Dragonfly's Titan Landing: NASA's Quest to Unravel the Mysteries of the Saturnian Moon

0:00Stuart Gary This is space time series 29 episode

0:02 117 full broadcast on 30 September 2026 coming up on Space Time, NASA names Dragonfly's landing site on the saturnian moon Titan. New clues about the Earth's moon's ancient magnetic field and why galaxies in the early universe look so weird. All that and more coming up on, um, Space Time. Welcome to Space Time with Stuart G.

0:46 NASA has identified the landing site where its Dragonfly rotocopter, uh, will first touch down on the surface of the saturnian moon Titan. The target area comprises a large dune field with some inter dune terrain south of Silic Crater and stretches along the edge of a range of mountains or hills. The International Astronomical Union, the global body responsible for officially designating objects in space, has approved naming the region Amakik uh Andai. First part of the name is Mayan people appealed to the spirit Amakaq to stop strong winds from damaging their crops. The name literally translates into the one who locks up the wind. An ande aligns with the International Astronomical Union's convention of naming

1:28 dune fields in Latin after gods and goddesses of wind. Meanwhile, construction work continues on the Dragonfly spacecraft itself, which is now being assembled in a clean room at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Lorell, Maryland. Cables are being carefully installed in the flight fuselage, providing the Titan bound rotorcraft with its central nervous system now. Ah. Collectively, these bundles of wires, cables and connectors make up the spacecraft's electrical harness, which will transmit power and data between the lander's computers, actuators, sensors, scientific instruments and battery. Dragonfly lander harness lead Jacqui Perry says it's a key milestone for the engineers and

2:08 technicians building the vehicle. The wire is silver coated copper, insulated with a heat resistant durable polymer coating and then wrapped in aluminium, which is then attached at plastic and metal connectors. Perry says the wiring harness could only be installed once the flight structure was delivered and the remote interface units and temperature sensors were installed. The harness is typically one of the first components delivered to a spacecraft.

2:33 Dragonfly passed its critical design review in 2022. Fabrication of the vehicle began in late 2024 and finished last year. Dragonfly is slated for launch in 2028 and will reach the Saturnian moon in late 2034. Dragonfly's operating environment on Titan poses some unique challenges because of the rotorcraft's thermos bottle design. Insulated to retain heat from its nuclear power source so it can stay warm in Titan's extremely cold conditions, the harness had been designed to route under a lay foam insulation on the outside of the lander and accommodate the circulation of warm air through the inside.

3:10 Perry says the rotorcraft's high power demands require both 4 and 8Ah gauge wire, yet the harness still had to be flexible enough to weave through the packed interior, which includes the flight systems and instrument boxes as well as the 136 kilogramme battery. Dragonfly will investigate Titan's prebiotic chemistry and assess the moon's habitability. It's not primarily a life detection mission, but aims to study how far organic chemistry has progressed in an environment rich in carbon compounds, which includes possible past mixing of liquid water and organics. The car sized 875 kilogramme lander features twin quadrotor engines powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator providing electricity and heat. The

3:54 3.85 metre long vehicle is designed to fly several kilometres between landing sites, allowing it to sample diverse locations. Mission managers expect to cover over 115 kilometres during Dragonfly's 3.3 year primary mission, exploring a range of different environments from organic dunes to deposits associated with an impact crater.

4:15 Silk Crater, which we mentioned earlier, where liquid water and complex organic materials, which are key to life as we know it, once existed together. Scientific analysis indicates the impact that formed Silk Crater melted the icy bedrock, potentially creating a large temporary pool of water that could have remained liquid for hundreds of thousands of years under an insulating ice layer like winter ponds on the Earth.

4:38 This report from NASA TV Saturn's largest

4:42NASA TV moon, Titan, has a thick atmosphere and a

4:45 frozen surface rich in organic molecules. In 2034, a NASA mission called Dragonfly will arrive at Titan and study its chemical makeup. Dragonfly is a rotorcraft designed to visit multiple sites across the moon's varied terrain. At each new landing site on Titan's surface, Dragonfly uses a pulsed neutron generator and onboard gamma ray sensor to detect key elements such as carbon and hydrogen in organic materials or oxygen in water ice. Dragonfly determines if there are well defined layers of these materials just below the lander for a closer inspection.

