The world is in conflict, life is becoming unaffordable, and AI is coming for all our jobs. Surely no one can be blamed for wanting an ‘out’ from this planet if possible – even if it’s only into the void. Thankfully, what the good AI taketh away, the good AI also giveth and, in this case at least, what it’s giving us is options. More specifically, we are being offered life on Mars.
This is of course hyperbole, humanity is still some ways away from being able to colonise Mars, but Chinese scientists have made a sizeable step in that direction by creating a robot scientist that is capable of producing oxygen by processing Martian rocks. It looks like even the finest minds of our race are being forced to look to their laurels when it comes to job security.
The robot performed this marvel by first subjecting minerals found in Martian meteorites to a thorough analysis, and establishing the presence of the chemicals it needed to manufacture oxygen. It then carried out the necessary experiments of actually doing so, all without human intervention. In carrying out this operation, the robot has to automatically, and rapidly, identify the most optimal formula or process to produce/extract oxygen from the chemicals it has identified from the rock samples. Doing so requires sorting through over three million possible compositions in the samples considered. These findings were presented online this Monday (Nov 13) in the Nature Synthesis journal, in a paper titled ‘Automated synthesis of oxygen-producing catalysts from Martian meteorites by a robotic AI chemist’.
Oxygen is of course the top priority when it comes to space and interplanetary exploration. Everything we do – from producing heat as warm-blooded animals, turning the food we eat into energy, to the fuel we burn to actually get to any destination. Be it the next town over or Mars, oxygen is non-negotiable. Space travel presently requires that any exploratory vehicle carry vast amounts of oxygen in pressurised canisters for its human occupants to breathe, power the vehicle, and provide for emergencies. The situation would likely have remained that way but for the discovery of the presence of water on Mars. Water is a compound of water and hydrogen, and water’s presence on Mars means that producing oxygen on a large scale is now a feasible prospect.
The AI-powered chemist that now makes the process possible is also an essential element in the whole process. The lack of oxygen is the very problem that scientists are seeking to address, so it makes little sense to send a living, breathing human down – or rather up to Mars to carry out the entire process. Carrying out the same process that the AI robot does remotely – or quite literally working from home – is very difficult due to the distance between the two planets, For reference, the Earth and Mars are the third and fourth planets from the first in our solar system. The robot being sent up to the planet to carry out this whole song and dance cannot just be automated. There has to be someone making the all-too-important judgement call of what process should be picked from among the many available to produce the oxygen; hence the AI-powered chemist. Another issue is the manpower that would be necessary to carry out the task. The five different Martian ore categories used in the experiments give rise to 3,764,376 possible formulas or options to explore. Finding the best possible formula among these would require at least 2,000 years of human labour. Each of the experiments would take about five hours at the minimum.
Study lead Professor Jiang Jun of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei summed up the new finding to Nature News perfectly: “We have developed a robotic AI system that has a chemistry brain”. However, the researchers also note that the robot AI still needs the guidance of human scientists to accomplish the things it does. The robot AI becomes smart only when it is ‘taught’ something through human intervention.
The actual experiments run through the robot so far consist of giving the robot some water (on Earth) and tasking it with producing oxygen from it, using only Martian soil. The robot then analysed the soil using high-powered lasers or ‘laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy’ before shifting through the options available to it. Once the robot found a viable formula, it ran the actual physical test in a lab via a robot arm to test its theory. So far, it has managed to create water in just two months, after testing 200 options in the lab. The entire process, from the AI’s ‘brain’ to its subsequent experiments, is all powered by the sun. The robot has a few other significant limitations that need to be overcome before it ever leaves Earth. For one, the robot has so far only operated under temperatures similar to Mars, at 37℃. Researchers still need to establish whether the robot can operate under conditions similar to Mars entirely, such as atmospheric composition, gravity, humidity, and air density. Given optimal conditions, it is estimated that the robot chemist could help a Mars base achieve oxygen self-sufficiency given 15 hours of sunlight. In Professor Jiang’s words, “In the future, humans can establish (an) oxygen factory on Mars with the assistance of AI chemist. This breakthrough technology brings us one step closer to our dream of living on Mars”.
Obtaining oxygen on Mars is not limited to introducing a catalyst to water of course – NASA’s Perseverance Rover recently showed how it could break down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to produce oxygen, arguably a far more efficient procedure. It’s still important however to explore the possible ways in which we can produce oxygen from locally available resources. It is also important to note that uses of an AI-powered chemist are not limited to producing oxygen in hostile environments – the reviewer of the working paper that synthesised the findings is described in the official press release as having remarked: “This type of research is of wide interest and is under rapid development in organic/inorganic material synthesis and discovery”.