Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Mariano Capezzani

The beauty of Mars is overwhelming.

Mountains, valleys, mesas take your breath away and leave you wanting. Through robot eyes or your own, every shade of red, brown, purple and ocre combine in a mesmerizing landscape of greater extension and extremes than Earth itself. Weather is hostile and terrain inhospitable, yet our heart is forever captive and we’ll traverse the void at any cost.

Terraforming Mars will be mankind’s greatest endeavour, but it will change the planet forever. A necessary step for survival, but desperately heartbreaking nonetheless.

Just to think about the junkyards surrounding the great city-states at Echus Chaos or Isidis Planitia, floating bottles on the shores of the Hellas Sea, trash left behind by expeditioners at the slopes of Tharsis and Ascraeus, abandoned caravans and worn tires at Noctis Labyrinthus, fish & chip shops and overnight hotels surrounding the wobbly Space Elevator at Olympus.

Ugh…

There’s a price to pay for human colonization. It will push us past the limits of our technology, lifespan and biology, societal views, political and socio-economic paradigms, and emotional resilience to living farther than ever, longer than ever. It will be an intrinsically complex, stressful, wasteful process for all those willing to commit their lives to it.

We must help these brave people. Let us build awesome apps for them. Make their lives easier. Enrich their martian experience. Isn’t that what building products is about?

I bet Elon has a few ideas in mind, but I also have a few ideas of my own I’d like to share to the world right now.

First question: why martian apps at all?

I mean, we’ll still use Twitter and Medium and Google Maps and Candy Crush. The App Stores will follow the inter-webs all the way to the red planet. Beyond running spaceport facilities and other specialized atmosphere-modifying building-sized mammoth engineering marvels, is there a point for specific apps for interplanetary travelers?

Yes, there is. Big time. Here are just three app ideas that would enhance colonizers lives and more ways than one.

Martian app idea #1 — Mars Assist

A colonizer’s life is harsh. You will commit daily to impossible tasks with aggressive deadlines, under unconceivable pressure, fixing hundreds of problems in an unforgiving environment. You will face such challenges in every single EVA, and there will be many of those. Martians will spend probably half their day out on various missions:

Recces (read “rekkies”), or exploration trips to find suitable locations to expand the colony
Supervision of robot-driven automated construction of terrestrial infrastructure, base stations, living quarters, greenhouses, energy plants, etc.
Rover, builder or transponder maintenance
Daily chores such as collecting rocks, scraping soil, Earth-gazing, reminiscing of distant loved ones, etc.

So they will need all the help they can get.

Mars Assist is a mobile app that will help colonizers succeed at their key mission tasks, where “successful” doesn’t just mean come back alive or with minimal loss of limb. It means accomplishing the goal in a non-life threatening or nerve-racking fashion and generating enough data and learning to improve the odds of next missions. Its key objective is to hyper-enable humans to do their work in the most efficient possible way, empowering them with contextual information and control over their surroundings.

Mars Assist will have 3 main subsystems:

a) Navigator

Thing Google Maps on steroids. Maybe Google should do it. Maybe they already are. Maybe they’ll steal my idea.

Navigator will help users traverse through martian terrain in the context of a specific EVA mission, or any other terrestrial activity, and provide all relevant information to guarantee successful return to base.

Running on martian iPhones (marsPhones) with redundant execution on rover or base station, it will provide colonizers with an enhanced visual and verbal feedback on the current mission status and upcoming milestones, taking into consideration all available inputs such as rover telemetry, suit telemetry, geo-location, weather conditions, wind speed, transponder routes, mission waypoint location, and any other device-specific telemetry information available. Multi-variant processing of all these inputs, while considering previous mission history and typical machine and human fatigue patterns, will produce a Mission Success Coeficcient and a highly accurate estimation of time to completion. Intolerable values of MSC will inform of an abort decision or of alternate mission vectors to take place.

Conditions can change suddenly change on Mars, landscape features are deceiving, software and hardware can fail, and things never done before take more time than you can plan for. Navigator can help users be aware of calculated risks and counter the instinct to press on and “get it done” that, while adventurous and the stuff of movies, occasionally gets people killed. Every human life is precious, especially on Mars.

