote address at the opening ceremony of the 74th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Baku.

For this annual global gathering of world-leading space scientists, rocket engineers and space graduates, all with their futuristic eyes firmly set on the heavens above, his evocative and challenging words brought them crashing down to Earth.

“Soon the era of human domination of this planet might come to an end,” he warned, laying out the stark reality of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and the inherent dangers it presents to humanity. His talk drew rapturous applause from delegates crammed into the 3,000-capacity auditorium.

Despite suggesting that AI has the potential to help humanity, Harari, most famous for his international best-selling book ‘Sapiens’, expressed serious concerns about its precipitant threat to the very life that brought it into being.

Era of human domination

“For tens of thousands of years humans have dominated Earth but if we could go forward in time 700 years, or even just 50 years, we are likely to find a planet dominated by an alien intelligence.

 

We have already met this alien intelligence here on Earth and, within a few decades, it might take over our planet.” 

 

Harari said wasn’t referring to an alien invasion from outer space but “an alien intelligence created by us” in our own Earth-bound laboratories over just the last few decades.

 

“AI is an alien intelligence,” he asserted. “It processes information, makes decisions and creates entirely new ideas in a radically alien way. 

 

“Today, it already surpasses us in many tasks, from playing chess to diagnosing some kinds of cancer, and it may soon surpass us in many more. The AI we are familiar with today is still at a very, very early stage of its evolution.” 

 

He described AI as being still at its “amoeba stage” but unlike human evolution over billions of years it wouldn’t evolve at such a slow pace.

 

“Digital evolution is millions of times faster than organic evolution. The AI amoebas of today may take just a couple of decades to get to T-Rex stage.” If Chat GPT is an amoeba, what do you think an AI T-Rex would look like, he asked?

 

Space exploration

Harari believes that AI has great potential to help humanity, not only by exploring other planets free of stringent life support constraints but also protecting the eco-system of Earth, providing us with much better health care and raising standards of living “beyond our wildest expectations”.

 

But in parallel he issued a stark warning that it would bring with it many new dangers.

 

“AI is likely to de-stabilise the global job market and the global economy. Algorithms might enshrine and worsen existing biases like racism, misogyny and homophobia. Bots that spread outrage and fake news threaten to destroy trust between people, and thereby destroy the foundations of democracy,” he said.

 

“Dictatorships too should be afraid of AI, for they work by silencing and terrorising anyone who might speak or act against them. It isn’t easy, however, to silence and terrorise AI. What would a 21st century Stalin do to a dissenting Bot? Send it to Bot Gulag?” 

 

Existential threats

As well as significant societal challenges, Harari believes AI poses a series of existential threats to the very survival of the human species.

 

“Is it wise to create entities more powerful than us, that might escape our control?

 

“The problem isn’t that AI might be malevolent, the problem is that AI might be so much more competent than us that it will increasingly dominate the economy, culture and politics, while we humans lose the ability to understand what is happening in the world and to make decisions about our future.” 

 

AI might destroy humanity not through hate and fear but because it doesn’t care, just as humans have driven numerous other species to extinction by carelessly changing and destroying their habitats.

 

“Maybe AI will push humanity to extinction and then spread itself through the Milky Way galaxy and beyond? Homo-sapiens will then be remembered in the annals of the universe simply as the short-lived connecting link that shifted the evolution of intelligence from the organic to the inorganic realm.

 

"Some people may view this as a noble achievement, but I personally have a deep fear of this scenario. I believe that what really matters in life is not intelligence, but consciousness.”

 

Intelligence versus consciousness

Harari said intelligence should not be confused with consciousness. “Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, like winning at chess or curing cancer,” Harari explained.

 

“Consciousness is the ability to feel things like pain and pleasure, love and hate. In humans and also in other mammals and birds intelligence goes hand-in-hand with consciousness.

 

“We rely on our feelings to solve problems but computers possess an alien intelligence that so far has no link to consciousness.”

 

Despite an immense advance in computer intelligence over the past half century, he acknowledged there has been exactly “zero advance” in computer consciousness with no indication that computers are anywhere on the road to developing consciousness. 

“Just as spaceships, without ever developing feathers, fly much further than birds, so computers may come to solve problems, much, much better than human beings without ever developing feelings,” he said. 

“If human consciousness goes extinct and our planet falls under the dominion of super intelligent but entirely non-conscious entities that would be an extremely sad and dark end to the story of life. It would be an empire of total darkness.” 

