How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Robots! And in this metaphor, Carnegie Hall is the 4th rock from the Sun.
As part of their Centennial Challenges program, NASA recently posted a Request For Information for a Mars Ascent Vehicle.
They are looking for teams that can land a M.A.V. on Mars in close enough proximity to a sampling robot to be able to retrieve its samples, seal them up and send them into Martian orbit. And it must be performed almost entirely without human intervention. These are the droids they’re looking for.
Sometimes, it’s good to remind ourselves what we’re capable of. Interplanetary space travel works well. We are but a few decades away from setting a human foot on another planet, for the first time, ever. It’s a monumental undertaking that will undoubtedly benefit us as a species.
But now scale it back a bit. Rather than going to work on Mars, what are some of the challenges that we face each day going to work on Terra (this planet’s actual name)? Traffic congestion, which can be tied to overdevelopment. Gas prices, which can be tied to the costs of refining fossil fuels. Maybe there’s something about your job you don’t like – an inefficiency or antiquated method of getting something done. Those too could be challenges that are shared across various sectors of industry.
And how do we face these daily challenges? Too often we allow them to change our behaviours. We deal with traffic congestion by road raging, or tuning into an easy-listening station on the radio to prevent road rage. We deal with gas prices by complaining about gas prices and blaming taxation. We deal with office inefficiencies by taking advantage of them and becoming a part of the pattern. These are all reactions.
But if we isolate a problem, isolate its cause, and then throw a call to action out to our communities, the solution – while never guaranteed 100% of the time – is always easier to find.
George Carlin used to tell a joke about being of average intelligence – the premise was that if you’re of average intelligence, half the people in the world are dumber than you are. The other side of that coin is that the other half are smarter than you are. That’s what any crowd-sourced challenge relies upon to function. And luckily, it doesn’t take a brainiac to recognize a good solution. The person least likely is sometimes the person best suited.
The deadline for Mars Ascent Vehicle submissions is May 30th, 2014. The deadline for you enlisting your community to change a little piece of your part of the world is entirely up to you.