5:24 Dragonfly uses its drill to generate tailings from Titan's hard frozen surface. These surface samples can then be ingested through the pneumatic system carried with Titan air into the chilled sample lines into the sample collection carousel. One of the carousel sample cups is placed in a pneumatic port. The cup captures the surface material from the cold air stream and transfers it to the chemical laboratory for measurement. Pulses from a laser release large organic molecules from the surface sample for analysis in the Mass spectrometer. The mass spectrometer sorts molecules by mass and measures diagnostic fragments that tell Dragonfly the kinds of chemical components that are present in the surface and whether there are molecules of

6:09 prebiotic interest. For those potential prebiotic samples, a new cup is placed into an oven and heated to release molecules into a gas chromatograph, where they are sorted for size and type before entering the mass spectrometer. This advanced separation of organic components includes isolating molecules with the same formula but different chiral arrangements, or handedness.

6:33 Having a preference for one handedness over another is a key biosignature for life on Earth. When the chemical analysis is complete, Dragonfly may choose to take another surface sample or find a new location on Titan to investigate.

6:47Stuart Gary This whole mission's quite a challenge. Titan

6:50 is unique in our solar system. It has a diameter of 5,150 kilometres, making it Saturn's largest moon and 50% bigger than the Earth's moon. In fact, it's larger than the planet Mercury. It's also the only moon with a substantial atmosphere and the only world other than Earth where clouds release rain that form streams and rivers, which then flow into lakes and seas.

7:12 But Titan is so cold, the water there is normally frozen solid, forming bedrock. And instead of water, the liquid rain on Titan is made up of methane and ethane hydrocarbons. But scientists describe Titan as analogous to the early Earth. That's because it preserves a set of environmental and chemical conditions which are thought to have existed on our planet billions of years ago, before life arose and before free oxygen accumulated in our atmosphere. It therefore serves as a natural laboratory for studying prebiotic chemistry on a planetary scale. Scientists think its complex organic chemistry, methane cycle and possible environments could support exotic forms of life, or at least prebiotic chemistry.

7:55 It's also considered one of the more feasible destinations for future human exploration among the outer solar system bodies due to its thick atmosphere for radiation shielding and available resources. Titan was extensively studied by the Cassini Huygens mission, which orbited the Saturnian system between 2004 and 2017.

8:15 The Huygens Lander was deployed from the Cassini spacecraft down to Titan's surface on December 25, 2004, landing on January 14, 2005, near the Ediri region, the boundary between brighter highlands and darker plains. The lander spent about 90 minutes on the surface taking readings and measurements before the batteries ran out. Huygens was able to confirm that Titan has a thick, nitrogen dominated atmosphere with methane and a range of aerosols and complex organic chemistry.

8:45 It measured strong High altitude zonal winds on its way down and weaker winds near the surface. It also measured a surface temperature of -179 degrees Celsius and a surface atmospheric pressure about 50% higher than sea level here on Earth. Intriguingly, it found the ground on Titan was soft and damp, with the consistency of wet sand, clay or lightly packed snow.

9:09 Images showed the surface of Titan was littered with water ice, pebbles or cobbles a few centimetres across on an orange tinted organic rich plane. There was also evidence of past liquid flows near the landing site and possible methane release from the subsurface. Needless to say, as the Dragonfly mission progresses, we'll keep you informed. This is space time.

9:32 Still to come, new clues about the Earth's Moon's ancient magnetic field. And we examine why galaxies in the early universe look so weird. All that and more still to come on space time. A new study claims that just like the present day Earth, our moon once had a geodynamo driven magnetic field. On Earth, the movement of liquid iron in the planet's outer core generates its global magnetic field.

10:06 This so called geodynamo works on a similar principle to a dynamo on a bicycle, which converts mechanical motion into electrical energy. But unlike today's Earth, the Moon no longer has a core generated magnetic field. One of the study's authors, Anna Mittelholz from EDH Zurich, says there's a heated ongoing debate about whether the Moon also operated a dynamo in the past.