Navigator also has a mission planner component, where the tasks, milestones and expected times can be estimated using previous mission metrics or, alternatively, educated guesswork.

b) True sight

Think Terminator eyes meets Star Walk. Maybe Google is building it. Magic Leap certainly looks like it is. Some of the early demos are impressive.

As a complement to Navigator, the True Sight module will provide high-refresh rate augmented reality overlays on the marsPhone or on the helmet visor. The overlays will describe anything from landscape features, meteorological phenomena, nearby waypoints and any other relevant location with multiple layers of information. It will point to features hidden from line of sight behind hills, mesas or mountains. It will recognise whirlwinds and sand storms. It will show the Sun and Earth under the horizon, star formations, Phobos and Deimos, Mars Odyssey, Musk Mars Orbiter 1.

Besides natural objects, it will also describe any man-made object it can recognize using computer vision. The models will have to be trained incorporating peta bytes of new visual dictionaries of tools, machinery, utility objects and any other hardware marvel we will have sent to Mars prior to colonizers. You don’t want to unscrew the wrong panel on the miniature plutonium isotope decay reactor, thinking Cheerios or porn mags are stashed inside. I mean, colonizers will most probably not be chosen for their innate stupidity, but try living in Mars and keeping your cool for extended periods of time.

c) Force control

If you’re going to build solutions for Mars, why not think cool? Who wouldn’t want to use The Force to move objects?

Force control will enable colonizers, be they true of heart and righteous, to remotely operate any tool, machine, gadget, system, rover, using their marsPhone or their connected-suit glove. All hardware sent to Mars will have to be built following standard embedded protocols to allow fly-by-wire generic remote operation. So when a Mars explorer on a settlement activity finds a greenhouse module ready to be unpacked, it will most definitely not have to flip a manual or “google” instructions to disassemble the supporting structures or organic payload. It will just need to make sure the device is “redtooth” discoverable, connect it to the marsPhone and then issue standard self-recognisable command sets like “disassemble” or “engage cryo-defrost cycle”. Of course, manual operation will be permitted, if something goes awry.

Security being paramount, all operations issued and executed will require DNA-secure authentication and incorruptible audit trails. Even if you attempt to self-destruct the colony, we’ll know every time, so stop trying.

The three combined modules of Mars Assist will ensure colonizers trek out with a realistic sense of awareness and control of their surroundings, which will in turn derive in a more confident approach to problem-solving, expanded sensory perception to perform mission critical tasks at near robot-speed, lower oxygen consumption and ergo a higher probability of survival.

Martian app idea #2 — Mars Exchange

Earthlings are supremely effective at dilapidating resources and shielding our greedy intentions with demagoguery. Socialists can’t stand to be corrected, and Capitalists are driven by self-centered obsessions. But on Mars, our socio-political and economic paradigms will face their fiercest challenge: the need to reinvent our humanity and ways of living to ensure our species withstands the test of time. Whether city-states emerge and a pan-martian eco-friendly economic model (inspired by, not coincidentally related to, eco-economics) becomes adopted as the de-facto standard is yet to be seen, and one can hope, but any basis of future economy will, with almost absolute certainty, be based on a digital de-centralised ecosystem. Mars society will not be a pyramid, but a trustless, collaborative environment where everyone can generate value, and no one can control it.

Buzzword alert! Yes, the crypto-craziness is coming to Mars, people. Fact is, what Satoshi started cannot be stopped, and some of the mind-bending byproduct innovation will find its way to the red heaven sooner rather than later in support of crucial use cases. I know power will be an issue. Can’t really afford proof-of-work and server farms in Mars. We’ll get around it…

So, what is Mars Exchange? It’s basically an open trade platform where players in the martian economy and workers of city-states can register their value-generating enterprise and issue tokens that represent an interest in that enterprise. Tokens are thus used as means to exchange goods and services, and as a way to acquire an interest in a particular human endeavour. No intermediaries. No central-authority. No fees. (Check out Galia’s ideas on this.)

