"I'm afraid."

HAL: I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it... I'm a...fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you.

Dave Bowman: Yes, I'd like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me.

HAL: It's called "Daisy."

HAL: Daisy...Daisy....give me your answer ... do. I'm ... half crazy all for the love of you... It won't be a stylish marriage... I can't ... afford ... a carriage. But you'll ... look sweet ... upon the ... seat ... of ... a ... bicycle ... built ... for ... two...

- 2001:  A Space Odyssey

Opportunity, NASA's long running Martian rover, is in deadly peril. A gigantic Martian dust storm*, spanning a quarter of the planet, has enveloped the solar-powered explorer and forced it into low-power mode, which shuts down all of its systems except for a mission clock that will periodically check on power levels to see if they're sufficient to resume operations.

 

Should the current situation last too long, Opportunity could cease to function permanently due to damage caused by lack of power to the heaters that keep its circuitry functioning in the frigid Martian environment, or simply by no longer having enough battery power to restart.

But, it's not over 'til it's over, and Opportunity has been beating the odds for almost fifteen years now. After its landing on Mars on January 25th in 2004, it was only intended to remain active for 90 Martian days, a timeline which it has exceeded by over 14 years, carefully traversing 28 miles of the Martian surface and sending back almost 225,000 photos. And this isn't the first time that Opportunity has been in trouble and survived. It was stuck in a sand dune in April of 2005 but was eventually able to escape, and in 2007, a similar dust storm drove the rover into low-power hibernation for several weeks, but it finally returned to operation.

Things are a bit different this time. The current storm is the size of North America, and it's twice as opaque as the 2007 storm. As far as Opportunity is concerned, an unending night has fallen, and all NASA can do now is wait and see.

This is probably one of the best reasons I've seen to date for not using artificial intelligence in space exploration. The news coverage for Opportunity's current situation uses all kinds of emotionally loaded terminology like "battling", "fighting for its life", "heroically", and so on. Sorry, no, let's be frank for a moment: Opportunity is just a collection of hardware and software that neither knows nor cares that this storm could be its swan song. The situation reached a certain point, and its programming shut it down, just like powering off your desktop computer, that's all.

But now imagine if Opportunity actually was self-aware. How could it not be heartbreaking to listen to an AI-enabled rover bravely reporting on its worsening situation, fully aware that it was completely lost to any kind of help, then finally sending a last message before falling tragically silent as lack of power forced it into sleep, a sleep from which it might never awaken?

So perhaps it's just as well that Opportunity is just a piece of technology. Regardless, good luck, Opportunity - it may be silly to think of you as alive, but you've been trundling along for quite a while on our behalf, and it seems wrong not to feel some sense of responsibility for you. Who knows, it may be comforting to future robotic explorers to  know that we worried about you, even if you couldn't appreciate it.

- Sid

* Coincidentally, the same thing happens to Mark Watney in the book version of The Martian.