Robot Avatars

Thank you so much, Chris. It's it's long. It's long, but we're so we're not gonna read the whole thing, but I'll give you the gist of what Chris was talking about. Chris was talking about the sort of the the combination of multiple disciplines to allow us to explore the universe ultimately with robots that would give us a telepresence in wherever those robots could go, so that we

could kind of experience that ourselves. So we're talking about a combination of different factors advances in robotics where the robots, particularly humanoid robots, would be able to go around and explore things, the ability to send those signals back to us using a user interface that's similar to virtual reality or augmented reality headsets, and the ability for us to control those robots in real time or as close to real time as possible, so that we can experience what

it's like being on these remote places, including places across the galaxy, right right, This is like a step above rovers and into full on robotic avatars. Yes, So we wanted to talk about the possibility of that and some of the challenges that we face in order to get to a point where we could have robotic avatars. And in some ways we're really close, and in other ways, for some applications there's some problems that may in fact

be insurmountable. Yeah, well, we may be coming up against problems that we often encounter when trying to uh interface between technology and our brains. Yeah, exactly. But we've talked about this on the show before, but maybe we should just do a real quick refresher on why it is you'd want to have robots in space exploration as opposed to human astronauts, right right, and why you would want

to have a robot, you know, avatar in the first place. Now, there are some reasons why you would want one just here on Earth. And one of the great stories will be covering later is looking into research of using robotic avatar for people who are otherwise incapable of moving right. It gives them the ability to have a robotic body do things on their behalf, and they can control it in various ways. So that's one reason, but the other one being for space exploration or other means. Here on Earth.

Robots can go places we can't. Yeah, we've got these delicate, squishy human bodies that don't breathe the vacuum of space. And you, Yeah, cold, really super cold temperatures kind of mess with us. Radiation is bad. Super hot temperatures mess with us. We're just not that great. Yeah, organic matter, organic matter has limitations, and some of those are limitations that mechanical or electro mechanical or synthetic materials either do

not experience or experience to a lesser degree. Well, yeah, there there are a couple ways you want to look at this. One of them is simply that it can't like a robot can do things a human couldn't do. It can actually accomplish a mission that we would not be able to complete. The other thing is that we don't have to value robots as much like it's okay to send a robot on a suicide mission. You don't

have to feel bad about it. Right, It may end up being a large financial obligation, but still that's very different than putting a human life in danger. Sure. Sure, and you know, sentencing someone to never see their family again, or never use Facebook again, or right right, or just never see Gremlin's too again. Actually, I'm getting into an area where I wouldn't mind giving those things up. But

Kremlins Too is still amazing. Uh No, it's it's one of those It's also one of those things where we could send them to, even if it's not a one way mission, we could send them to places that would be extremely risky for humans. And that that includes places here on Earth. Obviously we use robots for that now, shure for deep sea exploration. Yeah, and there are also reasons a robot could complete a mission that humans couldn't complete.

Apart from the fact that it like the environment, might kill a human, it can also be that robots can have scientific precision that humans don't naturally have unless we have some kind of tool or something. Yeah, robots can move on a level of precision that that is far greater than what humans can accomplish, and we've been putting

that to good use here on Earth as well. Also, robots can have an array of sensors on them that give them access to a lot more information than what we humans can can act us with just our our natural senses. Right, So they're they're robots are capable of quote unquote seeing in a spectrum that's much more broad than our visible spectrum that we're limited to because of our dumb media. And they can also quote unquote here, I mean pretty much any sense you can think of.

We can build sensors that are much more sensitive to that information than our natural sense of The robot can have an onboard mass spectrometer, which I mean we have a tongue. But yeah, it's just better better to use the spectrometer than to go tasting the dust of Mars.

This taste radioactive. Yeah, that's not not necessarily a good thing. Okay, Well, so obviously it's not a new idea to use robots controlled by humans in certain conditions where they would be you know, preferable or more useful or at least you know better to put in harm's way. For example, one thing I've seen plenty of pictures and video of before

his bomb disposal robots. This was total sense. This is one of the ones that leapt to mind when I was thinking about this, sort of like the predecessors to the types of robots that Chris was asking about in the email we received. So, bomb disposal robots have been around for a while. The earliest one I could find was designed in nineteen seventy two by Lieutenant Colonel Peter Miller. I say lieutenant because he was in the British Army. His bomb disposal robot was built as a means of

a matter of necessity. At the time, the British Army was dealing with a lot of car bombs that were being left by the Irish Republican Army and so or rather the Irish republic Army, and so he wanted to find a way to be able to to pull cars that might have explosive devices in them to a safe zone surrounded by sandbags, that sort of thing, so that it could be detonated without putting people in harm's way. And a lot of the times before he had made

the first bomb disposal robot. It was essentially the job of somebody who was very brave and padded down as much as possible, armored up to physically go look into a car, sometimes having to open a car door, which could be a triggering device to get access to a bomb. So they were trying to find a way to make this safer and he came up with the idea when he was thinking back on something else he had done.

