How to Turn an Asteroid into a Space Habitat (Using Self-Replicating Spider Robots) (sciencealert.com) 65
A retired Technical Fellow from Rockwell Collins "released a 65-page paper that details an easy-to-understand, relatively inexpensive, and feasible plan to turn an asteroid into a space habitat," reports Universe Today (in an article republished at Science Alert):
Dr. David W. Jensen breaks the discussion into three main categories — asteroid selection, habitat style selection, and mission strategy to get there (i.e., what robots to use)... He eventually settled on a torus as the ideal habitat type and then dives into calculations about the overall station mass, how to support the inner wall with massive columns, and how to allocate floor space.
All important, but how exactly would we build such a massive behemoth? Self-replicating robots are Dr. Jensen's answer. The report's third section details a plan to utilize spider robots and a base station that can replicate themselves. He stresses the importance of only sending the most advanced technical components from Earth and using materials on the asteroid itself to build everything else, from rock grinders to solar panels...
With admittedly "back-of-the-envelope" calculations, Dr. Jensen estimates that the program would cost only $4.1 billion. That is far less than the $93 billion NASA plans to spend on the Apollo program. And the result would be a space habitat that provides 1 billion square meters of land that didn't exist before. That's a total cost of $4.10 per square meter to build land — in space. Possibly even more impressive is the timeline — Dr. Jensen estimates that the entire construction project could be done in as little as 12 years. However, it will still take longer to fill the habitat with air and water and start regulating its temperature.
All important, but how exactly would we build such a massive behemoth? Self-replicating robots are Dr. Jensen's answer. The report's third section details a plan to utilize spider robots and a base station that can replicate themselves. He stresses the importance of only sending the most advanced technical components from Earth and using materials on the asteroid itself to build everything else, from rock grinders to solar panels...
With admittedly "back-of-the-envelope" calculations, Dr. Jensen estimates that the program would cost only $4.1 billion. That is far less than the $93 billion NASA plans to spend on the Apollo program. And the result would be a space habitat that provides 1 billion square meters of land that didn't exist before. That's a total cost of $4.10 per square meter to build land — in space. Possibly even more impressive is the timeline — Dr. Jensen estimates that the entire construction project could be done in as little as 12 years. However, it will still take longer to fill the habitat with air and water and start regulating its temperature.
that's just the game Space Engineers (Score:3)
There is ONE problem (Score:1)
If said asteroid is on a trajectory that would put it on a collision course with your previous residence I.e. it's earth, Einstein in case you forgot, well you might have to make alternate plans
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If said asteroid is on a trajectory that would put it on a collision course with your previous residence I.e. it's earth, Einstein in case you forgot, well you might have to make alternate plans
Making an asteroid into a habitat is hard, but changing the trajectory of an asteroid by enough to make it hit Earth would be much harder. It's not just the delta-V, it's the delta-V times the mass.
(and if you're about to say, "but we talk about deflecting hazardous asteroids!", remember that you need to only deflect a hazardous asteroid tiny amount, a distance of roughly the radius of the Earth. Or, delay its arrival time by a few minutes and Earth will have moved out of the way).
except self-replicating robots do not exist. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Even so, I'd like to see such a compact fab able to assemble robots from raw materials and some supplies (such as electronics and motors). Or robots able to autonomously find and mine resources. Even here on Earth that would already be an accomplishment.
The mining industry has introduced automated haul trucks in recent years. Bucket wheel excavators also don't need all that much supervision, just because of the sheer scale they operate at.
Moving the resulting ore into furnaces for smelting is done basically entirely by machine already, with humans doing a little bit of aiming and the initiating and nothing else. If Australia continues their push to move up the supply chain (and they really should), they're likely to automate that bit as well. Australia'
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Hopeless romantic here... (Score:3)
I'm aware this was a topic of a SF novel. Still, if this could get done before I die, I would select it for the place I would love to end my life, staring up at the stars.
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If this was even remotely possible then why do we still have laborers here on Earth? All that digging and building could be solved by making a single robot then letting it get on with things.
TLDR; This guy's a loon. A complete fruitcake.
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Re: Hopeless romantic here... (Score:2)
My position is that if it is demonstrably impossible to do today, tomorrow, and in the media career span of anyone reading this today, then it's unwise to treat a toy calculation, that I'll charitably assume was done for fun, as a serious technical blueprint.
Poking at an impossible problem is good mental exercise for anyone working in a technical field. Losing sight of the fact that it's impossible is synonymous with substituting one's fantasies for reality and crossing that thin, but nevertheless very well
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And we can't carve out a habit in an asteroid today with a magic wand, either.
But thinking we won't be able to one day is just stifling the progress of magic.
Alakazam!
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I'm old enough to know when I'm reading someone's science fiction idea.
