DARPA Fractionated Spacecraft Program Starts 59
An anonymous reader writes "Start buying Cold War nuclear shelters and piling up the canned food, because Boeing Advanced Systems has started System F6: 'DARPA's Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying Spacecraft United by Information Exchange space technology program.' In other words: multiple, networked specialized spacecraft swarms that are intelligent enough to perform a single coordinated task together, like analyzing the crops or deciding to destroy humanity, Skynet-style. Actually, it could completely change satellites for the better, according to some experts."
Oh Noes... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know it's been said before but it seems like lately there has been a lot of fear mongering going on in the world. I understand when I see it on TV; all the soccer moms of the world need to know the latest threat to their little angels.
But Slashdot should be better than this. Every time an article comes up that mentions AI, virusses, bacteria, censorship, anything remotely threatening it gets the fear mongering going.
Here, we have a developement that could save millions of dollars worth of launch costs; yet we fear it because... why exactly? It might spontaneously gain intelligence and attack the human race? Someone might hack it and tell it to attack? Attack using what exactly? I hope that the poster was joking, but honestly, I doubt it.
Surprised Slashdotters don't see the parallels... (Score:2, Insightful)
Remember back in the old days when there was one monster mainframe that served all the users and access to it was tightly controlled? Then we discovered the wonders of having thousands of smaller computers all networked together, giving incredible flexibility and scaling?
That's what this is for satellites. Instead of having billion-dollar single point failures floating around in space, DARPA is trying to develop the technologies to have constellations of tens, hundreds, thousands of smaller satellites working together in an integrated mesh network. A network that can be improved by launching new nodes with upgraded features, one with fault tolerance in case of node failure.
F6 is one of the precursor technologies to be able to do this. And yes, like many things in space it can be used for evil purposes just as it can be used for good.