It turned out that that Peter Miller was something of a tinkerer and someone who often would think, how can I make this easier? Uh? And one of the things he thought about was a way to make it easier for him to mow the lawn so that he didn't have to do it personally. And what it did was he he did something really simple. He had a lawnmower that had powered wheels so it could move on its

own once you apply you know, gas to it. Essentially, he tied a rope to it, put a stake in the ground that the rope was attached to, and let it go so it would go in a circle. And every time it completed a circle, it was it was winding the rope around the steak. It was tall enough in it there would be a shorter length of rope next go around, so it was concentric circle. So it's like an early mowing room. It's brilliant in theory for some reason that it seems like it wouldn't actually work

in practice. It worked for him enough for him to think, maybe I can come up with something similar, but use it for this this very dangerous activity. And he thought, well, the lawnmower wouldn't really work as well. And he saw someone using a motorized wheelbarrow, and he literally went to the garden center, bought a motorized wheelbarrow, brought it back to headquarters. They were given carte blanche to do whatever they needed in order to actually put this thing together.

So they disassembled the wheelbarrow so they just had the chassis and they created a robot that had a toe hook on it. It was essentially a grappling hook and they could power it remotely. And by remotely, I mean they tied ropes to the controls. By power you mean human power or yeah, there was a human standing several feedback using ropes to guide and power the willbarrow as it would move to a car. And in fact they had to test this out almost immediately. They had to

go to Belfast with it. They used it to hook a car and it started to tow the car back, however, and it was actually there was another vehicle I believe that was connected to it to help it pull back because the wheelbarrow wasn't strong enough to tow a car. I don't believe. However, what happened was the wilbarrow unfortunately fell over during that first real life It wasn't even a test, this was a real life use of it. This was before they had really had chance to test

this thing. It phil fell over on its side and they ended up deadening the car by rockets where it what where it ended up after it'd been towed just

a short distance. But they still considered it a success because it didn't it didn't require someone to get into harm's way to pull the car further away from it was actually at a car dealership is where the car was so uh they considered as a success, and in fact, Peter Miller would go on to oversee the development of more sophisticated robots, ones that had a true remote controllability not just with ropes, and ones that had more like an articulated arm so it could do things like pick

up a suspicious package and move it physically to a different location. Uh, you know, ended up being sort of the genesis of bomb disposal robots. And so we've got a lot more advanced ones now, including ones that have cameras so you can operate remotely and see what quote unquote see what the robots sees. Yeah, yeah, and uh, of course there's lots of other military use robots. A lot of them are used for for for simple reconnaissance missions. In fact, the company that makes room bas has military

reconnaissance robots that are pretty awesome. Um. But uh, that gets into our next bullet here, which is reconnaissance drones. Yeah, so drones obviously being used for reconnaisance around the world right now. Uh, the earliest drones were really kind of

electronic drones. That we were the earliest electronic drones, I should say, because you could count like unmanned balloons from the nineteenth century and the really tragic time that they strapped bombs to bats and yeah, yeah, that could be considered part of it too, But in this case, we're talking about electronic drones that were just used as target practice UH for combat pilots and anti aircraft gunners, and then eventually in the nineteen sixties, the US Air Force

funded development of unmanned reconnaissance drones like the Ryan Model one seven, also known as the Lightning Bug, which had to be launched from a Lackey d C one thirty Hercules airplane. UH. They had cameras aboard the drones, but they were just taking series of photographs and had to be retrieved so that you could see what they had gotten.

The nineteen sixties, they didn't have a satellite up link to automatically, you weren't getting a live need from the drone, so you actually had to You had to find the drone after it landed and retrieve it so that you could get the information that was captured. But this meant that you had an unmanned vehicle as opposed to someone flying like a Youtubo spy plane, which you know had previously been shot down. But so the Union, so that

was a big issue. UH. In nineteen seventy two, the Ryan Model one four seven SC TV was introduced, which had a TV camera that sent a live feed to the d C one thirty drone controller. Aircraft. No telling if the sc TV also had Canadian humor on it. Oh yeah, how many of you are familiar with that sketch show. That's a dated reference right there. At any rate, today we've got lots of different drones with cameras on them.

They can give you a live feed, including consumer drones, the type of stuff like the Parrot a r drone where you can control it with a smartphone, get a live feed of the camera to your smartphone. You can play games with other people who owned them, and you do a little like kind of tag like games using your smartphone as the user interface. So these are a commonplace now, Yeah, yeah, it's it's kind a long way baby. Yeah.

