Serkan Anilir

Q1. What kind of style will it take for communication in an extreme environment like outer space? What are the problems for technologies, services or businesses which support such communication?

Cellular phones are practically technology transfer from Apollo program, in which the communication between Earth and Moon was established. Martin Cooper from Motorola, also communication system designer of Apollo, tested first machine in 1973 and become the first person to make a call on a portable cell phone. It was developed for space, but became an everyday tool for us.

An important problem in space communication technology is the "time delay". The round trip communication delay between Earth and Moon is less than three seconds, which allows normal voice and video conversation. However, the round trip communication delay between Earth and Mars, due to the speed of light ranges from about 6.5 minutes at closest approach to 44 minutes at superior conjunction. NASA has found that direct communication can be blocked for about two weeks every synodic period, around the time of super conjunction when the Sun is directly between Mars and Earth. This again is a particular value in space exploration, where life-threatening problems requiring Earth's assistance can occur.

Although it should be remembered that the colonization was conducted without the benefit of real-time communication with 'home'; there might be solutions using a constellation of communication satellites, including one Lagrangian point satellite to avoid difficulties during conjunction. Or, it could be a new technology which could change the influence the current mobile technologies.

Q2. How will your current study on the Infra-free Life (IFL), the space technology which allows us to live without depending on infrastructure, become involved in mobile communications?

Infra-Free (IF) research approaches the mobile communication world from two different perspectives; technological and social. Although we call cellular phones, wireless technologies etc. 'mobile', they are still based on network systems, which become the infrastructural backbone of these technologies. In short words, they are depending infrastructures. They are not Infra-Free.

Although the infrastructure remains invisible, a sudden collapse in this infrastructure leads to the failure of the system; an examples is the earthquake in Yamakoshi mura, where the communication tower collapsed and mobile systems stopped. From the view of IF research, the decentralization of mobile infrastructure network, where each house becomes a 'keitai' itself; might offer less vulnerability and more flexibility. It can also eliminate time consuming and expensive infrastructure deployment.

From the social aspect, IF research studies the future community. New technologies are reshaping the 'software'as well as the hardware around us. Mobile communications reconstruct the world as a global village. Celebrities replace our families and friends, we often know more about the life of supermodels than we do of our own relatives or neighbors. Changing work and earning patterns, atomization of family members into separate demographic markets and specialization of media all ensure that we inhabit different planets in the same house. Popularity of online worlds like 'mixi' indicate that real-life is failing to live up to expectations.

IF research aims a community, in which the technology does not lead but support. IF communities depend on self-production technologies, in which each member of the community has a certain duty to perform, so that the system works. It could lead to the reconstruction of community, where the house is no longer a castle with ubiquitous security systems, electronic commuting, home shopping or personalized media; but an open-source and tool for human communication.

Q3. In network communications, including mobile, collective intelligence and open-source collaboration are rising to the surface now. How do you think will such movement affect future space development?

Current space exploration systems are great on centralizing data but poor if multiple teams of people want to collaborate on them. In the same way communication networks evolved replacing old systems with mobile technology, leading space agencies like NASA also plans on doing the same with its satellites, influenced from current network communications and their possibilities.

The future space exploration foresees a sensor-web system being developed around a target like Mars, small instrument satellites networked together in an organic measurement system. Each satellite could have its own on-board capability, of course, allowing for it to autonomously reach and provide coverage where it feels it's needed within the bounds of the other devices in the system. They will be directed by mission controllers on earth and by other satellites in that networked system.

Today TV, telephone, computer data and images are beamed around the world via satellite, which is the backbone of our mobile technologies. Not only mobile, but we are using space technologies at every point of our daily lives; at our homes, hospitals, malls, stadiums, museums, farms, and firehouses. They have been all achieved through space technology transfer programs.

Space exploration would not be possible without the help of mobile communication technologies. Moon landings, space stations, missions to other planets and even the study of Earth are facilitated by the process, transmission, storage and distribution of data and data products.

I personally believe that space exploration will continue introducing new technologies to our daily lives. Both mobile and space technologies has progressed based on needs presented by the other and neither could be as developed without experiencing the same common challenges. They will grow and develop together.

Q4. A great deal of trial and error has been made by companies and people related to the mobile media, such as cell phones and PDA, to conceptualize a society in which such media is being widely disseminated. What do you think that a near-future society where mobile media is widespread will be? Please let us know in as specific terms as possible.

If we try to remember the first mobile technologies on the market, we can see the clear difference now that in just 10 years; these technologies became lighter and very compact while integrating a lot of different functions into one single media.

I guess, the future society will search for more integrated and compact options, where the mobile technology might be attached to our clothes. Later, they could be even attached to our bodies starting an inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human, machine and technology, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains, will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed and knowledge-sharing ability of our own creations. A new era of mobile technology...

In this new world, the humanity might enter an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly non-biological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today. There will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. We will be able to assume different bodies and take on a range of personae at will. In practical terms, human aging and illness will be reversed, pollution will be stopped, world hunger and poverty will be solved.

We will decide the limits to integrate mobile technology in our lives. In long-term, if we do not decide the right place to stop, there might be an environment that each personality becomes just a group of electrons flowing in the limitless web-space, asking where we did the mistake.

Q5. How is mobile media used in the country (region) where you live? Please let us know the characteristics that you have noticed through your daily life or problems that your society has faced. How do you utilize mobile media?

I live in Tokyo for more than 8 years and I feel that people becomes hostages of technology. When I make an appointment to meet my friends in front of Hachiko, I feel that although this place has been designed as a meeting and interaction spot, it became a space for individuals to do their own thing with their keitai.

However, the real information is in front of us; space is information. The experience of observation, meeting someone and learning from each other are precious information sources, which cannot be completely achieved through technology.

When there is someone lying on the bank of the station, no one stops and asks him if he is ok but prefers to continue emailing his friend. We are moving into a virtual world where our 'warm human heart' becomes some kind of virus in the social network and has to be deleted. This is a dangerous game for a society.

Another point is personal information. When most people call their friends, they sometimes ask 'ima doko?'. This is very interesting for me because the phone was originally designed to place at a certain position, for example on the table of our living room, where everybody could reach you. When you called someone, you knew where the person was, because he was picking up the phone. Now, as the mobile technology evolves, although we believe that we can reach a lot of personal information, we do not even know where the person we are calling is. Thus, when we drop or lose our phones, we lose all our important information and struggle to collect them back. As we see, mobility is not always convenient and we may have overlooked some important points in information technology and may have to rethink about the future evolution of mobile technologies.