Hope probe – Close Read

What Gaganyaan tells us about chat AI, and vice versa

Talk of chat AI* is everywhere, as I’m sure you know. Everyone would like to know where these apps are headed and what their long-term effects are likely to be. But it seems that it’s still too soon to tell what they will be, at least in sectors that have banked on human creativity. That’s why the topic was a centrepiece of the first day of the inaugural conference of the Science Journalists’ Association of India (SJAI) last month, but little came of it beyond using chat AI apps to automate tedious tasks like transcribing. One view, in the limited context of education, is that chat AI apps will be like the electronic calculator. According to Andrew Cohen, a professor of physics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, as quoted (and rephrased) by Amrit BLS in an article for The Wire Science:

When calculators first became available, he said, many were concerned that it would discourage students from performing arithmetic and mathematical functions. In the long run, calculators would negatively impact cognitive and problem-solving skills, it was believed. While this prediction has partially come true, Cohen says the benefits of calculators far outweigh the drawbacks. With menial calculations out of the way, students had the opportunity to engage with more complex mathematical concepts.

Deutsche Welle had an article making a similar point in January 2023:

Daniel Lametti, a Canadian psycholinguist at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, said ChatGPT would do for academic texts what the calculator did for mathematics. Calculators changed how mathematics were taught. Before calculators, often all that mattered was the end result: the solution. But, when calculators came, it became important to show how you had solved the problem—your method. Some experts have suggested that a similar thing could happen with academic essays, where they are no longer only evaluated on what they say but also on how students edit and improve a text generated by an AI—their method.

This appeal to the supposedly higher virtue of the method, over arithmetic ability and the solutions to which it could or couldn’t lead, is reminiscent of a similar issue that played out earlier this year – and will likely raise its head again – vis-à-vis India’s human spaceflight programme. This programme, called ‘Gaganyaan’, is expected to have the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launch an astronaut onboard the first India-made rocket no earlier than 2025.

The rocket will be a modified version of the LVM-3 (previously called the GSLV Mk III); the modifications, including human-rating the vehicle, and their tests are currently underway. In October 2023, ISRO chairman S. Somanath said in an interview to The Hindu that the crew module on the vehicle, which will host the astronauts during their flight, “is under development. It is being tested. There is no capability in India to manufacture it. We have to get it from outside. That work is currently going on. We wanted a lot of technology to come from outside, from Russia, Europe, and America. But many did not come. We only got some items. That is going to take time. So we have to develop systems such as environmental control and life support systems.”

Somanath’s statement seemed to surprise many people who had believed that the human-rated LVM-3 would be indigenous in toto. This is like the Ship of Theseus problem: if you replace all the old planks of a wooden ship with new ones, is it still the same ship? Or: if you replace many or all the indigenous components of a rocket with ones of foreign provenance, is it still an India-made launch vehicle? The particular case of the UAE is also illustrative: the country neither has its own launch vehicle nor the means to build and launch one with components sourced from other countries. It lacks the same means for satellites as well. Can the UAE still be said to have its own space programme because of its ‘Hope’ probe to orbit and study Mars?

Cohen’s argument about chat AI apps being like the electronic calculator helps cut through the confusion here: the method, i.e. the way in which ISRO pieces the vehicle together to fit its needs, within its budget, engineering capabilities, and launch parameters, matters the more. To quote from an earlier post, “‘Gaganyaan’ is not a mission to improve India’s manufacturing capabilities. It is a mission to send Indians to space using an Indian launch vehicle. This refers to the recipe, rather than the ingredient.” For the same reason, the UAE can’t be said to have its own space programme either.

Focusing on the method, especially in a highly globalised world-economy, is a more sensible way to execute space programmes because the method – knowing how to execute it, i.e. – is the most valuable commodity. Its obtainment requires years of investment in education, skilling, and utilisation. I suspect this is also why there’s more value in selling launch-vehicle services rather than launch vehicles themselves. Similarly, the effects of the electronic calculator on science education speak to advantages that are virtually unknown-unknowns, and it seems reasonable to assume that chat AI will have similar consequences (with the caveat that the metaphor is imperfect: arithmetic isn’t comparable to language and large-language models can do what calculators can and more).

* I remain wary of the label ‘AI’ applied to “chat AI apps” because their intelligence – if there is one beyond sophisticated word-counting – is aesthetic, not epistemological, yet it’s also becoming harder to maintain the distinction in casual conversation. This is after setting aside the question of whether the term ‘AI’ itself makes sense.