And so again this is a way of us extending our presence beyond our immediate surroundings, right, although still fairly uh, I mean, with the use of the consumer drones is still fairly uh modest. You know, something that is a lot like a direct robotic avatar would be something like robotic surgery. Yeah, because that involves directly translating a humans

movements into the movements of robotic arms and tools. That's sort of like just giving you this tiny direct presence inside somebody else's body, which is creepy yeah, but also cool sure, And like all robotics, this can work in a few different ways. Most of the robotic surgery things that exist today are shared control systems, and and that just means that a doctor is yes, is directly using

robotic equipment to perform a surgery. The robot in question here isn't really thinking and it can't really react to anything that happens. The robot doesn't decide where to cut right exactly. Um Now, tell usurgery and doctor supervised robotic surgery systems are are in development. But you know, tell usurgery requires really good, really stable Internet connections. No one wants something to go terribly wrong in someone's body because the Internet went down. Can't. You clearly can't have any

latency issues either, because you need to. For example, a lot of these systems have warning warning algorithms in place so that if you start straying too close to a very sensitive very Let's say that you are performing a surgery to remove a cancerous tumor for a sample, and you're starting, you would start to get to a point

where you're going to be cutting into healthy tissue. A lot of these have a system involved where you get a feedback to the surgeon, so the surgeon knows, even though they're not in the same space as the patient, that they can't go any further without potentially harming the patient, right, right, And there's a large process of scanning and uh, data collection that happens before any of these surgeries would start, so that frequently they'll kind of mark off areas around

the edges where you're supposed to cut, so that right, so that you get that feedback and get you get the margin, I think is what they call it. Yeah, yeah, and you know, sometimes they will even have stops in place to tell the robot like no, you do not move past this point, please and thank you, which makes a lot of sense. And then uh, doctor, supervised robotic surgery requires just so much of that scanning and programming beforehand.

And you know, like we've just been saying, these machines are not the computer programs really aren't complex enough to stop or change plans if something goes wrong. So there's just an element of of oh involved. Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of the questions about robot surgery are also involved sort of in the idea we discussed not too long ago about what happens if a robot breaks the law. The underlying question is who's responsible for the

autonomous actions of a robot? Uh, And so people probably just aren't yet comfortable with the idea of giving a robot full free reigin, even when it might do as well as a human in practice. Yeah. Even scarier than a pushing robot is a robot that's already performing lapard scopic surgery on your heart. H But but the concept is definitely awesome. You know, using tiny endoscopic cameras, a robot can show a surgical team in two D or even three D what's going on inside of a patient.

And and robots can make such small, controlled movements, um so consistently, you know, without fatigue, no handshaking, right right, you know, some surgeries take hours like half a day even And and robots don't get tired and don't get shaky hands when they miss their three pm snap time,

right exactly. And in that way, this really is a lot more like the idea of a robotic avatar than some of the other things we might consider, because the tools are becoming extensions of the doctor's hands, right and and they are enhancing the doctors already formidable h experience and abilities to the point where the doctor is capable of carrying out moves that may not have been possible under his or her own normal, you know, human motions.

So it also one thing that this Another huge benefit this gives us is minimally invasive surgery where you don't have to do the the you know, you may not have to make a big incision in order to perform some of these surgical procedures because you're able to make these very precise movements with tools that can go into a relatively small uh cut. And that also means that you have a faster healing time and less chance for infections.

So there are other benefits as well, right, and so the question of have we ever used anything like a robe abotic avatar and space exploration is a little different though than the kind of examples we've talked about before. So if you are controlling a bomb disposal robot or a robotic surgery tool like the Da Vinci robot, or even a drone that's you know, pretty far away, it's still close enough that you can have direct interaction and control. Um it might not be so like fully immersive, like

you're becoming the robot. But there's some kind of analogy between that and having a robotic avatar. Space exploration is a little different for a few reasons, right, Yeah. Yeah. So one of those is that if we look at the history of using robots in space, you could argue that things like probes kind of sort of fit the bill in the sense that they have sensors on them that extend our ability to look or whatever into space,

depending upon the sensors. Uh. They typically have an antenna that will allow them to transmit information back to Earth and occasionally receive messages saying, hey, you need to do a small course correction. That that's about the extent of the interaction between probe and Earth. It's mostly a data gathering system. There's a lot of autonomy and disconnectedness. Yeah.

Rovers however, those are much more recent. Uh, they date really back to the nineteen seventies when the Leno cod rover launched by the then Soviet Union to the Moon. Um That was a remote controlled rover equipped with a camera that sent back images of the Moon. The first unmanned rover to land successfully on Mars was the sojourner in that was carried aboard the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft, and we've since used a few other rovers to explore Mars UH and also we've used it to look at other

you know, rovers to look at other bodies as well. However, the further out we get, the more we're no longer talking about real time, and that's the big change between the ones we were talking about earlier, the ones where we're on the same planet as the robots. So the lag time and communication tends to be either undetectable or so short that we can we can adapt to it. Sure, sure, a few seconds is adaptable. If you're talking about the fourteen minute lag tend to get a message back and