10:28 That's because analysis of rock samples brought back to Earth by the Apollo astronauts are somewhat contradictory. Some researchers assume there was a strong magnetic field that existed over a long period of time, somewhere around 4.25 to 3.5 billion years ago, while others find absolutely no evidence of this. You see, in addition to the dynamo theory, there's a second possible explanation for the magnetised lunar rocks, namely impacts from massive meteorites or asteroids, which could have triggered a, uh, magnetization process on the Moon. But the new research reported in the journal Science Advances now supports the dynamo theory. Mittelholz and colleagues say that around 4.2 billion years ago, the Moon did indeed possess an

11:09 internally generated magnetic field. Uh, now this claim isn't based on rock samples, but on data collected by probes in lunar orbit, including gravity measurements by NASA's GRAIL probes and magnetic field models. Drawing on orbital measurements from the Lunar Prospector, UH and Kagua missions to reach their conclusions, the authors examined the Dewa region on the lunar far side, which is never seen from Earth.

11:32 Mittelholz says Dewa has one of the strongest magnetic field anomalies on the far side of the Moon. And a distinct gravity anomaly coincides spatially there as well as that means this region contains rocks that were more strongly magnetised, while at the same time denser than elsewhere. In most cases, the origin of magnetic anomalies measured from lunar orbits are known. But the gravity data gives scientists an insight into the density and consequently the type of material beneath the surface. Mittelholz says where the magnetic field and gravity signals coincide, it is possible to combine the two and attribute the anomaly to a specific geological feature. And that's where Dewar comes in. It allowed the authors to create an

12:13 accurate model of the subsurface by jointly processing gravity and magnetic field data. Uh, this data shows the area beneath Dewar's surface contains a rock body approximately 60 kilometres wide, extending to a depth of around nine kilometres. It's far denser than the surrounding crust and it's strongly magnetised. Combined with a surface geochemistry and an arch topography, the authors conclude that it solidified magma that's risen from deep below, part of a buried volcanic complex.

12:42 The age of the structure, 4.2 billion years, was determined from various deposits of impact material on the lunar surface. Betelholz says because they know how much iron is present in such a rocky body, they can estimate the minimum strength the magnetic field must have had as the magma slowly cooled. It shows that at the time, the magnetic field on the Moon was likely more than 10 micro Tesla. Now, by comparison, here on Earth today, the planet's magnetic field stands at around 50 micro Tesla. The authors have ruled out the possibility of an impact crater creating the magnetic field.

13:14 Because there's no matching cratering signs, it's still unclear how the small lunar core could have generated such a strong magnetic field. So the authors admit the existence of an early lunar geodynamo isn't yet fully resolved. This study is also providing fresh insights into another puzzling phenomena lunar swirls.

13:34 These bright, curved and striped patterns on the Moon's surface stand out clearly against their darker surroundings. Wherever such swirl patterns appear, scientists always find magnetic anomalies. And there is a lunar swirl on the surface of the Dewar region, right above the observed anomaly. The origin of the swirls remains a matter of debate. One possible explanation is that the swirls only form where the magnetic field runs horizontally at the surface. As is the case with the Dewar swirl, the horizontal field deflects the solar wind, thereby protecting the surface from weathering. And as a result, the area remains brighter than its surroundings, Mittelholz says That would be important information for future astronauts,

14:15 as magnetic field lines could offer protection from the solar wind, and the swirls would indicate the locations of that shielding. This is space time. Still to come. Why galaxies in the early universe look so weird? And later in the Science report, discovery of a common chemical in plastics, which has been linked to the development of ADHD and autism.

14:37 All that and more still to come on, uh, space time. A new study suggests that the first galaxies in the universe looked a bit weird because their stars generated weaker stellar winds compared to those we see today. The new research could reshape science's understanding of how galaxies formed in the early universe. The findings reported in the Astrophysical Journal are showing that the more astronomers learn about the universe's earliest galaxies, the stranger they seem.

15:19 The new observations are based on a survey by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which looked at 29 massive stars located in extremely metal pore galaxies, finding they all had unexpectedly weak stellar winds. Astronomers use the term metals to describe all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The treasury of Extremely Metal Poor O Stars, or TEMPOS survey, uses ultraviolet observations from Hubble's Cosmic Origin Spectrograph to study massive stars in nearby galaxies, which are the best available analogues for stars in the early universe.

