Well I will wish them success. I expect that if they do go for it, a swarm of humans and there robotic offspring could augment that nations and businesses are doing in space. Providing another aspect unique to non-national, and not necessarily profit harvesting (Until success).
While I was coming up with the above response, it occurred to me that factory automation followed anchored robotics is a bit like sponges and other anchored sea organisms which wait for their raw materials to float/swim by.
We are not quite to the level of paying self actuated robots which alter/manufacture objects, but it is likely to come when it does come to Earth, it would not be that hard to transfer it to other worlds.
And we could build other worlds.
this is the largest "O'Neill" colony we might yet build using material such as carbon nanotubes, same stuff we might make space elevators out of.
Bishop Ring (habitat)
A Bishop Ring is a type of hypothetical rotating space habitat originally proposed in 1997 by Forrest Bishop. Like other space habitat designs, the Bishop Ring would spin to produce artificial gravity by way of centripetal force. The design differs from the classical designs produced in the 1970s by Gerard K. O'Neill and NASA in that it would use carbon nanotubes instead of steel, allowing the habitat to be built much larger. In the original proposal, the habitat would be approximately 1,000 km (620 mi) in radius and 500 km (310 mi) in width, containing 3 million square kilometers (1.2 million square miles) of living space, comparable to the area of Argentina or India.
Because of its enormous scale, the Bishop Ring would not need to be enclosed like the Stanford torus: it could be built without a "roof", with the atmosphere retained by artificial gravity and atmosphere retention walls some 200 km (120 mi) in height. The habitat would be oriented with its axis of rotation perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, with either an arrangement of mirrors to reflect sunlight onto the inner rim or an artificial light source in the middle, powered by a combination of solar panels on the outer rim and solar power satellites.
Also unlike the 1970s NASA proposals, where habitats would be placed in cislunar space or the Earth-Moon L₄/L₅ Lagrangian points, Forrest Bishop proposed the much more distant Sun-Earth L₄/L₅ Lagrangian points as the sites for the habitats. more from Wikipedia
This ideas are only on paper, but there is more real and mature projects on space manufacturing like http://www.tethers.com/SpiderFab.html
]]>While I was coming up with the above response, it occurred to me that factory automation followed anchored robotics is a bit like sponges and other anchored sea organisms which wait for their raw materials to float/swim by.
We are not quite to the level of paying self actuated robots which alter/manufacture objects, but it is likely to come when it does come to Earth, it would not be that hard to transfer it to other worlds.
]]>Then the workers go out and get grains of materials that can be "Eaten" by the "Queen" to make more workers.
Dead bees/ants recycled I presume.
I think this model is very interessant.
http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/affor … ilization/
It goes far beyond the hive model.
Instead, we could talk about a "robotsphere" in analogy to a biosphere or a ecosystem.
A group of robots that, as a group, it could replicate and "evolve" (with a code uploaded by humans).
It is based on minimize payload. Sometimes it is better to send complex "made on Earth" machines, with enough replacements.
Other parts, bulky, are maded from materials of the destination.
IRSU at great level.
And making more a more infrastructure, less and less "made of Earth" parts or raw material are needed, and different space sources are used.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/21/tech/mci- … index.html
So, I am thinking that some time from now, a 3D printer/Robot serving as the "Queen".
Printing out little bee or ant robots. Workers only I would think.
Then the workers go out and get grains of materials that can be "Eaten" by the "Queen" to make more workers.
Dead bees/ants recycled I presume.
But when the "Queen" malfunctioned I suppose it would have to be repaired/replaced by humans.
But even this is still far fetched. However I might suggest that by "Digesting" a grain of soil material at a time it might be possible to find ways to purify the materials at a low energy cost.
Still a long way off though I think.
But such robots would not scare me very much, since their replication machines would be dependent on humans, and at most they would have a hive mind, and no stingers.
I suppose Venus and Titan might be a good place for it. In the case of Venus, perhaps they would not so much gather materials but construct a floating hive. The 3D printer would have to absorb materials from the atmosphere. In the case of Titan, I am supposing that the energy source would have to be chemical, I recall mention of an existing one, involving Titan might use hydrogen and acetylene as an energy source
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_Titan
But that does not seem to me to be a very vigorous energy source.
]]>However, if you get labour down to a few hours week in a few years time, you're going to be able to reap the benefit quite soon - as well as free up a lot of human time to work on reducing labour requirements even further. Whereas you could spend decades striving for the perfect before achieving full self replication.
So, my suggested path involves moving forward with the self-replicating FabLab (which can make all it's own tools, save for a few high tech items like lasers and microprocessors), work on developing something like a solar cell printer to gain very cheap power, develop the means to extract raw elements from dirt, and keep developing desktop manufacturing. Work towards producing electronics in a desktop foundry, Perhaps we could get it to the point where humans are mainly assembling stuff after the parts have been made, and then it's a case of automating that to close the loop.
links for the solar cell
http://inhabitat.com/printable-solar-ce … onstrated/
]]>Just wasn't sure if you knew it was available online.
]]>Terraformer- It would be really helpful in this case if there were a general measure of closure for a system. Does anyone know of one?
Once we have one, the obvious criterion for what we should do first is whatever has the highest value of dC/dL, or whatever increases closure the most per unit value of research labor.
I don't think that assembly is necessarily going to be the last thing we automate. However, we are going to have to design to a more challenging standard for assembly. This means, firstly, standardizing methods of attachment so that it would be easier for smaller numbers of machines to do the attaching. It means designing standardized methods of manipulating pieces, and it probably means that assemblies are going to take up more space. It also probably means that they're going to be harder to modify with peoples' hands since they won't be designed for that.
It's a lot of very small-scale design and definitely takes a lot of design effort, but I think it's actually one of the more doable things that needs to be accomplished.
]]>So, my suggested path involves moving forward with the self-replicating FabLab (which can make all it's own tools, save for a few high tech items like lasers and microprocessors), work on developing something like a solar cell printer to gain very cheap power, develop the means to extract raw elements from dirt, and keep developing desktop manufacturing. Work towards producing electronics in a desktop foundry, Perhaps we could get it to the point where humans are mainly assembling stuff after the parts have been made, and then it's a case of automating that to close the loop.
]]>No matter how much the resources to develop VNM tech cost, any return will come back in perpetuity, which makes it worthwhile, no matter how small.
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