[extropy-chat] Darwin Award

[jeffrey davis]

Someone wrote:

> > > For what are basically economic reasons it will
take nanotech level technology to get us into space.  I don't see any way to
avoid strong AI.

Then someone else replied:

> > I encountered this myth regularly when I was
working as a consultant for NASA, and it just doesn't hold water.

Then Samantha wrote:

> Depends on what you mean I suspect.  The context of
> these remarks is getting enough of humanity into space and far enough away
to end up with self-sustaining colonies/outposts that give humanity a much
better chance of survival.  To satisfy all of these constraints we are
talking self-sustaining groups of on the order of thousands of humans
(genetic diversity) preferably relocated outside the Solar
System or at least in the outer system.  Please tell
me what you are going to use pre-nanotech to make this a reality.

Now me:

This is an economic problem.  Man hours per kilogram of payload. To lower
this cost, to lower the man hours per kilo, you need to have more of the
work done by machines, ie automation.  It's not magic, and it's some
futuristic über-tech. You don't need full-on self-replication with 100
percent closure. A lesser degree of closure will do.  In the end it's still
just advanced automation.  It's irrelevant whether it's nano-, micro-, or
macro-tech.

I'm working on it.

Best, Jeff Davis

   "Everything's hard till you know how to do it."
                           Ray Charles
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