forth to Mars, or is it? It can be even longer than that. It's fourteen minutes. It was fourteen minutes when when the Curiosity rover landed to get a message one way, but that was just because of the positions of Earth and Mars. It can actually be much longer because Mars can be and Earth can be on opposite ends of UH from the Sun, and to bounce a message back to it is is obviously twice the going rate. So yeah, twenty eight minutes between um, your your robot

and yourself is a really long time. You're like, all right, I'm driving towards this cliff. Oh crap, Like, oh I fell off that cliff half an hour ago. I wasn't aware of it. Yeah, um yeah, that's it's actually a real issue. So we'll talk a little bit more about the latency and lag in just a second. But before we do that, let's talk about another thing that's really cool. We have a story about something that is much closer

to having a robotic avatar than any of these. I mean, it's it's actual purpose is to have that sense of of of ability to move around in an environment on behalf of someone. Right, Well, a a true robotic avatar, kind of like you've seen I don't know, in the movie Avatar or something. What it is that the one with him night shy, I'm along the little kid who

can control you can stop talking air. Uh So, in any of these movies where you have somebody who assumes sort of a robot body, like they plug their brain into something and now they're controlling a robot, that's sort of the idea of you know, you have a robot avatar acts on your behalf, you sort of become the robot mentally. Uh, nothing like that exists today, but people are working on things like that. For example, robots that are sort of on one hand, giving you feedback through

at least visual kind of screen information. Ideally it could be some kind of virtual reality or augmented reality feedback. But then you can also control them with your mind. Yeah. So this is referencing a really cool report that we saw in I O nine. Researchers at the c n R S A I S T Joint Robotics Laboratory and the c n R S L I R M M Interactive Digital Human Group they need to work on some of those easily pronounceable acronyms. Learn it's a great acronym.

What are you talking about? Iced and learn, which sounds like the aliens from Futurama. So they these two groups have collaborated on a project that could allow for thought controlled robotics. And there have been lots of experiments in recent years about thought controlled robotics. Yeah, exactly. Uh, some of which require invasive surgery in order to implant electrodes, some of which use more uh more of a contact

thing like an e G cap, right exactly. So typically what we see today is that you can do a lot more with surgical implants, but the goal that people are working on is to try to be able to have significant thought control of for a brain computer interface with noninvasive methods like an e G cap on your head, so you don't have to get surgery if you want

to control robot. Right, It's a lot easier sell to say, like, hey, you might want to shave a little patch on your head than it is to say like, hey, can we drill a hole in your skull? Will fix it? We promise? Yeah? Yeah. It is definitely a big leap there, right, So this is this particular one they're calling robotic re embodiment and uh. Again, the person who is controlling the robot wears an e

G cap to send commands to the robot. So there's a trade meaning process obviously where you have to both, you know, train the robot how to respond to to certain stimuli that are created by the thoughts you know that they're converted into electrical signals, and then you also have to train the person who's wearing the caps so that they are in fact concentrating on whatever whatever task they want the robot to do. Now, this particular approach

is intended for people who have suffered paralysis. So again the idea of giving them some more control over their lives by having this robot be able to do things on their behalf, by them actually controlling it with their thoughts. And uh, there's even an AI component to it, which makes sense because otherwise the person wearing the cap would have to do everything to control the robot. And we haven't reached that point where we can feel like our

brains are actually inside this robotic body. The robotic body is really just an extension of our own abilities. Yeah, and it's usually very sim book commands, Yeah, are e g. Reading is not that good. Yeah, So for something like walk down the hall, you might you know, you're looking at a screen that's showing you what the robot quote unquote can see based upon cameras they're in the robot. Uh, and the picture that they had was of a humanoid robot,

so that was pretty cool. You could look at say a point down the hall, and the AI would take over and walk the robot for you down the hallway, so you didn't have to think, all right, now I have to lift the left leg of the robot and set it down. It would do all of that automatically, which makes sense. So it's a it's marrying remote control with a I some some autonomous behavior so it can

complete certain tasks. But then other things you could, you know, think I want to pick up that glass, and the robot would, presumably if it's everything's working properly, reach out an arm, pick up the thing you wanted and bring it to you. Another thing in that realm that's obviously much simpler is telepresence robots. Yeah. I mean these are almost when you when you see how some of them are implemented, it's kind of like, oh, that counts as

a robot. Yeah, but it does. I mean imagine like, for example, a an iPad doing FaceTime on top of a scooter scoots around like a little segue. I mean, that's a telepresence robot. And I've seen those. I mean, you know, some of them look look like it looks you know, it looks like it's a handle that's connected to two wheels, so it doesn't even look like it's a Segway type thing even, but the handle has a frame into which you can put a tablet like an iPad.