When I was in 4th grade I drew up plans for a nuclear powered space ship but oddly NASA didn't take that any more seriously than my magic wand idea or this guy's Stargate Replicator Spiders (c).
C'mon, this is literally straight out of a very popular sci-fi show where they spent an entire season fighting the replicators plus I can't even guess how many less well known books, short stories, musicals, and Bollywood plots with the traditiona
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And assuming that a problem can't be solved simply because we can't solve it today is a good way to stifle progress.
This is the call-sign of modern scientific thinking. Science has become like a religion to some folks. It already knows all. There will never be progress or new discovers. We've discovered all that we ever will. Stick your head in the sand and keep going, "la la la can't hear you" any time someone brings forth an idea that isn't "of today." The future is exactly the same as now. Forever and ever. Amen.
Re: Hopeless romantic here... (Score:2)
Science isn't magic.
It can't materialize self-replicating robots into existence using "today's technology" because self-replicating robots just plain don't exist in today's technology.
Similarly, science can't magic down the cost of launching stuff into orbit by 2 orders of magnitude using today's technology because anything remotely feasible using today's technology costs on the order of $50k/kg to launch out of the Earth's gravity well (charitably) and $4bn will only buy you about 100 tons, not counting th
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If this was even remotely possible then why do we still have laborers here on Earth? All that digging and building could be solved by making a single robot then letting it get on with things.
TLDR; This guy's a loon. A complete fruitcake.
Cost. Until automation becomes cheaper than human labor, humans will continue to do the work here on Earth. It would be cheaper by far for robots to build out human habitats like this out where humans can't survive.
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If you could build an army of self-replicating robots capable of constructing a ring habitat for $4.1 billion dollars, it would have been done. Period. The entire construction industry would be disrupted worldwide.
Stargate addressed this issue. (Score:5, Informative)
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I also remember the Wolfram T galaxy.
Re: Stargate addressed this issue. (Score:3)
If it really is the replicators from Stargate, it seems like it would take far less than $4 billion. Think: he only has to create one here on Earth. Once it's done terraforming Earth, then it can simply use all the resources here to launch shuttles to the asteroid. Wait, what was the goal again and why? Lol.
https://stargate.fandom.com/wi... [fandom.com]
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Not for spider robots.
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which IIRC is a plot to sub-plot in several sci-fi stories.
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Not a problem, because completely impossible at the moment. Maybe in 100 years or so, but probably later. Actually usable self-replication is unsolved.
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No problem. Just make self replicating rat-bots to eat all the spider bots.
The plan (Score:2)
1) Find asteroid
2) Create, test, and utilize far-future autonomous technology to convert it into something else
3) Profit!
Wow. All three steps. I just get this sneaking suspicion that there are a LOT of difficult and expensive sub-steps to step 2. I dunno, maybe I'm crazy.
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Re: The plan (Score:2)
Saved me from writing the same comment.
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Re: The plan (Score:2)
Finding asteroids is tricky enough on its own, given that "finding" also means characterizing an unresolvable faint point of light approximately 10^8 kilometers away.
Apollo program? (Score:1)
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My eyes rolled so far back (Score:5, Insightful)
He claims that all the tech needed is 20th century or older. Launch a bunch of “autonomous self-replicating robots” to an asteroid that have the capability to mine, refine and process the regolith into functional engineering materials, and then use that material to self-replicate thousands of robots? And it’ll only cost 4 billion dollars? It’ll cost way more than that. How much does such a similar system currently cost on earth? 10 billion? A trillion? A hundred trillion?
The answer is probably infinite dollars. To my knowledge, that tech doesn’t exist, and we’re probably missing some of the necessary science as well. Nobody, anywhere on this planet, knows how to create any kind of robot that can self-replicate from raw materials (other than biological systems). 20th century technology? This plan probably requires 23rd or 24th century tech. The dude is off by at least 200 years.
The article is interesting, but it suffers badly from “single-author-itis”. The guy is a civil engineer that is clearly out of his depth. I’m going to fault him for failing at one of the primary rules an engineer is supposed to follow - know your technical limits and get help if you have to exceed them.
He would have done MUCH better if he’d assembled a team with a mechanical engineer, a materials scientist/engineer, a chemist or chemical engineer, and a space scientist or three.
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To my knowledge, that tech doesn’t exist, and we’re probably missing some of the necessary science as well. Nobody, anywhere on this planet, knows how to create any kind of robot that can self-replicate from raw materials (other than biological systems). 20th century technology? This plan probably requires 23rd or 24th century tech
It's not necessary to insist on nanomachines (which may or may not be physically possible). The plan can be accomplished with so-called "clanking replicators." That was the name given to them in the '80s. You build robots using robots and the material handling is done the way we do it today on Earth, no magical nanorobots involved. Ore is smelted for metals, and all the other various materials and reagents are scraped out of the surrounding rubble. Assembly is done the way we build cars and computers t
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We simply don’t have the knowledg
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I like your “clanking replicator” term. But it simply doesn’t exist. Even if you have all the $$$ on the planet, every bit of science and technology known to mankind, and every person on the planet working for you, you couldn’t design an electro-mechanical-chemical system that replicated itself from raw materials.
