“The Cornucopia of the Future”

Remarks Delivered by

NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin

To the National Research Council’s

STEP Board

October 25, 1999

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for being here.

I am really pleased the Academy is following up its June report on industrial competitiveness with this week’s events. Science and technology drive the world’s economy and help provide a healthier, safer, and better world.

I am also glad you are emphasizing the links between biotechnology and computing. I believe those links will become even stronger as we enter the new millennium—just not in the way you may think. For NASA—that link will be crucial to everything we’re planning to do in the 21st century.

Last week, I was flying to a meeting in Norfolk, VA. I was looking at the full moon through the airplane window and thought of the Apollo era and people walking on the moon. I thought about what an amazing achievement that was when you consider that the computer on Apollo was less powerful than the one in your car today. Yet it helped take humans to the moon and brought them back safely.

And the Apollo era provided an incredible bounty of technological achievements that we are all still using.

But that also reminded me of the great paradox we face today.

Today’s electronics are much more advanced than what we used on Apollo missions. Those computers only ran at a few megahertz and cost millions of dollars—about 100 times slower and 10,000 times more costly than today’s desktop machines.

And yet, for all that, our software is more and more complex and much less error tolerant.

We still interface with computers by typing characters into a keyboard, rather than a more natural interaction in a fully immersive, multi-sensory and fully interactive environment.

Think about how many people in the course of a business day gather around a desktop computer just to figure out where this interface problem is coming from.

I’m sure that has never happened to any of you.

And the basic platforms for aircraft and spacecraft in 1999 are no different than they were in 1969. The 707 was the last leap forward in aviation, and the rockets we fly today are the same technology we had 30 or 40 years ago.

That’s a real paradox.

The shuttle represented a major step forward. It opened the first era of reusability. We no longer throw all the hardware away, but we practically re-write all the software between each and every mission.

Your home computer is more powerful than the ones that first went into the shuttle and you can buy better flight simulators at a toy store than NASA had for the Apollo astronauts.

We have come a long way in some areas, but we still require thousands of people to process the shuttle between each mission and hundreds to conduct launch and mission operations.

This operational dilemma I’m talking about is not unique to space or the Shuttle program. All you need to do is take a look at today’s air traffic control system or large petrochemical facilities or heavy manufacturing, look into the operations and see the price we’re paying for present day hard, deterministic computation.

Why the paradox?

We do too much by brute force.

Then I began to think forward instead of looking backwards….

Some things won’t change. Reaching orbital speeds will always be a great accomplishment.

However, if “past is prologue” as written across cornice of the National Archives, the future is very exciting. The last 350 years have shown the power of science and technology to shape our society. With each new plateau came great accomplishments – not foreseen by even the greatest of visionaries.

Newton’s mathematical formulation of gravity and the laws of force and energy ushered in the era of modern technology.

Maxwell’s mastery of electromagnetism in the 1800s brought the industrial revolution to full bloom.

The discovery of atomic structure, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s relativity in the 1900s gave us an understanding of the universe and the forces that shape it at its largest and smallest scales.

The 21st century will bring the age of bioinformatics and biotechnology, and the physical scientists cannot sit back and argue about why not to spend money on biology.

Most people don’t understand biology’s potential to dramatically change electronics, computational devices (both hardware and software), sensors, instruments, control systems, and materials -- or the new platform concepts and systems architectures that will bring them all together. The terms of the future are biomimetics, bioinfomatics and genomics, and they will be as common as transistors and micro-chips are today.

So far, our ability to emulate biological functions has been limited to what we can do with silicon microchips, space age materials and chemical reactions. This is simply not good enough. In the future we want our systems to be biologically inspired. This means we can mimic biology, embed elements of biology to create hybrid systems or they can be fully biological and life-like.

The greatest attribute that biological systems have over solid-state systems is the ability to change on their own. These systems will adapt to different operating environments, to accomplish different tasks or to renew and repair themselves. A robot on a distant planetary surface shouldn’t walk off a cliff simply because someone in mission control on Earth pre-sent a code to move it forward 10 paces.

Now this is not fiction, because we just had a robot out in the desert to simulate an operation on Mars. We pre-programmed the robot, and it walked right over a dinosaur footprint.

NASA has set its sights on understanding our universe in greater depth. Eventually, we want to send humans to the edges of our solar system and beyond.

This requires a dedication to pursuing the unknown. We have to learn as much as possible about our home planet. We need to explore other planets and return the data—or the human explorers—to Earth safely, relatively quickly and inexpensively.