The UAE’s hacks for international prominence

The UAE seems to be making a sincere attempt to whitewash itself, according to a New York Times report on September 1, by hosting the COP28 climate talks. This is both unsurprising and fascinating – both because we’ve seen this in the local cosmopolitan self-image the country has sought to build. This is perhaps most overt with Dubai, but Abu Dhabi and Sharjah as well: while the former, with its surfeit of tourist attractions, seems keen to appear to be from the future, as they say, all three cities have been erected on a migrant labour force, especially from the Indian subcontinent, that is otherwise kept hidden from sight. The country is also the personal fiefdom of the emirs of each emirate and has no interest or room for critical dialogues on most matters of any import – a point that the newspaper’s report also makes:

“That’s the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the U.A.E. acting as host of the annual global climate conference,” said Devin Kenney, who researches the United Arab Emirates for Amnesty International. “How are you supposed to have a serious discussion about a critical problem for all humanity in a country where critical discussion is illegal?”

As far as taking responsibility for major events to launder one’s international reputation goes, the UAE’s previous attempt was its Mars mission. In July 2020, the country ‘launched’ a probe named ‘Hope’ to the red planet, which successfully achieved orbital capture in February 2021. Emaratis celebrated the occasion in much the same way Indians had with the Mars Orbiter Mission, and such celebration was probably the mission’s primary objective. The UAE’s spaceflight organisation was actually founded in 2014; the probe was assembled in the University of Colorado, by engineers from the UAE as well as from Arizona State University and the University of California, Berkeley; its ground-segment requirements are being met by NASA and a private entity in Arizona; and it was tested in and launched by Japan, onboard its H-IIA rocket.

‘Hope’ was not a product of the UAE’s space programme because the UAE doesn’t have a space programme the way India, China, Russia, Japan or the US have a space programme. Yet the UAE reaped a reputational windfall out of the exercise, thrusting itself into the ranks of countries that have successfully conducted interplanetary missions, and giving its citizens and ‘permanent residents’ something to cheer about.

Recently, in an opinion article in The Hindu, Jindal School of Government and Public Policy associate professor Rahul Menon used the ‘Hope’ mission as an example of a country with a lower population (and thus relatively lower availability of highly skilled persons in diverse fields) achieving what India, China, etc. had because of state intervention, towards his larger point that such intervention is also capable of yielding desirable outcomes. But the UAE is a red herring in this arena whose state did nothing more than fork out a considerable sum of (what is essentially family) money, fly out some of its best engineers to the US, contract a rocket in Japan, and wait. Seldom having seen the country do better, I bet it’s trying to pull a similar trick with COP28.

A trip to Jebel Jais

None of the images in this post are available to reuse.

I visited Jebel Jais, or the Mt. Jais, mountain in the UAE yesterday. It is a part of the Al Hajar Mountains, which in Arabic translates roughly to ‘The Stone Mountains’ (جِبَال ٱلْحَجَر). These mountains line the northeastern border of the Arabian peninsula, running the length of and almost parallel to Oman’s eastern coast. In the UAE, it pierces into the emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, and that’s where Jebel Jais is located as well.

A small group of us drove from Sharjah a few hours after a sandstorm had hit, sending the visibility plummeting and rendering the whole desert landscape with a dystopian brush. The way from Sharjah to the Al Hajar is largely empty, dotted now and then by a government building, a petrol station or unused housing colonies. But if you pay attention to the sand, you’ll see it changes colour from a pale orange to dark grey to bright orange, and finally to a dull grey as you reach the mountains themselves. I couldn’t capture this on my phone camera.

The tectonic context of the Al Hajar: the Arabian plate is moving into the Eurasian plate in the north, deforming the crust along the Makran subduction zone in the Gulf of Oman and the Zagros fault in Iran. Beyond this, I found a dispatch in the April 2015 issue of Gazelle, a publication of the Dubai Natural History Group, that matched much of my local experience around the mountains. So let me quote from there at length:

Twelve DNHG members, led by Sonja Lavrenčič, headed to Ras al Khaimah on April 10 for an exploration of Wadi Bih; an extensive watercourse which once served as a caravan route through Ras al Khaimah and Musandam. [Wadi in Arabic is roughly ‘stream’ or the path of a stream.]

The wadi lies under Jebel Jais, considered one of the highest points in the UAE, and presents a magnificent though very harsh landscape. At the time of our visit all the channels were completely dry and one branch of the watershed was barricaded by the Jabana landslide.

