[extropy-chat] Darwin Award

[Russell Wallace]

On 5/18/06, jeffrey davis <jrd1415 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
Well, not so much per kilogram of payload (existing launchers would be good
enough to scrape by with, if the flight rate could be increased enough) as
per person-year of life in space (the latter of course complicated by the
large up-front cost of building a habitat as opposed to an outpost).

> 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.
>
True, but saying "90% closure is okay" doesn't buy you much, as it turns
out; by the time you've cracked the problem of converting e.g. lunar
regolith into solar cells, that's the hard part of the problem. Nanotech's
looking like the best bet for solving it, though perhaps sufficiently
advanced macro/microtech robotics would suffice.

> I'm working on it.
>
Good!
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