Building an Interstellar Philosophy (www.centauri-dreams.org)

Harvard scientist Robin Wordsworth’s essay, discussed in NOĒMA, argues that the future of space exploration will be a hybrid: highly autonomous machines will blaze trails, extract local resources, build habitats and refine the know‑how needed to eventually support human-tended biospheres. He contrasts the prohibitive technical and economic realities of sending many humans (e.g., ISS’s ~$150B cost, limited internal volume versus per-person ecological footprints of 3–10 hectares) with the far lower barrier for robotic missions. Wordsworth envisions an incremental pathway: closed‑loop habitats grown or manufactured from in‑situ materials, progressively more life‑supporting ecosystems, and machine-led infrastructure that makes long‑term human presence feasible within the Solar System and, someday, beyond. For the AI/ML community this raises clear technical and ethical targets: durable long‑duration autonomy, on‑device scientific discovery and data return, self‑assembly/regeneration, and eventual self‑replication (theoretical “von Neumann” capabilities far beyond today’s rovers). It also pushes questions about alignment, interpretability, and trust when payloads are our “descendants” — non‑biological agents that may require humanlike affordances to secure empathy and stewardship. Equally important are philosophical stakes: if artificial minds participate in, or even lead, interstellar expansion, researchers must confront agency, rights, and co‑evolutionary design choices as core parts of building spaceworthy AI.