A little before my group’s visit, in fact, there had been a heavy downpour due to which the waters had flooded the drains along the sides of the road, breached the high water-mark in the plains and triggered a half-dozen landslides.

The rocky debris collected near the feet of the mountains due to a landslide.

Between two ridges is a broad alluvial plain with a scattering of acacia trees, and our route took us in a loop around this area, skirting the edges of the slope.

The valley has a small modern settlement, and we encountered signs of earlier habitations at intervals. A tributary ravine named Wadi Ghabbas shelters a handful of ruined stone houses among Sidr trees [Ziziphus spina-christi], and another collection of homesteads stands across the plain under the opposite slope. …

Notable monuments to the exertions of earlier residents are the heavy stone walls of terrace fields seen around the wadi. The retaining walls were built over several seasons in locations where they would catch layers of alluvial wash; the accumulation of moist deep earth would then yield a crop of high-grade barley, which was packed off to the coast and used especially for sfai flatbread.

We examined two cisterns, stone-lined and of rounded rectangular form. In other environments the green opaque water with its drifting skim and fringe of withered grass might not be thought enticing but, in this desiccated terrain, whatever is wet is welcome.

The ascent to Jebel Jais begins in about 140 km and is picturesque from the start, especially if you can appreciate the features of arid landscapes. I lived for four years in the middle of nowhere in the UAE a while ago. I didn’t enjoy life then but you start to understand the desert and find pleasure when the heat is drier. On the day of our visit, in fact, the relative humidity was 40% and there was prediction of rain. Ras Al Khaimah is often the wettest of the seven emirates of the UAE, partly because of the Al Hajar.

The Al Hajar is at the centre of Ras Al Khaimah’s aspiration to become as prosperous as the emirate of Dubai. You might see some of these photos sport unusual linear shadows – they’re of cellphone towers. The UAE’s two cellphone networks have towers across the mountains. Almost all the towers bear the words “Jebel Jais – Ras Al Khaimah”. Perhaps the thinking is that if your phone works all over the place, you might be less averse to spending time here at any time of day. We did see one group of people hosting a barbecue halfway up Jebel Jais and quite a few others on picnics.

There are also spacious viewing decks with dumpsters, clean public toilets and – near these decks – solar-powered water purifiers and street lamps. We also spotted a (speed-controlled) roller-coaster and what’s purported to be the world’s long zip-line. It was closed for service when we visit because of the sandstorm. Someone said there’s a proposal for a five-star hotel near the Jebel Jais peak, plus other restaurants, cafés, camps and outdoor activities in the area.

In early 2021, the UAE’s Hope probe entered into orbit around Mars. Where R&D is concerned, UAE might be considered naïve but also extremely wealthy, allowing it to throw money at problems that would indeed benefit from more money. The Hope probe’s development had involved some scientists in the UAE as well as three American universities, which had also put the probe together. But the probe flew with the UAE flag and its orbital capture was timed to happen in the 50th year of the country’s existence. The UAE is effectively using the achievements of spaceflight available to achieve today to elevate its international standing and advertise its ability to think progressively, even if in a superficial sense.

Closer to ground, en route to Jebel Jais, you might spot a labourers’ camp or two, where conditions have only recently improved to include minimum wages for Indians. This contrast is inescapable throughout the UAE but especially in its rapidly urbanising parts. Ras Al Khaimah itself is a wealthy emirate whose highways feature sophisticated traffic cameras and radar imagers even as they’re flanked by petrol stations operated by overworked, underpaid Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants.

Near the feet of the Al Hajar, in fact, the emirate has been doling out land (and water and power) to Emiratis for them to build large houses on, anticipating the area’s impending, inevitable prosperity. There’s nothing similar for the immigrant workers who laid those supply lines.

A panoramic shot of the Jebel Jais landscape. Ignore the smear.

An important thing that the emirates, their companies and their contractors are doing is exercising a latent resentment of the aridity. The workers’ work to ‘develop’ Jebel Jais is hardly distinguishable from an exercise in transforming the desiccation into a tenuous urban paradise, in much the same way Dubai has been expanding by gradually swallowing sea and sky and Abu Dhabi has been by exploiting hydrocarbon extraction and export.

I’m not sure what Ras Al Khaimah’s long-term plans are, to be honest, but if they’re anything like those of Dubai, one has to think they also include proposals to ‘reclaim’ the sea, afforest large areas of the desert, roll out cloud-seeding programmes, create and expand a ‘financial district’, attract tourists and spread the gospel of consumerism.

