The space agency is now looking for a partner to run the center, to be called the Center of Biology Inspired Technology, and plans to spend $150 million a year funding it.
"Living organisms perform enormously complex information processing, at a nanoscale level, with meager investments of energy," a background paper about the center reads. "It is envisioned that what will be needed will be seamless human-machine partnership where the strengths of each will complement and blend with one another."
As humans venture farther into the solar system for longer periods of time, they will rely more and more on machines to keep them alive and carry out scientific missions.
Not only will the machines need to work for decades without major repairs but, according to NASA, they will need to anticipate, explore, adapt, repair and possibly even replicate -- just like living things.
What will be needed will be seamless human-machine partnership where thestrengths of each will complement and blend with one another.
The center, whose specific agenda has not yet been set, will become increasingly important as the International Space Station, or ISS, develops over the next several years.
"It’s very open," said Lori M. Levine, a contract specialist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "With projects like the ISS, we need technologies that will enable us to go with a rather small crew, and allow more autonomous activities and greater interaction between humans and technology."
The key to biologically inspired technology, NASA says, is creating autonomous systems that can learn from interaction with their environment. The systems should be intelligent down to their microscopic components, like molecules in a living organism.
Some specific applications the space agency is seeking are human-like information processing systems, self-correcting computers, self-guidance systems and self-repairing spacecraft.
Currently, spacecraft need to be designed and constructed to handle worst-case scenarios, making them extremely expensive to develop, and often, heavy and large. But NASA sees something "exquisite," it writes, in the properties of organisms whose forms naturally adjust to extremes.
"A hallmark of all biological systems is the ability to adapt to unforeseen contingencies while maintaining homeostasis," or equilibrium, "through a cascade of feedback and feed-forward controls," the NASA paper reads.
It's what an ant can do that a machine -- at least as we know machines today -- can't.
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