You run the software which allows for two way communications. So the person who wants to control the robot would use their own mobile device or computer or whatever, which would have a camera trained on them, so their face would show up in that iPad. You would have a little framed picture of whomever is using it. Like I

use the example of your boss just as general. Your boss who goes and travels a lot, uses this to check up on employees and could control the movements of the robot remotely, So you would have your own little on your device. If you're the boss, you would have some sort of controls to guide where the robot could go, and you would have a view from the camera, the ford facing camera on whatever tablet or whatever device you

have plugged into that. And then you could roll up and interrupt people at work and ask them what they're doing and make sure that they're being you know, productive and not getting on Facebook for the four years time in the row or whatever, or you know, you could go up to the water cooler and participate in a conversation. Yeah, not participate in the water That would be that uh,

a bad choice for a robot. Can't wait till somebody comes up with the great hacks for these things, where they can make it seem like you're working through your telepresence robot because it plays video of you, like saying, Hi, how are you doing as it rolls around the office, But really you're out bowling well. And also, I mean you can you can really defy the expectations of your robo boss by simply walking into a room that has a door and closing it behind you, because this is

a robot that's literally on wheels and nothing else. So I read about these Actually they can knock on a door just by ramming into the door. Att Yeah, the other explanations I have seen have suggested that's perhaps uh like really forward thinking offices, not our not our forward digging office, but in general could have automatic doors installed

so that this problem. Yeah, there's a little motion sensor and then it opens up automatically, and then the your robo boss rolls on end to to chat with you. Where we're ruining all of Joe's dreams by suggesting this right now, he much prefers just the picture of our boss ramming too door repeatedly, get it open at any rate. This telepresence approach is something that already exists. Again, it doesn't it doesn't give you, uh, the the experience that

Chris was talking about. Obviously. Well, part of that is the fact that our virtual reality or augmented reality systems are not up to snuff enough to to make us feel like we are that robot. Yeah, to embody a robot or to embody yourself within a robot. How would be the best way to say that, I don't know how to become a robot. To become the robot, you really do need some kind of VR, like face time is not good enough. Yeah, yeah, I mean that's VR

is one of those things. It's funny because the earliest some of the earliest implementations of virtual reality were uh were military implementations, and they were to give people a better view of what was around, uh, whatever vehicle they might have been in. So islets were using this, for example, in order to get a good view underneath the aircraft if they had to drop something off at a particular target,

or you know, people inside an armored vehicle. Obviously, the armored vehicle is an important element of keeping personnel safe and if you were to I don't know, put a lot of windows in it, it becomes less safe. So what you do is you end up mounting cameras on the actual armored vehicle that point out in different directions, and then you can have a head mounted display and by turning your head, it actually automatically signals which camera view you start to get and and can access them

in you know, hypothetically in three sixty degrees around. Yeah, I've seen some really cool implementations of this where it has that sort of seamless overlapping technology. It's kind of it's it's not that different from stitching together photographs to make a panoramic image, except it's doing it in video, which is kind Yeah, but but these are are examples of again kind of marrying that idea of uh a mechanical presence and allowing you the ability to perceive as

if you were that thing, because it's not. It's not your view of the of your surroundings. Your view of the surroundings is the interior of that vehicle. It's the view of the vehicle and within its surroundings. So that's kind of you know, you extend that to a robot, like a humanoid robot, and you could say, Oh, I that would totally work if I have a head mold display with head tracking, and when I turned my head, the robot changes its perspective, whether it turns ahead or

just a camera rota exactly. Yeah, that's kind of one argument for the fact that if we were to try to create robotic avatars, they should probably be basically humanoid robots. Yeah, because you're not going to be able to, you know, inhabit the headspace of something that's not at least sort of shaped like a human. The further away you get from the human shape, the more effort it's going to take on the part of the human controlling it to uh, to do so in a way that feels natural now

it's not. And that's I don't think that's an insurmountable challenge, and we'll get into that a little bit. But I think it's probably easier in the long run to get human pilots used to controlling a a roving, a rolling robot than it is to create a bi peedle. Yeah. Building a robot that's humanoid, that is capable of doing things like I was thinking of picking itself up when it fell over. Really that's a big challenge. Those Boston Dynamics people are Yeah, those robots, those robots are like

paper forward. No, No, they're working on two legged robots. That's true. There is the one that was running on the treadmill. Well, at any rate, let's talk about some of those leunges. Yeah, well one of the big ones obviously, if we're so. So, what did Chris ask about Because we were talking about robotic avatars specifically mentioned for space exploration, right right, and Chris had said, uh, perhaps we would be able to use something like quantum communication to get

around the lag and latency issues we have. So, for example, the Curiosity Rover when it when we were landing that we as in when the team was landing that I had nothing to do with it. I was covering it, which was cool, but I had no direct involvement. When the team was landing, they are are observing the Curiosity Rover's landing. We were doing that knowing that the events were watching had already happened. Right, That had taken that fourteen minutes for information to get back to us, And

technically we're looking at what happened fourteen minutes ago. So there was a time where the robot was either safe on the surface of Mars or had crashed and was uh, you know, completely lost to us, and we had no

