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.”

*         *         *

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.