Why not? I detailed in another post in this thread how very few humans are involving in smelting metals these days, and pointed out how relatively simple it is to eliminate the last few humans. This is true across the supply chain as capitalism continues its relentless march towards eliminating labor costs. So what's the problem?
Pretty much everything involved in making a robot is mass produced, which means it's largely automated. Discrete electronics? Automated. It's not like there's such a thing as
Self replicating robots? How? (Score:2)
Of course biological systems can be self replicating, but so far none of them are capable of functioning in a space environment, though some can survive it in a dormant state
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There’s a few extras steps we still might need to work out to make that one work. (/s)
Re: Self replicating robots? How? (Score:2)
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Re: Self replicating robots? How? (Score:2)
And what about basic maintenance. You have moving parts a freezing, airless vacuum. Stuff will require grease and other types of lubrication. Every new robot will need some.
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Uncritically granting premise. (Score:2)
“ Dr. Jensen estimates that the program would cost only $4.1 billion. That is far less than the $93 billion NASA plans to spend on the Apollo program.”
So we uncritically equate 1 person’s “back of the envelope calculation” with the current accounting work of a gov’t agency?
I’m interested in Jensen’s estimate, and the Artemis budget (did they mean Apollo?) but the first is PR and the 2nd is legislatively mandated record keeping.
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That takes cars of ... (Score:3)
Just like in the book (Score:3)
In the book, The Ring of Charon [wikipedia.org] , beings from somewhere else in the universe had sent out seed ships. Some of these ships ended up in our asteroid belt and went "dormant". When they were awoken by an experiment done at Pluto (yes, the book has a habitat on Pluto), they execute their directive which is to use the material of planets to create a Dyson sphere.
There are various types of these robtos. Some simply destroy the planet by sucking the material upwards while others then turn that raw material into the necessary components. It's a self-replicating process since these robots can create other robots to keep things rolling.
Unfortunately, the author never got his third book published so we don't know how the story ends.
How not to get funding or public support. (Score:2, Funny)
He just watched (Score:2)
He probably just saw Wild Wild West and decided steam punk spider robots were existing tech. Then just hardwire in the AI RISC thinking machine prototypes from the first Mission Impossible and we're in business.
Checked the paper: mechanical computing (Score:4, Insightful)
I was very interested in the self-replication idea because semiconductors are hard to make and the solution was to not use them at all. Instead of electronics everything will be computed mechanically.
I think the idea is brilliant but not without challenges. A large part of it's success will depend on a design that is fault tolerant and the level of precision used. The lower the precision, the higher the mass of the computer. I have doubts about his existing plan (they have not done any real world computing tests) but I think the concept is sound.
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Microcontrollers to drive all those automatons with plenty of spares would be a rounding error in the initial launch weight.
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It wouldn't be a rounding error because millions of them are needed. The best approach would be to make an all-in-one chip made with quadruple redundant power and control systems, a particularly radiation resistant process, a radhard CPU design, and uses radhard software. On top of all that, they need to be able to operate over a HUGE range of temperatures.
It's easy to understand why mechanical computing was selected though I believe it will have it's own set of issues.
Re: Checked the paper: mechanical computing (Score:2)
Too bad mechanical computing at the scale necessary to run a robot doesn't exist.
A Boston Dynamics robot is a walking rack of high-ish performance electronic computers, plus a rack of really high performance electronic computers sitting off-camera that you don't see where the dynamics similations are done beforehand (kinda like an Xbox gesture recognition gizmo is small, but the machines that trained its neural net fill a room).
Mechanical computers used to fill rooms too, for all the computing power of your
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But even then, there's incredible challenges to making the rest of the parts for anything we'd consider to be a useful robot from raw materials found on an asteroid or another planet.
Even manufacturing something 'simple' such as a small modern electric motor is a huge task when you start to break it down. You probably need rare-earth magnets, you may need adhesives to hold the magnets
self replicating spider robots... (Score:2)
that's still a hard NO !
Seveneves (Score:1)
I believe this was one of the plotpoints of the book. :)
Or just use a magic wand (Score:3)
The magic wand is about as realistic as this guy's plan, less likely to fail but eating the entire solar system, and it doesn't cost much to carve a wand out of a tree branch.
And oh yeah, the magic wand is about as far away tech wise as his spider bots.
What could possibly go wrong..? (Score:2)
"Yesss.ss" , screeched the self-replicating spider robots, "come v.visit our asteroiiid".