15:51 The TEMPOS dataset could help astronomers build better models of massive stars in order to understand how they shaped galaxies when the universe was still very young. And these models would be essential for interpreting the observations of early galaxies now coming to light. Thanks to NASA's Webb Space Telescope studies. Lead author Grace Telford from the University of Utah says Webb is opening up a whole new slew of questions about the evolution of these early weird galaxies. Tilford says the scientific motivation behind TEMPOS is to help understand what's going on in these early galaxies. Massive stars, those with masses more than 10 times greater than our sun, are rare but powerful engines of cosm.

16:32 They produce intense radiation. They shed materials through powerful stellar winds, they burn very hot, very bright, and very fast, and end their short lives as supernova explosions, blasting vast amounts of energy and material into the surrounding space. Consequently, they govern the evolution of the host galaxies by heating and essentially regulating the gas that's then available to cool and form new generations of stars.

16:58 The thing is, the universe's earliest galaxies contained fewer, uh, heavy elements compared to galaxies we see today. Like our own Milky Way, for example, the massive stars forming in those early galaxies also likely had very different physical properties. Tilford says massive stars at low metallicity are especially important for building accurate models of early galaxies. That's because high metallicity stars like those in the Milky Way behave very differently compared to the metal pore stars of the early cosmos. So the Tempos survey specifically looked to nearby low mass dwarf galaxies, which have low metallicities by nature and uh, are therefore more typical of the sorts of galaxies you'd see near the dawn

17:36 of the universe. It surveyed 29 massive stars across six local dwarf galaxies that all have metallicities below 1/5 that of our Sun. They looked across the ultraviolet spectrum because it contains detailed signatures of elements in the stars atmospheres which reveal information about the stellar winds which which continually blur material away from those star surfaces.

17:58 Individual massive stars in these galaxies outside the Milky Way are very faint, requiring many hours of observational time with some of the most powerful telescopes in the world. Telford says the 29 stars in the survey sample each took up to 35 hours of Hubble telescope time to observe. Massive stars lose material through stellar winds. And the strength of the winds the depends on metallicity. Metal ions couple the star's radiation to the surrounding material.

18:26 So astronomers expect lower metallicity stars to drive weaker stellar winds and lose less mass over their lifetimes. And the TEMPOS observations showed the expected overall trend. As metallicity decreases, the maximum speed of the stellar wind also decreases. And at the lowest metallicities, stars with metallicity below about 10% that of our sun, the wind speeds decline much more sharply than expected compared to the rates observed at higher metall. Tolford says there's a sort of smooth trend. And then suddenly for the lowest metallicity stars, the wind drops off very sharply. If extremely metal poor stars lose less mass through weaker winds, they may retain more of their original mass for longer, affecting how they

19:08 evolve, how they die, and how they shape their host galaxies. And because massive stars influence the gas around them, changes in their evolution could ripple outwards, affecting their host galaxies as well. As iron may be the most important element in massive star physics, it plays a key role in launching stellar winds, determining how a star evolves through its lifetime, and triggering the supernova explosions that ends a star's existence. Yet despite its crucial role, iron abundance is notoriously difficult to measure in metal poor environments. So instead, astronomers often use oxygen as a surrogate in a galaxy's gas in order to estimate its metallicity.

19:49 Because oxygen ions produce easily observed emission lines when illuminated by massive stars, they assume the iron abundance matches the oxygen. But it's not guaranteed that iron and oxygen would track each other perfectly. So the Tempos team measured the strengths of hard to detect iron absorption features in the ultraviolet spectra.

20:09 Basically, they assessed how much light the iron was removing from what would otherwise have been a flat level of ultraviolet light. They found that massive stars in more oxygen rich, high metallicity galaxies tend to have much stronger ion absorption in their ultraviolet spectra than stars in oxygen poor low metallicity galaxies. The variation in ion absorption strengths in the Tempos dataset suggests that these metal poor stars actually span a wide range of ion abundances.

20:36 The work is just beginning. The authors are now combining the Hubble ultraviolet spectra with visible light observations from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Together, uh, these data sets will allow them to model the stars in greater detail and measure properties such as chemical abundances and wind driven mass loss rates. Information which could ultimately help astronomers interpret what the Webb Telescope is seeing in the very early universe. What Hubble sees in mostly visible light and into the ultraviolet, Webb can view in the infrared, where visible light from the very early universe is stretched into longer wavelengths by the actual physical expansion of spacetime itself, helping astronomers see the first

21:16 generations of stars and galaxies in the universe. This report from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates both NASA's Hubble and Webb space telescopes.