How can we avoid this dark fate and deal with the numerous challenges posed by AI? The good news is that while AI is nowhere near its full potential, the same is true of humans too.

 

Positive potential

In terms of regulation, Harari suggested that humanity first needed to focus its attention on this existential threat of AI.

“We humans need to stop fighting among ourselves and cooperate on our shared interests. Unfortunately, in too many countries, like in my own country of Israel and elsewhere, people are not focused on our shared human interests, but rather on fighting with the neighbours about a few hills. What good would it do to win these hills if humanity loses the whole planet?”

Even if humans across the world cooperate He described the task of regulating AI as a difficult and delicate one.

“Given the pace at which AI is developing it is impossible to anticipate and regulate in advance all the potential hazards, therefore regulations should be based less on creating a body of rigid rules and more on establishing living regulatory executions that can quickly identify and respond to problems as they arise,” he said. 

 “To function well the institutions should also be answerable to the public and should stay in close contact with the human communities all over the world that are affected and impacted by AI.”

Mistakes happen

Harari believes regulatory institutions will need one more crucial asset - strong self-correcting mechanisms - if we are to prevent an AI catastrophe.

“In this era of AI the greatest danger to humanity comes from a false belief in infallibility. But even the wisest people make mistakes and AI is not infallible either,” he said.

“If we put all our trust in some allegedly infallible AI, in some allegedly infallible human being or in some allegedly infallible institution, the result could be the extinction of our species.

“In the past humans have made some terrible mistakes, like building totalitarian regimes, creating exploitative empires and waging world wars. 

“Nevertheless, we survived because previously we didn’t have to deal with the technology that can annihilate us. Hitler and Stalin killed millions but they couldn’t destroy humanity itself, so humanity got a second chance to learn from its catastrophic mistakes and experiments.” 

But Harari warned that AI is very different. “If we make a big mistake with AI we may never get a second chance to learn from it. We should not allow any single person, corporation or country to take a gamble on the fate of our entire species and perhaps on the fate of all earthly life forms,” he said. 

“As far as we know today, terrestrial animals maybe the only conscious entities in the entire galaxy or perhaps in the entire universe. There might be other conscious beings out there somewhere, but at least to the best of my knowledge we haven’t met any of them, so we cannot be sure.

“We have now created a non-conscious but very powerful alien intelligence here on Earth. If we mishandle this, AI might extinguish not just the human dominion over this planet but the light of consciousness itself, turning the universe into a realm of utter darkness. It is the responsibility of all of us to prevent this.”

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The 74th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), in Baku, Azerbaijan, held between 2 and 6 October 2023, was organised by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) in conjunction with Azercosmos (the Space Agency of the Republic of Azerbaijan) under the theme ‘Challenges and Opportunities: Give Space a Chance’. In 2024 the IAC will be held in Milan, Italy.

A shorter version of this article was published by Central Bylines on 5 November 2023.

Politicians dither as climate crisis builds

 

GLOBAL heating appears to have entered a new and fast-moving trajectory. Amid record-breaking temperatures, melting ice and a sharp increase in North Atlantic sea surface temperatures during the month of July, veteran climate scientists are now becoming increasingly alarmed about the pace of change.

“A few decades ago some people might have thought climate change was a relatively slow-moving phenomenon but we are now witnessing things happening at a terrifying rate,” said Prof Peter Stott, leader of the UK Met Office’s climate monitoring and attribution team.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has also warned of record temperatures and extreme heat in the near future after confirming the latest climate-heating El Niño event had “arrived”.

The last major El Niño was in 2016 – which to date remains the hottest year on record. But for 2023, it comes on top of increasing global heat driven by human-caused carbon emissions, an effect described by the WMO as a “double whammy”. Its officials say urgent preparations for extreme weather events are now vital to save lives and livelihoods.

“As El Niño builds through the rest of this year, adding an extra oomph to the damaging effects of human-induced global heating, many millions of people across the planet and many diverse ecosystems are going to face extraordinary challenges – and unfortunately suffer great damage,” added Stott.

The WMO estimates there is now a 90 percent probability of the latest El Niño continuing to the end of 2023 at a moderate strength or higher, with the added risk of it supercharging extreme weather.

New records for high temperature have been broken almost daily on every continent in recent months whilst in the UK, the average temperature for June was beaten by nearly a full degree with an unprecedented heatwave also affecting the country’s coastal waters.

Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, admits that he doesn’t fully understand what’s going on with this summer’s crazy climate data.

“It feels to me like the climate may have shifted into some sort of new regime of global heating that scientists don’t yet understand. And yet the media and everyone keep acting like things are basically fine and leaders keep expanding fossil fuels,” he says.

Cambridge University’s Prof Emily Shuckburgh, a leading climate scientist and director of Cambridge Zero, says that after the UK’s record-breaking month of high temperatures, it looks likely the rest of the summer will be warmer than normal too as global temperatures continue to rise.

“We’ve been warning of these changes for 30 years and warning that the planet is overheating,” she told listeners on BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme (3 July 2023).

“We’ve got record melting in Greenland occurring right at this moment, we’ve got record low levels of sea ice in Antarctica. From pole to pole we are seeing dramatic changes and it is nature as well as humans that is witnessing the impact.

“Those extreme temperatures of 40 degrees that we saw in the UK last summer had a dramatic impact on our wildlife and a dramatic impact on us. Across Europe thousands of people died prematurely in that heatwave.

“Sadly the UK used to be a global leader in terms of climate change and it was only two years ago that we hosted the big international climate conference COP-26. We’ve now relinquished that leadership.”

Prof Shuckburgh says the recent progress report from the UK Government’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) on how the UK is doing against its own decarbonisation plans was “covered with red” because goals and targets were not being met.

“We should be responding to the cost of living and energy crisis by investing in insulation, in solar, in wind, offshore and onshore,” she suggested.

Prof Shuckburgh urged people to accept the global scale of what is at risk. “We know that if we don’t respond to climate change as a country and as a world then the risks are enormous,” she said.

“They are potentially catastrophic in terms of our food supplies, the global spread of disease, the risk from migration by communities that have been impacted by climate change, the risk of conflicts and, most importantly of all, the risk of passing catastrophic tipping points.

“This is what’s at stake. The really frustrating thing from my perspective is that we know what the solutions are. We have them at our fingertips and what we need are stable policies in support of them.”

Such stark warnings are echoed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, who also described addressing climate change as a “human rights” issue.

Evoking a “dystopian future” if urgent action isn’t taken, he said: “Our environment is burning. It’s melting. It’s flooding. It’s depleting. It’s drying. It’s dying. We, the generation with the most powerful technological tools in history, have the capacity to change it.”

He accused world leaders of performing “the choreography of promising to act” before getting stuck in a rut dominated by short-term political expediency. Turk called for an immediate end to “senseless subsidies” of the fossil fuel industry and said the Dubai COP28 (2023 UN Climate Change Conference) climate summit in November and December needs to be a “decisive game-changer”.

At the end of June, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was accused by a resigning government minister and environment campaigner, Zac Goldsmith, of being “simply uninterested” in the environment and climate emergency.

Lame political leadership – mirrored by many of those in power and supported by the fossil fuel industry and elements of the right-wing media – along with a cost-of-living crisis and war in Ukraine, have all contributed to a prevailing laissez faire attitude.

At the start of 2023, when Sunak introduced his five key policy pledges, the climate and environment were noticeable by their absence, a clear indication that the country’s third prime minister in as many years does not view them as a priority.

Nothing has changed and, despite mounting climate relasted emergencies around the world this summer, Sunak, who favours flying about the country on short-haul private jets and helicopters, also shunned a recent Paris summit on the climate, debt and poverty hosted by the French President Emmanuel Macron.

If there can be a final thought and persepctive (for now) on this challenging issue then perhaps, somewhat surprisingly, it might go to the actor William Shatner.

As Captain James T Kirk of Star Trek’s Enterprise spaceship he explored the universe, espousing a vision of the future where humanity had not only survived but overcome many of the Earthly problems we face today.

Last year, 90-year-old Shatner had what he described as a “life-changing experience” when he physically travelled into space for the first time, expecting to experience “a deep connection with the immensity around us” and “a deep call” for endless exploration.

“The strongest feeling I had, that dominated everything else by far, was the deepest grief I have ever experienced. I understood, in the clearest possible way, that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death,” he said.

“I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

“This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realised that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside.

“I did my share in popularising the idea that space was the final frontier. But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is and will stay our only home. It is the final and only frontier, and we have been ravaging it relentlessly, destroying it at an unprecedented rate and making it uninhabitable.” 

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This article by Clive Simpson was first published by Central Bylines under the title, 'Politicians drag their heels as the climate crisis intensifies'.