way of knowing. We just had to wait for that time to catch up so that we would find out what had happened, which is kind of crazy when you think about it, You're like, oh, this is an event that had occurred one way or another, but we had to wait until we until the information could get to us before we learned it very briefly with short Rover. Yeah, that's true. It kind of really was short and Rover. So that that's a great way of saying. What about

quantum communication? Now, I'm not entirely certain what Chris was trying to say because there wasn't a full explanation of it. Uh So I might be misinterpreting what Chris was saying, and if so, I do apologize. However, I gotta address this in that the way we use the term quantum communication does not mean instantaneous communication, which seemed to be what Chris was saying. But I'm not entirely certain, and this is partially just a terminology thing, but but yeah, so,

so what does quantum communication mean? All? Right? Now? Generally that refers to using the principles of quantum physics, which we recently talked about in our Random Number Generator episode UH, where the using quantum physics to create like truly random numbers, but at least they appear to be truly random again based upon all of our observations right as as far as we can tell, it's truly random, and it's to

use those to create keys for cryptographic purposes. So you can be assured that any messages you send to someone using this methodology are completely secure across the channel as long as that session is active, but it doesn't speed up that transmission. That transmission itself still takes place over more classical communication media, so you're limited by the speed of light. Ultimately, you can't go faster than that. We're pretty fast, it's but over long distances. It's not really

fast enough, and it's not instantaneous yet we can't. We can't use quantum communication for really long distances. We're limited by the actual limitations of quantum mechanics. In this case, the truly optimistic believe that maybe we're talking five hundred kilometers range max. UH. In real life, we're talking closer to hundred fifty two d kilometers or so being worked on now, And I would point out that that although longer than a car, is still shorter than the distance

to other solar systems. Yeah, significantly not interstellar range here. Um. You know. One idea that this might be related to, though, is the one of quantum entanglement, and that might be what Chris was referring to. And again, if I'm wrong, I do apologize, But there has been discussion of quantum entanglement, which is a truly odd thing to you know, concept, to us on the cissy, it's spooky action at a distance, as of certain Albert Einstein would have would have said

and did say. In fact he didn't, not would have he did. Uh. So the cons up here is is a little mind bending, right, So you've got I think, also sometimes misunderstood. It can very easily be misunderstood. So it's kind of weird. Yeah. Yeah. So so on the quantum level, you can get these quantum particles, sub atomic particles that are entangled with one another, so their states

correlate with one another. They don't, they don't necessarily match, but if you know something about one, you automatically know something about the other. One right exactly. So you know, there are a lot of different quantum states we could talk about, like the polarization of light or the spin of an electron. Let's go a spin. So let's say that you could describe spin as being either up or down. That's just two directions that we could talk about, but well,

we'll limit it for this purpose. And uh, if you have two entangled electrons, one is spinning and you measure one and it's spinning up, you know that the other one, because it's entangled, is spinning down. It's the opposite direction. You know that because of the fact that they are entangled. Now, uh, here's where it gets kind of kind of crazy. These two particles will remain entangled no matter how far apart

they are. So you could take those two entangled particles, take one to one side of the galaxy, the other to the other side of the galaxy. They're separated by the entire Milky Way, and if you measure one, you know what the other one state was at the moment

that you measured yours because they were entangled. So some people have suggested that this is faster than like communication, But if you really stretch your mind, you realize that locality has not necessarily been violated because you're you're really only you already knew that the two were entangled, right, You already knew that, and by measuring it, all you've done is determined what state they were in at that moment.

And if you wanted to try and do an experiment where you communicated something some way using this, it all falls apart. So let's talk about an example, because otherwise this is going to get super super complicated, and then I'll talk about some of the arguments about quantum entanglement because it's not a settled issue at all. Uh. I want to use this example though. All right, So I give Lauren an electron. Don't say I never gave you anything.

I give Joe an electron that's entangled with Lauren's electron. That's pretty cool, Yeah, always putting burdens on me. I ship you guys to oppositends of the galaxy, and at this point I am no longer involved in the in the communication of the two of them, however, So so Lauren decides she's going to measure her electron see which way it's spinning. She sees that spinning up, she knows

that Joe's electron therefore is spinning down. Now, Joe, oh, if you were to measure yours and you saw it was spinning down, you would know that Laurence was spinning up. But you haven't communicated anything yet. Yeah, And what we really want to say to each other at this point is like, man, Jonathan sucks. Right, So let's say that Lauren sends the message man Jonathan sucks along with Oh.

By the way, your electron is spinning down, it would have to go across classical communications channels, thus traveling at at best the speed of light across the galaxy. So even though you could measure the electron and know what state Joe's electron was in, the actual message about that information would still be limited by the speed of light.

If you wanted to change the spin of your electron, as if you could, like, hey, Joe, whenever you're electron is spinning down, it means this, and whenever it's spinning up and means this. I'll control my electron from over here.