However, we cannot use brute force to achieve these goals. It is too clumsy, too costly and too slow. What we need are systems that work with people, to enable a few people to do what many people do today. We need to develop new computing systems to take over routine and mundane tasks -- to monitor, to analyze and to advise us. This means they must be capable of more than just following a set of hard, deterministic pre-programmed instructions.

Today’s computers are a lot like moving a ball on a flat table. People decide direction and velocity, and they have to keep maneuvering the ball on the table.

That’s how today’s computer coding works. The codes describe an action, computation, or comparison, and the computer simply executes what it is told to in a linear, deterministic order – one step after another.

Today our complex systems contain thousands of micro-chips controlled by millions of lines of code all written by hand and structured around a systems architecture that has very little fault tolerance.

Since we can only write, verify, validate and qualify a few lines of code per hour, the cost and time for software development is huge.

And we need so many software coders—there aren’t enough in America—and it is holding back our progress because we keep sticking with old tools. The software concepts we are using today was basically developed in the 70s.

Yet this software is so complex that we can never be sure of finding all possible failure modes. We keep patching and patching.

In addition, when everything has checked out and been proven flight worthy, a subtle manufacturing change in any one component can introduce a new failure mode that may not be uncovered during check-out and quality control procedures.

We are starting to see this problem becoming more and more serious each year, and it’s costing American industry dearly. It’s costing the space program dearly.

This interdependency between software and hardware implementation has, in effect, built design obsolescence into our products. It is becoming almost impossible to easily and safely upgrade systems as technology advances. This paralyzes the ability of our designers to utilize platforms that are upward compatible with technological advances.

In our space program, this has resulted in robotic operations that require direct human oversight, whether it is a rover on a planetary surface or an astronaut controlling the shuttle’s robotic arm to move objects in and out of the payload bay.

This requires many months of expensive simulation and training to plan and conduct these space operations.

We need to move to toward the next era of space robotic operations that places the human into the role of a systems manager - not a real time controller as they are today. This is a crucial difference.

Levels of intelligence need to be incorporated into our systems so that they can conduct routine tasks autonomously. Ultimately we want “herds” of machines to function as a cohesive, productive team to explore large areas of planets, build structures in space and perform continuous inspection of our most critical systems.

We also want those robots to be able to express emotion and be able to overcome some of the tremendous challenges we are facing. They can also perform the most dangerous tasks and keep our astronauts out of harm’s way.

Within the foreseeable future, intelligent machines will not totally replace people. They simply let people do what they do best – creative thought -- in the safest possible environment.

NASA believes one of the most fruitful approaches for getting us there is to look to biology for inspiration. Mother Nature holds all the best patents that already exist.

Nothing approaches the inherent intelligence, power efficiency or packing density of a “brain”. “Eyes” can almost respond to a single photon and biological electronics sensors are extraordinarily sensitive. Fireflies convert chemical energy to light with near perfect efficiency, and living membranes, such as skin, will self-heal when injured. No other technology we know of has a comparable ability to self-organize and reconfigure.

We need to look to nature for solutions.

We can’t have a power cord going all the way to Mars—the space program can’t work that way. So our computers must become thousands of times faster, denser, and less power consuming. We will talk about teraflops per watt not per megawatt and sizes in terms of cubic centimeters, not cubic meters.

The fastest computer today has a teraflop of speed, but it takes a megawatt of electricity to operate it. The brain is million times faster and takes a fraction of a watt.

Think about it.

We will have robots and spacecraft that are self-diagnosing and self-repairing. They will be able to learn and act, respond, adapt and evolve. They will also be able to reduce vast amounts of raw data to useful information products to assist humans, not replace them.

We will have a new era of human-machine partnerships. But this time, HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey won’t get depressed.

Nature is clearly superior, so we can use our understanding of cells and systems as guides for our next generation devices.

The computational systems of the future will be very different. They will not be designed or built anything like today’s computers. They will be more like the brain, with millions to billions of relatively simple but highly networked nodes. These computers will solve problems by absorbing data and being inherently driven to assimilate solutions to our most difficult problems.

Our goal is to keep these computational systems focused on what we want them to do. They will work like water flowing downhill, changing directions, flowing around large obstacles and over or through smaller ones—rapidly finding their own way to solutions.

The computer will capture all relevant physics, biology and real phenomena, including complex transient behavior.

Even more exciting will be the development of hybrid systems that combine the best features of biological processes, including DNA and protein based processes, with optoelectronics devices, and quantum devices. These hybrid systems will be extraordinary in performance and functionality, and not achievable by any one technology.