We had started our ascent at around 4 pm and reached an altitude of some 1.5 km by 5.40 pm. We couldn’t go much further because the road work hadn’t been completed beyond that point. The peak of Jebel Jais itself was another 0.5 km upward. There was no wind and for the first time there was some blue in the sky, which meant we were above the sandstorm. It was also 6º C or so cooler than it was on the ground.

On the way down, we stopped for some cotton candy (at a small restaurant a local had set up in one of the viewing decks) and continued on. Two new sights we were able to catch were of the mountains we couldn’t see properly during the ascent, because of the sand in the air, and some cirrus clouds in the sky.

Beholding something colossal is a distinctly unsettling feeling. Something so large that you realise the smallness of your own body, and the bodies of other people, and simultaneously the largeness of the world around you. Especially the ability of little things – pebbles, motes of sand, splinters of rock – to crenellate on and on, not stopping when they’re as big as you, as your house, as your airplanes. They keep going like a deliberate reminder by the forces of nature of the scale at which they’ve been labouring for millennia. Thus, you’re forced to countenance the simple and immutable weight of perspective. Like tens of thousands of people join a protest until parliaments and palaces tremble, the mountainous accretion of diminutive objects can loom large enough to render human intelligence and ingenuity itself of doubtful value. This, they seem to say, is the world. Welcome.

Just as we reached the highway and began on the road home, a second, more intense sandstorm had hit the region and the hillscape became martian. The wind and the sand whipped so incessantly around that they scattered sunlight meaningless. You could easily defy its brightness and look directly at it. Thanks to millions of motes of sand, your star is no longer blinding.

Now for home.

UAE’s spaceflight shortcut to making history

This post benefited from valuable input and feedback from Thomas Manuel.

In an hour or so, the UAE’s Hope probe, currently en route to Mars, will beam a signal to Earth about whether it managed to get into orbit around the red planet. Thanks to the Indian experience of the same feat, achieved in 2014, we all know what this moment must be like to the people of the UAE… I think.

I’m also seeing a lot of quotes doing the rounds on Twitter and also in the news including messages of Arab pride, that this moment is a success for the Arab world irrespective of whether the Hope probe successfully completes orbital capture. While I’m sure a lot of writers will unpack the meaning of this moment in the days to come – including the fact that the UAE’s riches in particular are erected on a desperate workforce that migrated to the Gulf in search of better fortunes, and still labours in the shadows with none of the labour rights that the country’s full-time citizens enjoy – I hope some of them will be able to focus on two things: the connection between making history and spaceflight itself, and between UAE’s age and ambitions.

On the first count, the complexity of spaceflight seems to offer a shortcut, of sorts, to history-making today: perfecting a rocket launch, building a functional satellite capable of lasting many months in space, deploying a suite of instruments that can semi-autonomously investigate the properties of another world seems to be able to guarantee a significant amount of notability.

This is not tautological: there are many enterprises today that demand a considerable amount of resources, focus and skill to execute – a vaccination drive that doesn’t abuse its healthcare workers, for example, or even building a big bridge over the sea without injuring any of the workers involved in its construction, but neither compares to spaceflight in the latter’s ability to capture the public imagination. I suspect strongly that the crises currently facing humankind are becoming an increasingly larger part of this perception – both in terms of spaceflight being a sort of epitome of the human ability to innovate humankind’s way out of sophisticated problems as well as by stoking fantasies of escape – as might be the fact that spacefaring is a preoccupation of the billionaire class, and the capitalism world-system seems to be predicating the solutions to many of the world’s more wicked problems on the collective benevolence of these people.

In this sense, small but rich countries might as well be primed to buy their way into history – in this moment, today – using the spaceflight route, after doing the same thing in years past by benefitting from the exploitation of their natural resources, of outsourced labour and by offering anti-accountable financial services that help keep the global capitalist machine running.

Second, many Emiratis seem intent to make known the UAE’s relative youth – “some of our parents were born before the UAE became a country,” one social media post said – vis-à-vis the Hope probe’s impending orbital capture. It’s worth noting here that three prominent American universities were involved in putting the probe together. The Emirati monarchy may see reason to be proud here, considering the sort of internationalism they’ve been fond of promoting in Dubai, but the celebrations rooted in the UAE’s age (50 years) would be misplaced in turn. If anything, the UAE may demonstrate that in some particular enterprises of the 21st century, achieving great things needn’t have anything to do with national longevity – and in fact may benefit more from a political leadership able to do what it pleases.

Featured image credit: NASA.