New Skies Initiative

The beginning came slowly, as beginnings often do, under the name of the New Skies Initiative, also NSI or simply the Initiative. The name takes advantage of the two seemingly paradoxical connotations of the sky. First, and by far the most ancient, the idea of a sky is unifying, available to everyone simply by looking upward or through a window. But by this time, the complexity of Earth's sky, with its weather, shifting hues, and various meteorological phenomena both rare and mundane, had become somewhat an extraordinary feature. Mars lacked most of its richness, and the Moon and virtually any space habitat completely lacked it, having only a thin layer of air trapped in a bubble under a constant starry night. The idea of creating new skies, thus, induced both a widespread and gaudy ambition.

First, the various polities and organizations of the solar system had to define a concrete set of goals, fashioned after the result of many tugs of war between countries, companies, public interests, scientific viewpoints, philosophies, and constraints of time, technology, and money. Yes, even with a common interest, humanity was as multifaceted and, at times, antagonistic as always, as visions clashed, positions of power reshuffled, and occasional big issues of interplanetary politics leaked into the Initiative's sphere as an additional battleground. Through the trials and tribulations, each tenuous compromise clicked under the pawl one tooth at a time, ratcheting toward completion. Eventually, completion came in the form of the New Skies Initiative Strategic Objectives, or NSISO for short. This resulting set of criteria, lengthy and tedious, simplify into a few key points, as the many media outlets covering the topic presented them. 

The New Skies Initiative Strategic Objectives

First, the four major goals of the Initiative:

1. To establish a set of easily terraformable planets.

2. To design a system of robotic probes to terraform them.

3. To create the propulsion system to take the probes there in reasonable time.

4. To ensure the safety of the terraforming process and the long-term stability of all planets deemed suitable for colonization.

Thus, the New Skies Initiative fit neatly in the scientific projects of the time: It would start where other projects had left off, and conclude with a sturdy starting point for following missions to start from. Defining each goal came with its own challenges, but by far, the second and fourth points required the most time and effort to delineate: What are these probes for, and what can and can't they do?

Concerning this, the NSISO states what the robotic probes had to accomplish, and what they had to avoid in the process. Popular grievances about Earth's past largely drove these statements; a topic come again into the limelight due to Earth's rediscovered uniquenes. Somewhat tragically, nearly all of Earth's surface is artificial. From the expanses of farmland to sky-high cities, solar panels and industrial sectors, the environments that birthed humanity are largely present only in tiny reserves, ignoring the various recreations built throughout the Earth system. As the NSISO makes clear, humanity would not make the same mistake again, and thus the original geological formations of the second planet, as well as the ecosystems naturally formed after seeding, were to be preserved if at all possible. Thus, the probes would not turn the second planet into a road-crossed construction site connecting industrial plants spewing atmospheric gases, but into a virgin exoplanet turned green, upon which the robots are simply temporary inhabitants, leaving no litter, pollution, or even major earthworks such as roads behind. The NSISO thus mandated a circular resource cycle, minimal interaction with seeded organisms and features of planets deemed significant, and a set of safeguards against the robots growing out of a control — a constant background fear with automatons omnipresent and seemingly omnipotent. This aspect of the Initiative was dubbed the Verdant Objective, and though it received thorough criticism for being impractical, misguided, or even paradoxical, it remained a central part of the NSISO. 

To prioritize the Verdant Objective while minding other, more practical factors in the Initiative, the NSISO provides a list of priorities to guide the design and execution processes, unimaginatively dubbed the System Priority List. As much of the Initiative is an engineering problem, this list mirrors what engineers for time immemorial have used to compare priorities to each other as objectively as possible. The System Priority List describes eight priorities that will guide the machines of the New Skies Initiative in its entirety: Every last component, from rocket fuel to wire insulation, must satisfy higher items before they can satisfy lower ones. As follows — 

1. The NSISO's major goals and its Verdant Objective are above all.

2. Functionality. Machines must do the job they are designed for well.

3. Speed. Completing the Initiative quickly is a high priority — quickly being relative, for the NSISO estimated a timeframe of two centuries, on average, per planet.

