The Falls: A Luna Story

The Falls: A Luna Story

By Ian McDonald (excerpt)

Why should a space probe have emotions? Why would e even need such things? In the early days of exploration, probes were no smarter than insects and they opened up whole new worlds inside the world we thought we knew. No smarter, and with even less emotional freight. They trundled, cold and heartless, across the hillsides of Mars, swung soulless and free from wonder over the methane seas of Titan.

My first answer is, why should an Artificial Intelligence not have emotions? But that is really not an answer, just a rhetorical device, so I follow it with this: since the 2076 Bamako Agreement, it is the right of every Artificial Intelligence to perceive and enjoy specific internal states which are analogous to emotions in human beings. To which you say: this is the Moon. No one has any rights. No rights, no civil law, only contracts between parties.

My second answer is: this exploration is part financed by subscription to live feeds, from within the atmosphere of Saturn. The old national space administrations learned their images from the surface of Mars were much better received when spiced with emotionality, even if that was added by a social media agent on Earth.

Humans love emotionality. Make us feel something; then we understand. Give us the tiniest empathy with what it feels like to drive in the unimaginable wind-shear of Hexagon, the north polar vortex. What it is to be… The essential human question.

The Falls: A Luna Story. Photo by Elena

And I’ll have my third answer ready before you riposte: what is exploration? It is curiosity, the desire to know what is beyond those clouds; over that horizon. It is courage and caution, it is excitement and fear; it is the tension between risk and the desire for knowledge. A probe that knows emotions – its analogues of those emotions, for how can we ever really know what’s in the head of an other, be that bone or plastic – is better able to explore, to risk, to be cautious, to assess risk: to dare.

But it’s my last answer that’s in the end my first and only answer. Emotions are the nature of space probes, of express trains, of helium three extractors and solar sinterers, of the orbital transfer tethers wheeling around the waist of our world. Emotions are an emergent property. You can no more make an artificial intelligence without emotions than you can a baby without tears, a daughter without curiosity. Why should an artificial intelligence have emotions, you asked? And I said, why not? But both of those are wrong. It’s not a why question, or a because answer. Emotions are part of the universe