3. Future Space Technologies
Drivers
Extreme Computational
power… on the edge
Massively distributed
storage
Plummeting cost of
prediction
Quantum communications &
Sensing
Likely Technologies
Limited AGI on-board satellites
High degree of SSA
Free space optical
communications
Quantum Key Cryptography
Quantum sensing
Digital Twin systems
Space-augmented 5G+
4. Future Space Technologies - Impacts
1. Ultra-high Resolution
Real-time monitoring &
sensing
2. Ubiquitous, secure &
resilient Connectivity
3. Intelligent, autonomous,
cooperative satellite
constellations
“ We are building a Star wars civilization with
stone age emotions, medieval institutions
and God-like technology”
Edward O. Wilson
Space-Enabled
Game changing
applications for every
sector and activity
Thank you for the opportunity to share with you the research plans of the SmartSat CRC
We at the University of South Australia together with colleagues form the finest universities in Australia, as well as the CSIRO and DST have embarked on a bid to establish a CRCin intelligent advanced communications and satellite systems.
We aim to integrate advanced communications, particularly Free Space Optical communications, artificial intelligence and next generation EO sensors and analytics to provide our nation with sovereign ubiquitous connectivity, surveillance and sensing of our land, seas and oceans.
We will develop the technologies and test and validate them on the ground, in the air and in space culminating in a constellation of satellites with both general purpose and specialized payloads to help Australia solve both commercial and defence problems
We are at a very interesting juncture Ladies and Gentlemen
A number of technologies have been growing at an exponential pace but have now reached the knee of the J curve at the same time
Moore’s Law has actually playing out long before he observed it. And because we are linear thinkers we have not notice the impact that it is about to have on us.
If you take 30 Linear paces you will arrive at a distance of 30 paces, if however you take 30 logarithmic paces you will arrive a 1 Billion
All of our technologies have been growing at logarithmic pace
Drivers ------------------
[1] Extreme Computational Power… on the edge
50 years ago we could buy 1 transistor at $1 – I remember how proud I was when I bought my 9 transistors transistor radio! It even had 4 Bands!
Today you can buy 10 billion transistors for a few bucks
And because we have now reached the knee of the J curve we are told that within the next 20 yrs we will likely exceed human computational power.
[2] Massively Distributed Storage
The same is happening to data storage
In the 50s you could buy from IBM 5MB for 5Million and you needed a forklift to shift it; you can now buy several Tbytes for $100
Again it is anticipated that Google’s current data centers will fit on one sugar cube. Of course Google’s data is also increasing exponentially.
[3] Plummeting cost of prediction
These two dramatic technological advances are the engines of the innovation economy.
Firstly the cost of doing arithmetic calculations dropped dramatically so we began to convert everything into arithmetic
resulted a dramatic drop in performing arithmetic and gave us digitalization (we converted our are books into numbers and disrupted the book industry, our music into numbers the film chemistry into numbers and disrupted the photography industry and so on). We are now doing the same to prediction
Current AI technologies such as ML/DL are essentially prediction machines and they are fast reducing the cost of prediction! We are now beginning to convert non-prediction activities (like driving a car ) to prediction activities because it is cheap to do so!. This means that we will get machines to do more of it! So the value of humans engaging in prediction (like diagnosing disease or driving a car) will drop – thus the fear of job losses (entirely justified)
We have had autonomous vehicles for a long time! So too we had robots for a long time… but these were in controlled environments because we had to hardwire the rules by which they operated into them. We inserted many If,… then else routines into them. In a controlled environment the number of such routines although it can be large it s finite so we manage it.
When however we place these machines in the real world then the if…then… rules grows combinatorically and approaches infinity thus making it impossible to anticipate all the if then conditions/actions to ensure that the machine behaves like we would.
It was less than 10 years ago that experts were totally convinced that we will never have driverless cars. Not until we reframed the problem!
Instead of encoding all the rules into it. We use neural nets to mimic the way we humans learn by building models through examples testing these models (as sometimes they are imperfect) and if we like the results we stick with them of if not re-adjust them. This is why you want your children to learn from good role models!!
it is is i
As the machine predictions get better our own will drop in value
Technologies --------------------
Quantum Information Science will help us develop technologies in three areas
[1] Quantum computation
QC will allow us to solve problems that are currently impossible or practically impossible to solve ( eg Shor’s algorithm (Q. algorithm for integer factorization) would be solved in milliseconds
[2] Quantum cryptography or more precisely QKD will provide us the capability to have an unconditionally secret method of communicating
[3] Quantum Sensing
sensing will allow us to put the best pair of glasses that we can put on and to thus have the best image resolution possible that the laws of physics can provide us
Allow us to design RADAR which can detect objects at extremely low energy (say 0db) replace SONAR with underwater LADER and provide us stealth capabilities
or
