Where Information Technology ends and Metaphysics begins!!!

 Asoke K. Laha President & MD, Interra IT

At the end of November, a news item was released that took the Internet by storm: an ex-employee of NASA, who was part of the Mars expedition’s downlink operations, claimed to have seen two human-like beings walking towards the Viking Mars lander. Minutes after the story broke, the Internet witnessed a flurry of activities. Stories ranged from denouncing the claim, saying that no such expedition on Mars took place, to a number of conspiracy stories, claiming that NASA was involved in a cover-up.

We may never know what actually happened that day, but the study of outer space and beyond has always been a passion for many over the centuries. Around thirty or so years ago, “Star War” was a fictional hallucination that many predict it could turn into a reality in the future. In the past, the Moon was a revered object, invoking both love and fear. But we managed to turn dreams into reality by getting a man on the moon. When it came to Mars, some believed that mankind could never penetrate into the mystical appeal of the red planet. But that changed when the Viking Explorer sent images of Mars back to earth. I have a feeling that the next big breakthrough in information technology will come in the form of visiting planets that we once thought were far beyond our reach – such as Mars, Neptune or maybe even Saturn and Jupiter. Perhaps, one day in the future, we will have the ability to establish a tower in Mars, frequently broadcasting images back to Earth. Maybe in the future, we will have technology so advanced that we can establish regular space shuttles missions between various planets. Just maybe we will get a better understanding of our perplexing and fascinating universe. The key to these potentialities is the evolution of newer technologies. From time immemorial, space has been a source for whetting human appetite for discoveries and innovations. There have been many efforts to establish contact and understand outer space. Many theories were propounded – most of them were predictions and conjectures based on unscientific theories and unfounded knowledge. Some swore that there was life on the Moon and Mars. Even though science has disproved many of these theories, it has failed to douse the quest for people to unleash the mysteries around the universe. Perhaps, with advances in technologies, some of these mysteries will be finally solved. Every mission by NASA is dependent on the effectiveness of its communication systems. In missions to deep space, the vehicle hardly returns to Earth. Interaction with the spacecrafts is through communications, including diagnosis, spacecraft problems and their rectifications. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter undertaken in 2013 had sent nearly 25 terabytes of data. However, NASA estimates that the capability for deep space communications will need to grow exponentially in the next few decades. With the accretion of incremental knowledge of the cosmos, more pressing specific questions arise. To answer them scientifically, more sophisticated instruments are needed which can generate more data. This data then needs to be mined, processed and analyzed, necessitating more complex instruments and applications. It is an endless pursuit, which goes in cycles, bringing about tectonic changes in communication technology. As the sophistication of technology becomes incremental, its challenges become exponential. For instance, the space vehicle has to be planned and executed for traversing billion of light years from Earth. The extreme reliability of the spacecraft, the sustainability of such ecosystems, the medical research that has to go into insulating humans from unknown bacteria and viruses and last but not the least, the foolproof communication systems have to be put in place and this will eventually rewrite human history. There is an old idiom: trade follows flag. This was true when Columbus discovered American, Vasco da Gama anchored his ship at Calicut, the British arrived in India and when the Moghuls invaded India. This process is infinite, but with some changes now. That is to say, everything is germinated in fiction and that fiction merges with reality after decades, centuries or millennia. Science fiction has foretold many such things and they are still doing that. But what confounds me is whether I have written a science fiction or a narrative of the coming future: I am leaving that for the readers to decide.