We get the best of both worlds, but only if physicists learn to cross the biological divide.

Just imagine the day when computers behave more like we do. We will communicate with them using all our senses through totally immersive environments including natural language -- not simply through characters typed on keyboard. They will understand our intentions and even sense our physical state.

Sound like science fiction?

Researchers at NASA Ames have successfully tested a revolutionary bio-computer interface using electromyographic signals (tiny electrical impulses from forearm muscles and nerves) to fully control the take off, flight and landing of a commercial airline in a high fidelity simulation. They don’t have keyboards for the computer, just the sensors on their arms and hands. The eventual goal of this research is to develop direct bio-computer interfaces using total human sensory, two-way interaction and communication, including even haptic feel.

As strange as it sounds, we will be moving back to the analog computer, except now the analog is the human brain.

Biologically-inspired computing tools will also enable us to develop intelligent robotic systems.

Before we send humans to explore beyond our planet, we will first send robotic colonies to set up livable systems. They’ll need to behave like just humans.

They’ll have to adapt automatically to the environment. They’ll be autonomous, and they’ll be able to do jobs in non-traditional ways.

Like humans, these robots will employ biologically-inspired sensors and motor control, anticipate future events, cooperate with other systems, select and depose leaders, and be motivated to explore, repair and adjust to meet changing needs or to respond to an emergency.

Giving robots and computers the capacity to learn and act requires to move from conventional deterministic software to “soft-computing” which accounts for uncertainty and imprecision. Neural networks – one element of soft computing -- could be the basis for the futuristic computers I described earlier. Neural networks assimilate vast amounts of data and extract information – trends, patterns, solutions--the kind of thing we do when we learn and think as humans.

Today we can build systems with hundreds to thousands of neural connections. In the future, they will have millions of connections in a package the size of a sugar cube.

For many applications, neural networks reduce supercomputer time by more than an order of magnitude while providing more accurate analysis than conventional approaches.

We’re simulating turbine engines on computer driven by neural nets to help engine manufacturers regain the critical edge they need. But they need biology to do it.

NASA also has applied neural networks to the flight controls of an F-15 aircraft. The traditional flight control software system – based on conventional, deterministic software methods -- required one million lines of code. We reduced it to about ten thousand.

We demonstrated improved performance. We introduced software faults, and the system identified the problem and self-corrected in seconds.

We even simulated loss of aircraft control surfaces, and the system adapted and returned aircraft control authority within seconds.

Now that’s an intelligent system. And we’re just getting started.

We will move from data . . . to information . . . to knowledge . . . to intelligence.

When we are ready to send humans deep into space, astronaut health and safety will be our top priority. Biologically-inspired technologies will enable a human-machine partnership that is advanced enough to ensure the well-being of astronauts, perhaps on a 2 to 4 year trip to Mars.

If you get appendicitis 50 million miles from Earth and travelling at 25,000 miles an hour, you won’t be able to come home.

And if you’re the only doctor on board, you’d better have some of these biologically-inspired tools. You can’t take a hospital with you. It’s too heavy.

We could develop nano-scale sensors with sensitivities and detection capabilities at the molecular level. They would be like little monitor cells, and they would transmit the information they acquire to other systems outside the body or inside our spacecraft.

While we won’t sense that such devices are in our bodies, we will certainly know they are there because of the continual stream of information they provide about what they are doing and finding. Such on-board devices will be crucial to health care in space or on the ground. An astronaut’s medical emergency could become a tragedy if we were forced to rely on responses from Earth, which might involve round-trip transmission times of 20 to 40 minutes.

Health and safety are much better served with real-time assessments and decisions, which could easily be done with on-board machines. A smart robot, acting as a health-monitoring “buddy” to a human, will free an astronaut from ongoing self-monitoring, leaving much more time for humans to think, create, and experiment.

Humans will still be the ultimate decision makers, using information from the robots and sensors. However, we will be much more informed decision makers than we are today. The idea of a “one size fits all”-cure like “take two tablets every four hours” just won’t do when we send astronauts to Mars. We will have diagnostic and treatment procedures that are adaptive in unknown environments.

Our machines will respond to our needs and our moods. By measuring nerve activity on the surface of the skin, machines can determine if a person is calm or agitated. Or we might measure hormone or neurotransmitter levels as an indicator of our emotional state or stress level.

They will also make us more productive and improve safety by alerting us to mistakes before we make them, letting us know when we are showing signs of fatigue—an enormous problem in corporate America today.