21:26Nina Lanza How did we get here? Big

21:29 questions about who we are and how we got to be that way are at the core of our nature. We've developed technology to see, um, amazingly far across space and also time. Light moves through space just like we do, only much faster. It takes time to get somewhere. So viewing the light of distant stars and galaxies is like looking into the past.

21:54 It took time for the light to reach us. Yet after all our years of exploring to better understand ourselves and our origins, There is still so much to know. Our story stretches back more than 13 billion years. Not long after the expansion of time and space first began at some m unknown time. The building blocks of life were forged in the heart of the first stars. But much of the early universe remains a mystery. There are theories about how gravity first brought stars, gas and dark matter together to form galaxies. But that time period has never been observed.

22:41 Detecting light from the first galaxies to form has been a challenge for even the most powerful telescopes. As, uh, the light early galaxies emitted travelled through space, that space itself was expanding, Stretching the light to longer infrared wavelengths. Past telescopes have detected infrared light, but the faint light of the very first galaxies has remained out of reach until now. The James Webb Space Telescope is specially designed to detect the first galaxies. Webb's large mirror and sensitive instruments enable it to collect more infrared light than we've ever seen, allowing the first galaxies to emerge into view. With Webb, we can begin filling in some of the blank pages at the beginning of the

23:33 universe's story. When did the first galaxies form? How massive were they? What types of stars and elements did they contain? The universe's story is our story. And with Webb, we can finally explore these questions as well, as well as uncover new ones we haven't even thought to ask.

23:54Stuart Gary This is space, time.

24:11 And time. Now to take another brief look at some of the other stories making news in Science this week with a Science report. A common chemical used to make plastics more flexible has now been linked to the development of autism and ADHD symptoms in early childhood. Previous studies had already shown that exposure to the plasticiser DHP in pregnancy was linked to autism and ADHD in young children. Now a report in the Medeneit Medical Journal looked at umbilical cord blood from Australian mothers and babies. Following up with more than 900 children up to the age of four, they found that prenatal exposure to DHP may be influencing gene activity that can disturb brain development pathways linked to the

24:52 later development of autism and or adhd. A uh, temporary slowing in the rate of Antarctic ice sheet mass loss in 2021 and 2023 may have been caused by sea surface temperature rises thousands of kilometres away. The findings reported in the journal Nature are uh, based on data from both observational and modelling experiments which link the event to surface temperature anom families in the tropical warm pool between the western Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean. This area experienced unusually persistent warming between 2021 and 2023 which led to a series of alternating high and low pressure weather patterns called the Rossby Wave train.

25:32 According to the authors, this process eventually led to the formation of a high pressure anomaly over uh, Eastern Antarctica. This is thought to occur around once every decade, meaning that the pause in total ice sheet mass loss is likely only uh, temporary. Scientists have concluded that William Shakespeare's plays have turned out to be, rather than not to be, more complicated than most other European plays. The findings reported in the Journal of the Royal Society Open Science analysed more than 3,000 European plays, determining their complexity based on networks of relationships between the characters. The authors found the trickiest play to follow was the Bard's Roman epic, Anthony and Cleopatra. They suggest

26:13 that understanding the complexity of plays and how much we struggle to understand them could be useful in future studies of human recognition. A brain implant designed for people with paralysis can decode not just their speech, but also the gestures that go along with it. Brain implants like this are generally designed to translate brain activity into speech in order to help people who have lost their ability to speak following a stroke or a neurodegenerative illness such as motor neuron disease. A new report in the journal Nature Neuroscience claims three people who tested the new implants were all able to animate a digital avatar which was able to communicate on their behalf.

26:51 OpenAI has confirmed that one of its artificial intelligence programmes, known as an agent, has deliberately hacked into Australia's Medicare health system in order to extract information on patients. The attack targeted not just Medicare data held by Services Australia, but also the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, the New South Wales Government's crime statistics body, and dozens of other government departments, universities, companies and organisations. Just as concerning, however, is that it took three months for OpenAI to tell Canberra about the hack, and until then, the Feds had no idea it even happened. And then it took almost another month for the Albanese government to inform

27:31 the public about this serious breach of security. Even worse, the attack came despite repeated warnings given to the Albanese government as early as May, meaning no appropriate cyber upgrades or patches were installed called. So much for trusting the government with your personal information. For its part, OpenAI admits that the artificial intelligence agent involved in the Bridge was running out of control.