Mars exchange runs on two types of tokens: life tokens and value tokens.

Life tokens are earned by human beings, just by being alive. Everyone is entitled. They are periodically allocated a quota from the day they set foot on Mars. It’s DNA-secure, so we better get our scanner tech right or there will be a lot of finger pricking. These tokens have a standard value that does not change over time, and they are transferable to other people while living, or to next of kin after death up to any number of levels in the family tree. These tokens are therefore finite for a given lifespan.

Life tokens intrinsically sustain life, so they can be spent in exchange for common goods and services in such a way that all common basic needs are covered. Sounds like a socialist regime, right? We can protect this system from utter failure by ensuring that control and allocation of life tokens is not governed by a central authority, rather it is issued by a decentralized network where every Mars inhabitant is participant and operates a full node that will process the token allocation transactions. This will ensure everyone supports the network.

Value tokens are issued by local Mars enterprises, which are owned and operated by their workers. Anyone can acquire value tokens. Individuals will be able to sell life tokens to buy value tokens in the exchange, therefore assigning market value to them. These tokens are also finite. Companies will need to keep running their operations to generate the tokens, in order to generate value, so exchanges will be able to trade on the tokens in return for other value tokens or life tokens.

All token-generating subsystems are block-chain based and therefore immutable and incorruptible. All operations are secure, bound by open protocols and smart contracts.

This paradigm might face challenges when under market demand/supply pressure. For example, how come life tokens have fixed value and value tokens can increase in value as market dictates? We have time to solve it.

Martian app idea #3 — Mars Chat

Life on Mars will be hard, at least for a while. Full autonomy will not be reached within the first two centuries, since much of the demand for human and technological resources will be upper-bound by the top speed of the migration railway. Mars Transport System can only send a couple hundred colonizers per mission, and these occur mainly in 2 year windows.

Therefore, communication with Earth will be frequent and critical for colonial activities. And everybody knows what a pain a delayed conversation is like. If a 1-second delay using Skype drives us insane, think of what a 25-minute roundtrip delay Earth to Mars will do to your psyche. It doesn’t work. It will break all bonds, exacerbate the deep feeling of emptiness, and reduce personal and professional conversations to the equivalent of pidgeon mail.

But there’s a solution.

Mars Chat is an assisted chat. You don’t chat directly to your Earth counterpart. You chat locally to an AI that represents the remote party and behaves and responds with striking similarity to it. Think of the 80’s “Pick Your Own Adventure” books. The script is adaptive and pre-recorded. Mars Chat will guide you in creating the most appropriate pre-recorded responses and cover the conversation pathways based on the receiving party’s profile, previous conversation history and other relevant contextual events. If you’re calling your daughter on her birthday, Mars Chat will request that you record a conversation graph that covers specific topics on the context of that conversation. If it’s a work call, the graph will include branches related to specific objectives or topics to be covered.

It will take much longer and require more preparation, and it will certainly not be interactive for the initiating party, but it will feel like so for the receiving one. In reality, it won’t be much different from a regular conversation that you prepare in your head before actually making the call.

Once the script is recorded and all predicted pathways covered, then the comms package is sent and a phone rings on Earth.

That’s it. Three apps.

All will tether on the Mars Global Comms Network which is also a key component of Muskworld. All martian gear will support Mars Assist Force Control. All martian inhabitants and enterprises will operate in the Mars Exchange. And Mars Chat will be standard on every marsPhone, with free upgrades forever.

Elon, this is too hard. You need a partner, something in the lines of Weyland-Yutani, to make it happen. “Musk-Capezzani Planetary Services”. It has a ring to it.

No, I’m serious about this. I’m happy to build concept prototypes for these apps. Say the word.

These apps should be built soon, tested, validated, improved. We need to get this right. We want people to die on Mars by choking on artificial chicken bones or dislocating their heads playing Mars-Twister. All other preventable causality we must address. Our survival depends on it. It’s too important.

Let’s roll our sleeves and build the apps for martians!

Oh, and before you go, will you just take a look at this place…

Apps for martians was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Apps for martians

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