I remember my Grandfather telling me with utter seriousness and sincerity that by the year 2000 everyone would have a personal hovercraft and that we’d take holidays on the moon.
If you look at the growth of travel speeds in the first half of the twentieth century and project them forward, it really wasn’t such a crazy prediction.
Hell, right now, we’re one technology away from being able to build actual interstellar vessels. You need a robot that can harvest materials from an asteroid, build a copy of itself, and do some useful work before breaking down. If you have self-replicating robots, building big giant dumb objects in space becomes practical. And no, if you’re not an idiot about it, the robots diverging from their original programming and multiplying out of control is not a problem.
This would allow you to build large spacecraft, cities in space capable of carrying tens of thousands or more. And that’s the scale you really need to be thinking about when discussing interstellar travel.
How do you actually move the things? Giant solar-powered pushing lasers. Hell you might even put them directly in the Sun’s outer atmosphere and use the Sun itself as the lasing medium. And if you’re clever about it, it’s also possible to use a laser around Sol to slow down at the destination. You can build an interstellar ark propelled entirely by pushing lasers in the Sol system.
A lot of problems of space colonization and travel can be solved if you can build stupidly large objects for cheap. And self-replicating robots are just such a technology.
I remember my Grandfather telling me with utter seriousness and sincerity that by the year 2000 everyone would have a personal hovercraft and that we’d take holidays on the moon.
This was in 1996.
If you look at the growth of travel speeds in the first half of the twentieth century and project them forward, it really wasn’t such a crazy prediction.
Hell, right now, we’re one technology away from being able to build actual interstellar vessels. You need a robot that can harvest materials from an asteroid, build a copy of itself, and do some useful work before breaking down. If you have self-replicating robots, building big giant dumb objects in space becomes practical. And no, if you’re not an idiot about it, the robots diverging from their original programming and multiplying out of control is not a problem.
This would allow you to build large spacecraft, cities in space capable of carrying tens of thousands or more. And that’s the scale you really need to be thinking about when discussing interstellar travel.
How do you actually move the things? Giant solar-powered pushing lasers. Hell you might even put them directly in the Sun’s outer atmosphere and use the Sun itself as the lasing medium. And if you’re clever about it, it’s also possible to use a laser around Sol to slow down at the destination. You can build an interstellar ark propelled entirely by pushing lasers in the Sol system.
A lot of problems of space colonization and travel can be solved if you can build stupidly large objects for cheap. And self-replicating robots are just such a technology.
In 4 years
we have holidays on the moonall white color jobs will be automated by ai.Ironic how times have not changed in 30 years.