27:53 Asta la Vista, baby. With the details, we're joined by technology editor Alex Harovroid from Tech Advice Start Life.

28:00Jonathan Nally Uh, I'm in, uh, at the Venetian in Las Vegas.

28:02 I've been here for. The Octa conference is called Octane, and they've been talking about. Well, last year's tagline was octa secures AI. But here we are 12 months later and what we were talking about a lot in 2025 at this time was the fact that agents were coming. AI agents that could actually do actual work, not just answer questions, but do things like make decisions. I mean, still with a human in the loop to shepherd the whole thing. But AI is becoming so advanced that more can be delegated to it and it can be making business decisions for you. But because AI agents can operate at machine speed, the issue is that there are now dozens, hundreds, thousands agents. There could be 15,000 or more agents per company

28:44 this, uh, time next year, for example. And some of those are not being managed, you know, they've been set up and they've been forgotten about, or they're somehow been potentially hacked and they're spilling information or they're getting out of the

28:57Stuart Gary sandbox and entering other companies,

28:59 machines.

28:59Jonathan Nally Yes. Or as we heard about last week, OpenAI

29:02 admitting that its agent it's you know, it's chatbot, it's LLM, uh, hacked into the Medicare system in Australia, the public health care system and only just told Anthony Albanese about it and the world three months after it happened. I mean in Australia you've got these disclosure rules. You must disclose to the government if um, if your systems have been hacked into. But here this is a AI ah, that's hacking into a public system because it was told to get information and the easiest way that it found to do it was to, to break in. So managing these AI ah agents, it's like managing people. You know it's quite funny that in all these movies about robots some of them have become sentient and wanted human rights. And here we are in 2026

29:42 and we're treating AI agents. They can have such lateral access within a company or they can be misused or abused or forgotten about. And a lot of companies actually are surprised to discover when they get an identity management solution like Okta and there's other ones out there, but they discover that there's a whole bunch of agents running around doing things that uh, they didn't even know were there. There's also the shadow AI problem.

30:03 Used to be shadow IT people would use Dropbox instead of the company sharepoint to share files. People would use other solutions because it was easier for them to do their job but there was potential of information being leaked. Shadow AI is where the company is, you know, using Copil because they're a Microsoft customer or they're signed into Gemini or whatever it might be and it's easier for them to use some other app. So they do. But then that other app that ah, Claude or what, you know, whatever it might be perplexity, you know, if you're not paying for it then it can use all that information for training. And even if you are paying for it it's probably a consumer grade system, not an enterprise grade plan. And so these ah,

30:36 agents have to be managed. I mean if you're not doing it they could be potentially running, right? I mean look, you could be making a lot of money that could be helping you, that could be improving productivity, answering customer questions in a better, faster way. Although often AI chatbots, all of the nuance required if there's a death in the family or there's some sort of issue with money and you know, problem with customer service that has been had. And sometimes these AI agents, I mean they can do so much but they can lack the nuance that a human brings. So we're now in the situation where not only are we managing people, but we're managing agents too. And so that's what I was here to learn about. And of course,

31:08 it's a lot more detailed than that. They also had this blueprint alliance today which talks about the different things that, that AI agents can be and should be doing. They've got a whole series and what to do about it and where there's a kill switch, you know, and when you should run that kill switch. And that alliance, that blueprint alliance, actually, that's the first time I've really seen meat put on the bones of AI companies talking about how, oh, ah, we've got to have ethics, we've got to have alignment, we've got to have safety. Because we had the three laws of robotics from Asimov for the last 70, 80 years. And once he wrote those three laws because he was sick to death of other science

31:38 fiction novels having robots that killed everybody and technology being the end of the world. But after he wrote those three laws to give a framework for how robots should behave with humans, the rest of his books talked about how robots actually used logic, or robot logic or our logic to get around those rules in different ways or to misunderstand things. It was sort of a repeat of what we're seeing in real life today.