You just watch yours. Everything will be fine. If you try to change the state of your electron, Lauren entanglement breaks, so Joe could still be observing the electron, and it could still that spin could be changing, but it would no longer be connected to the state of Lauren's electron. It would just be random. So no longer in superposition

it has been affected by a macro scale system. And now Joe would be thinking that Laurence talking crazy talk, because it would just be random messages based upon whatever code you guys had worked out previously. So so there is no way to send the message. Man, Jonathan sucks through not through quantum entanglement as far as we understand right now. However, that being said, this is far from

a settled matter in quantum physics. Yeah, so first we've got so you're admitting everything you just said is wrong. I'm admitting that everything I said could be wrong. Man, I am allowing for the first of all, I am said accept the burden of proper scientific humility on so so it could be wrong. So, first of all, this was an idea that Einstein hated. He did not the idea of particles being able to uh be entangled with one another, and that this could potentially lead to something

like faster than like communication. He called it spooky action from a distance. Nature doesn't owe us liking it. That's true. That's true, And there have been people who pointed out that there are loopholes within quantum mechanics that could potentially allow for a more classical explanation of the behaviors of those sub atomic particles that does not involve entanglement. In other words, we have the illusion of entanglement, but in

reality something else is happening. So for example, there there's a story about how you could use an instrument to measure uh the various uh states of quantum particles and thus see the entanglement. But there have been there's been a point, as people have pointed out that perhaps the the instrument of measurement itself has communicated the state of one to the other using classical means. So it's the

speed of light is your limiting factor. So in other words, we're talking about non sentient things essentially communicating with one another. That's what happens at the quantum level, guys. So in other words, the whole thing ends up being what some folks would call a conspiracy. That one sub atomic Yeah, so that one subotomic particle, once you've determined what spin it is, the other one is told quote unquote that through the instrumentation and ends up spinning the other way.

Now there's also the talk about how perhaps there could be some set of events that creates this illusion of the two particles being entangled with one another, and that in fact, you could almost think of it in a in terms of fate, that the the the steps you take to make those measurements in fact determine the effect you get. And so you see the effect of entanglement, but the effect really isn't there. You have created it yourself.

And this is kind of a concept called setting independence, Like how do you determine that your actions did not lead to this? So there's a proposed um experiment. I read about this was in an article that I read back in November fourteen. That's kind of crazy. And here's

the here's the proposed test. You've got a particle detector and it has different settings that you can use to measure sub atomic particles, right, and if you were to choose which setting you wanted, like quote unquote consciously choose, you could be setting into motion the series of events that determined that both of these particles appear to be entangled. So, in other words, you are the cause it's not truly entangled.

You have caused this to happen. So they wanted us to say, let's take all of this chance out of it. What we're going to do is we're going to look for the oldest light we can detect in the universe. So, in other words, the furthest light source we can possibly find as soon as it hits Earth for the first time. So I don't know if they're looking at cosmic background radiation or not, but what they are doing is they're looking for uh, bright lights that are as furthest the

furthest away from us as possible. In other words, we've just detected the light for the first time, we've never detected it before, and they're looking for a couple of different sources and uh preferably those sources have to be far enough from each other so that their light could never have touched one another before that moment, so that means this light could not have interacted with anything before

that specific moment. And then taking basically the millisecond of when it hits as like, if it's an even number, then it's a zero. If it's not number, it's a one, or something along those lines. You've then determine what setting you use your particle detector. And the argument is that if in fact this means that events have come together to cause the illusion of entanglement to happen, they must

date all the way back to the Big Bang. So either either of the particles are truly entangled, or everything has been predestined from the Big Bang, or they're not truly entangled by that big turtle. Possibly, So that's kind of crazy. But um, you know, at any rate, even that's one of the weirdest things we've ever talked about.

I think, Yeah, it's pretty weird. So there are also some physicists who are looking into the possibility of maybe there is some way of working around this quantum entanglement for communications purposes. But from why I understand, the prevailing thought in in the discipline is that it is not likely to be possible, that it's it's really just an interesting phenomenon and uh is perhaps not practical anyway. Yeah. Well, also, I mean you have to take relativistic physics into account.

Where didn't Einstein or some other physicist experiment sort of in their thoughts with the idea of the tachon telephone the tachyons are the particles that travel faster than light, and if you could send a signal to someone through take eons, apparently would arrive before it was sent. Now, take eons, of course, are hypothetical. We don't know evidence that actually it's it's it's convenient for math right now.