4. Material efficiency. Designs will use a smaller amount of material when possible, for the more material they need, the more time and energy is required creating and recycling that material, and the greater the potential for pollution.

5. Structural limitations. Parts are preferred to safely bear their required loads. Of course, if failure means potentially causing the Initiative to fail, then this falls under priority 1. 

6. Energy efficiency. Perhaps strangely, not a great concern. This is because a large portion of a planet's available energy is necessary to complete the terraforming process, yielding plentiful power for the mission's entirety.

7. Reliability/Part lifetime. With automatic manufacture and replacement of parts, individual parts wearing out is acceptable.

8. Low Complexity. State-of-the-art manufacturing techniques can manufacture complex parts more easily than ever. 

These criteria are extremely unusual. For context, most great projects of history, as well as most of the present, use a much different set of criteria. A typical set reads like the following:

1. Functionality. This one often goes unmentioned; why would one even consider a solution that doesn't work?

2. Safety. The design should hurt no one.

3. Marketability. The design must be able to make money in the long run.

4. Low Complexity.

5. Reliability/Part lifetime.

6. The rest of the criteria which are specific to the design.

The typical criteria differ immensely from those of the System Priority List. Functionality is dethroned from the highest position because even a poor design is better than one that violates the Verdant Objective. Marketability is completely absent, for not only will the Initiative inevitably require a massive budget, but since the machines self-replicate, manufacturing only a few using the Initiative's funds suffices. Safety, too, is not a problem because a machine failing could never threaten a human life, and the NSISO already covered possible threats of the Initiative going wrong in its major goals. In this empathetic age, however, animals also require safe accommodations. Since the failure of a terraforming effort could cause billions of animals to suffer and perish, the NSISO allowed only relatively simple animals to come aboard.

The fact that part lifetime is so low on the System Priority List means that, generally, parts will fail often. This reflects the lack of human frustration associated with a part breaking and having to be fixed or replaced. With permission to fail, parts can be made faster and more numerous, with machines fixing, replacing, or recycling them without feeling frustration at all. With part lifetime a low priority and safety not present, a very important factor in the engineering process has changed: the factor of safety.

The factor of safety deserves a small tangent. Essentially, nearly any machine part, piece of infrastructure, building, or system is designed to withstand some design factor, or some measure of how strong or capable the item is. For example, a chair's design factor is the weight of a person that it must bear. However, because values are hard to know precisely, such as the weight of whomever purchases the chair or the precise strength of the chair material, objects are typically designed to bear a load equal to the design factor times something called the factor of safety. For example, for a factor of safety of 2.5, a chair must be able to bear 2.5 times a typical person's weight, just to be safe. Factors of safety usually vary from 2 to as much as 15 because of the importance of safety and the risk of an annoying or costly part replacement. In some cases, such as some aerospace applications, the demands are so high that parts are very near their breaking point, necessitating a factor as low as 1.2. Without risk to human life and frustration to human minds, the factor of safety of load-bearing components in the NSI, from robot legs to foundations of buildings, may be very low indeed, as low as 1.05 in some cases.

In conclusion, the NSISO does not call for effective, safe, simple solutions that are cost-effective, but for complex yet effective, fast-working systems that tend to have parts fail often. The longevity and efficacy of the designs themselves yet relatively short lifetimes of each part would earn the name the Theseus Principle.

With criteria finally set, the real work beckoned, and the myriad scientific circles, companies, and governments of the solar system began their labor. For the most part they collaborated, forming large teams that communicated in rays shot great distances through space, or around Earth or Mars. But as the Initiative would accept only the finest, most optimized designs for each of its components, these teams also competed with each other; mostly friendly, but high-stakes. With ideas proposed and grants given, designs for systems fought for adoption, whittling the submissions away until one stood alone. Then, with much honor to the designing team, the winning design joined the Initiative, integrating with its other systems. Like the NSISO that described it, the New Skies Initiative ratcheted to realization.