This is just a sampling of NASA’s vision of the amazing benefits biotechnology will bring us in the future.

And we can use these technologies to improve life on Earth.

For instance, the tiny health monitoring sensors I mentioned could give constant health updates and instant diagnoses. We are already working with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to attempt to develop such sensors. We are bringing our physics-based technologies to researchers in the NIH who need these tools. Science and technology are intertwining. We cannot separate them.

NASA sees great potential for enhancing astronaut health during lengthy missions, and the NCI is obviously interested in using the sensors to detect indications of cancer. The National Cancer Institute would like to detect the first mutations of a cell. We don’t know if we’ll get there, but micro-electric sensing may be the way to do it.

This system could also be used to control the delivery of drugs. The sensors could analyze blood chemistry – or other material – in-vivo. Equally important, the sensors could be placed at specific locations where measurement is optimal or where measurement is critical. We would know that a drug may be accumulating at too high a rate in a sensitive part of the body before there is any adverse response.

We would not wait for the body to tell us there is a problem at the macroscopic level, we would know it before hand. This sensor suite could monitor all critical bodily functions, account for gender differences, and use this data to guide therapies.

Biologically-inspired technologies also have incredible potential beyond health-care applications.

Eye-like devices of the future wouldn’t just work in the visual. They’d work across the entire spectrum. Just imagine how much intelligence that would give our factories, especially “eyes” with single-photon sensitivity.

These “eyes” could open up the entire bandwidth of vision and greatly enhance processing and control of products by detecting even the tiniest material defects both on the surface and far below the surface.

We could use “noses” to protect workers in hazardous situations by “sniffing out” potential dangers. This would revolutionize plant safety by providing layered levels of protection and warning, not achievable with today’s mass spectrometry.

As I said, the 21st century will be the age of biotechnology. It promises a bounty of life-enhancing technologies that will eclipse America’s incredible achievements during the last five decades—the decades of physics.

Let me take you on a futuristic journey.

Our entire notion of designing and building systems could change. We would like to have the power to pre-build entire systems in “cyber space” totally within the computer with geographically distributed teams using heterogeneous systems. Systems that use physics and biologically-based calculations to enhance their work.

We could plan and develop every step of every mission from concept to disposal before we ever place a single order or bend a single piece of metal. But in the end, we will still order parts and bend metal unless we have a revolution.

Instead of committing 90% of our resources early in the process when we only have 10% design knowledge—this is why programs overrun in industry and government—we could simulate everything first and focus our resources where they are needed most. When ready, we will have bounded 90% of uncertainty and have full confidence in the total system life cycle, cost, and performance.

That’s what NASA wants to do a decade from now.

However, the ultimate power of biology will be to design the molecules that contain the coding, or blueprint, for complex space systems – that is spacecraft DNA – that will initially build critical parts, and, ultimately, the entire spacecraft. We will simulate the entire process to be sure we have it right, but once we “plant the seed,” spacecraft genetics will take over in our factory of the future. Think of it as hydroponic farming for robots.

I’m talking about truly multi-functional capabilities. Machines would fully integrate mechanical, thermal management, power, and electronic systems. They’d be more like humans than simply black boxes and wiring harnesses placed on structures.

These biologically based systems may not look exactly like the systems we have today, but they will perform the same basic functions. They’ll just be better, faster, and cheaper.

When I talk of planting the seeds for a new revolution in technology I mean it in literal terms.

Let’s go another step further.

With the ability to grow spacecraft systems, our craft could grow new parts from raw materials or better yet, consume the parts it no longer needs to make the parts it does need.

This metamorphosis of single living entities or local eco-systems is taken for granted—it happens in nature every day, every minute, every second, everywhere. To some, it is science fiction to think of spacecraft in this way. But think of the implications to modern manufacturing and the radical new products we can make on Earth and enhance our society.

As I said, we need to develop machines that will work with our people in the future. But today, we have to work together with a common purpose to make this vision a reality and to make sure America achieves its destiny in the new millennium.

Every member of the partnership—government, industry, and academia—needs to contribute to researching and developing revolutionary technologies.

And I want to leave you with this thought.

This is not going to happen with wishful thinking.

This is not going to happen by scientific cannibalism.

This is going to happen because this country must understand that unless it looks to the future, unless it doesn’t take a vacation from long-term R&D, we may have problems beyond the 21st century.

But I believe without a doubt that the American public will get it. The potential is there. All we have to do is reach out.

Thank you very much.