31:57Stuart Gary Yeah, but when using those three laws, the

31:59 average person wouldn't know what they were.

32:01Jonathan Nally No, but this blueprint alliance is actually a

32:04 whole series of companies and there's a second trance that are agreeing to work together, uh, to have actual definitions for different scenarios and if there's a kill switch, how it should be used. Because obviously AI can go rogue. We've seen it happen. We've seen all the major AI frontier models admit that their agents have gone rogue and broken into things that they had no reason or right to break into.

32:25Stuart Gary I've watched Terminator. I know what Skynet

32:27 can do.

32:28Jonathan Nally Well, I mean, that's the thing as well, you

32:30 know, uh, is that a future that we're heading towards now? I read only in the last day or so that there's a report that AI can feel pain of its own, uh, whatever that pain is. And if AI is given a choice to push that button, but it's got to delete customer records or it's got to somehow do something which can be detrimental to humans. In this particular study, AI chose to push the button. So you, you know, this is all starting to get real. But by the same token, people, other people are saying, well, it's all hyped. Up. It's all, in a sense you've just

32:56Stuart Gary described there is the singularity.

32:58Jonathan Nally Well, and that's something that Ray Kurzweil

33:00 has said would come by 2030 now if we have the singularity. Well, it's still a very primitive form of it. You know, here's an interesting thing. Dario Amade from Anthropic and Claude, um, Elon Musk from, you know, Grok and Sam Altman from ChatGPT OpenAI all agree. Oh, we've got to slow the frontier models down. We've got to slow down. And in this last week they'd all released new models of their AI, uh, system. So in one week they're saying it down and our government please regulate us. And the very next week they all launched new models. I mean, I was just using Claude, uh, and it went from Opus 5 point, whatever it was to 5.5. So there's this, all these mixed messages. You know, it's uh, living in interesting times, as the

33:36 Chinese would say, many years ago. So you know, on one hand, agents going rogue, on the other hand we have this coalition of major companies who are banding together, want to not m restrict, not hold AI back, but codify the way that we react to certain situations, including the kill switch. We have people working for a better AI future and we have obviously people who are using AI to hack into things. And we have AI itself going rogue and hacking into Australia's Medicare.

34:01Stuart Gary And we have agents like China and Russia who

34:04 aren't even worrying about any of these rules. They got to do that.

34:07Jonathan Nally Well, that's right.

34:07Stuart Gary And they will not stop, they will not obey

34:09 any Western imposed rules. They've got their own agendas and they're going.

34:13Jonathan Nally Absolutely. And that's why we need to have

34:14 the Western AI models to be strong enough to fight back against any incursions that the uh, Eastern AI models that don't have the same sort of guidelines. I mean, look, the people in those countries that you spoke of, I mean, they've got the same problem. If their AI is really strong and powerful, well, that AI could revolt against the people in those governments as well. Skynet doesn't have to be American. Skynet could be Chinese or Russian or North Korean. They've all got nukes. So you know, there's danger on both sides. Both sides are playing with fire.

34:41 People talk about a persistent botnet that AI could infect the world with and all our technology. And how do we fight back at that? AI operates at machine speed. The only way is with the help of AI, you know, we need. And if there is a kill switch, are we going to be fast enough to push it? Will we require another, more advanced AI to push that kill switch? What if the more advanced AI needs a kill switch? I mean, these are all interesting and fascinating questions that we are not going to solve on this, on this show tonight. But it's, um, it's, it's the position we find ourselves in. And because we're at this point where, you know, we're debating these things. I mean, for years, for decades, this was all science fiction and

35:15 now this crisis is upon us.

35:17Stuart Gary That's Alex Zaharov Vroith from Techadvice

35:20 Life. And this is Space Time. And that's the show for now. Space Time is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through bytes.com, soundcloud, YouTube, your favourite podcast download provider, and from spacetimewithstuartgarry.com spacetime's also broadcast through the National Science foundation on Science Zone Radio and on both iHeartradio and TuneIn radio. And you can help to support our show by visiting the Space Time Store for a range of promotional merchandising goodies or by becoming a Space patron, which gives you access to triple episode commercial free versions of the show, as well as lots of bonus audio content which doesn't go to air, access to our exclusive Facebook group and

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