Artifical Intelligence

Imagine a world where you have two lives; real and virtual. Imagine that the virtual world looks and sounds just as real as the real world. Imagine that when you are in the real world and you see something, you get the same reaction as you do when you watch a movie. Imagine being able to interact with objects and people in that world and manipulate them as you wish. Imagine being someone else. Someone you wanted to be, but could never do in reality. Imagine interacting with others in ways you could never dream of doing in the real world.

This imaginary world can be a Virtual World or a Virtual Reality. With virtual reality you also get to immerse yourself using head mounted displays or other type of real-world sensors and projectors to enhance the virtual experience.

You are standing on the surface of Mars and are wondering how much effort it took humanity to get this far. In front of you there are three domes. One is your habitat, the other is used to extract water from the ice found in the rocks underneath and the third is the amazing BioGenDome, the eco system that supports life, you and is the main reason you are on this planet.

It took several spaceships, many missions and a lot of engineering to set them up. It’s been many year since that historic day when men set foot on Mars. A lot has happened since then. It still took anywhere between 6 month to two years for a round trip from Earth. The long term residents had to make this place like their home. Most of the difficulty wasn’t the lack of resources or day-to-day survival issues, though these had to be addresses anyway. The biggest problem was psychological. It could be very lonely here. With just a handful of people, there wasn’t much to interact with. At least you can be sure of one thing now. This mission, this whole colony, wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t because of the robots. They made all the difference. Everybody thought that the robot’s most important use on Mars would be to explore, make geological and biological discoveries or help us make the domes. Instead it turned out that they were far more useful as companions. We use them like pets. It’s wonderful. They are quite intelligent, though they are really like pets because sometimes they don’t understand the most obvious things. Either way, we love them. They keep us happy, engage us mentally and emotionally and it always feels that they know us better than ourselves. They make this place much more bearable. Actually it’s quite enjoyable here. “Hey R. Andy, where have you been all this time. I was starting to get worried…”