So another challenge besides the communication one. I mean, obviously that was huge, right because if we are to send robots out into the galaxy to explore, then if we are limited by the speed of light for communication purposes,

we're never going to get that real time experience. Well, I want to propose a solution that I think may have talked about a long time ago when we were talking about space exploration earlier on in the existence or the history of this podcast, which is sort of robotic avatars enabled by teams of astronauts who don't exactly go

straight into the monster's mouth. So, so you've got to explore the surface of some moon or or asteroid or something like that, and you want to do it with a robotic avatar, something that has the judgment and uh and foresight and control of a human while having all those wonderful advantages that robots provide you could, for example, have a spacecraft orbiting this object, and then from that spacecraft you could have a human who dons you know,

control gloves or an exoskeleton of some kind and VR headset and then becomes that robotic probe and then's down on the surface and is close enough to communicate without too much late And Chris actually brought that to light as well, saying that that could be a possibility for something like exploring Mars or even setting up a colony for Mars in the future where you know, we talked about the Mars one proposed plan, which we need to do an update on, I think at some point, just

to talk about some of the information that's come to light since the plan started, wonderfully sketchy information. Yeah, Yeah, there's there's a lot to talk about. I think maybe we do need to revisit that at some point, but at any rate, Uh, there there's talk of there was talk of using robots to build the habitats that the

Martian colonists would be living in. Yeah, and and this this approach would make a lot of sense to being able to have that real time control or close to real time control of robots by using uh an orbiting space station of some sort, or even just a spacecraft with people on it that would then be directly controlling the robots on the surface. That delay would be much shorter. Yeah, it's a lot safer to that way. You don't have human construction workers down there breathing in all of those

delicious perchlorates that would be good Martian soil. Yeah, that's not not great for your lungs breathing all that in. So we talked about licking Mars dust earlier, Yes, we did. Yeah, that was one of the first things you said, Joe. See, I think the communication challenge is probably the biggest one that we have, especially once you start about talking about going beyond our solar system. I don't know that we're going to solve that without some other breakthrough discovery that

allows for some faster than like communication. But there are some other challenges to We need to make sure that

whatever robots we create are safe for whatever their purposes. So, for the example of robots here on Earth, if we want to have a robot like the one that was reported to reported by in a an I O nine, we need to make sure that it's going to be safe to be around, you know, as with other humans, right, you don't want a robot that would be capable of harming someone through uh and you know, whatever action it

may take. You know, like like if you ever go to a manufacturing plant with one of those giant industrial robots, they have these enormous areas set up around them to prevent people from getting too close because it's deadly and bumpers and stuff like that. Sure, sure, which is less of a problem if you're right on Mars because no one else is walking. Yeah. Yeah, what are you gonna do? Shove over a Martian? I mean's robot? I hope not that Martian. We're going to start a world war because

Q thirty eight space modulator or whatever it was. In reality, I would only make peace loving robots. You're the one who had all the shoving ones. I'm just saying mine. Okay, it's just hypothetical robots. Pathetical robots that would probably belong

to Jonathan. All right, let's be fair. All right. So anyway, um, you know, you all obviously would need to build a robot that was going to be uh, you know, well designed for whatever environ it it was going to go into this kind of goes back to, you know, having a robot with wheels as opposed to legs because it's more stable. Yeah or uh. And it may not have the same number of limbs that we have, So it may be that it has a single articulated arm, or

it could have a whole bunch of articulated arms. The user interface would have to be designed to allow for that, right, depending upon how much autonomy you gave the robot versus remote control. If you want true, the true sense of being present in that robot, then you want as much of that control as possible. Otherwise it feels like you're just a passive audience member um watching a movie or something, as opposed to the person who's actually making things happen um.

And we'd have to make an interface that makes sense based upon what the robot is capable of. The robot is able to gather a lot more information than our human senses can detect. We have to have that information presented in a way that makes sense to us, the human operator. Right, because we can't see in every ectroum, or we can't hear certain noises. Do we have that converted into what we can here? How do we indicate that it would be normally beyond our range of sensing.

These are little questions that we have to answer in

order for this to make sense. And then, of course we just have to train people how to use these robots whenever we do develop them, and that's probably the easiest because humans are pretty pretty plastic with the brains, right, yeah, yeah, And you know, just just looking at the different number of video games that any given human can play, I'd say that we're pretty capable of moving through an environment with a avatar that does not move exactly how Yeah,

we do. I agree. Yeah, that's a good example, although it does mean that whenever you switch from one type of robot to another, you've got to have that, you know, five to ten minutes of oh it's right be in this one means that I end up shocking a person as opposed to handing them the cup of hot coco I made them. That would be important to Yeah, and the left shoulder trigger in this one isn't poke the button, it's I are a rocket launcher. That's good to remember.

Good to remember. I hope whenever they design robotic avatars they don't have any controls that rely on joystick clicks. I mean, how does the word how do you sprint? Click the left thumb stick. Oh well, that that wraps up this discussion. I want to thank Chris for that amazing It was really a phenomenal, phenomenal message, and I wish we could have read the whole thing, but that

would we would have had to have a second episode. Uh, but I do welcome all those kinds of messages to come on in because it's fantastic to hear from you. We love knowing what you guys want to hear more about, and uh, we welcome that kind of message. So you can send us an email. That email addresses FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or you can drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. At Twitter and Google Plus, we are FW thinking over on Facebook.

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