Re: NASA "LSAM" and where's sci.space.xx gone?

On 29 May, 17:26, Alex Terrell <alexterr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This raises another very fundamental question the question of time
delay. Some management doctrine speaks about the grade of employee
being determined by how long it took brefore their absense was noted.
If you have an MD planning the strategic direction of the company, his
strategic decisions are extremely important to the company but they
will take years (possibly even a return signal to Alpha Centuri) to
bring to fruittion. A journey to the Moon and back is 2.5 sec approx,
ignoring server delays. This means, let us say, that if you are
repairing something on the Moon you can plan out what you want to do,
but you will not have the actual manual feel.

So what we need is a remote controlled back-hoe digger, with a built
in 2.5 second time delay, somewhere in the Antarctic desert,
controlled from Silicon Valley. Lets see what and how they can dig.
Offer $1 million to the team that shifts the most dirt in 7 days.

You would add in some intelligence - mainly to stop the controller
doing silly things. Modern planes already have this feature.

I think that would be an excellent idea. There is already a precedent
for this in the Pentagon's 200km "race" to Las Vegas and the "urban
challenge". Why not have a digger challenge". There is only one slight
fly in the ointment - gravity. All the diggers would be 1/6 scale. The
time would therefore be 2.5/6 sec. An alternative might be to do a
simulation and have standard lunar soil in JLINK (ProEngineer).

Well Andrew Ng at Stanford is developing a flatpack assembler. Put
that on the Moon and any maintainance task can be performed, always
assuming you have the parts to begin with. To my mind any flatpack
assembler knocks stone dead the notion of the value of Man in Space.

Who fixes the flat pack assembler?

You have more than one on the Moon. "Another" is the short answer.
This leads us on to the concept of a swarm. We should talk about AI as
residing in a swarm. You send to the Moon/Mars a swarm. Now at present
a failure in a probe leads too mission failure. With a swarm this
would not be the case.


That is a TAUTOLOGOUS argument!

So is "because its there". Settling space can't be done remotely.

Everest is there. George Mallory to whom that immortal quote belongs
did NOT ask for large sums of public money.

Not really. It would be interesting to play a game of Quiddich (I have
indeed been reading too much sci fi - Harry Potter) would be
interesting to play. I am quite serious about this. If it were not so
expensive I would indeed be interesting.

Quiddich would be much faster if the brooms were piloted remotely. An
automated snitch hunter? However, its mentioned in Book 5 that human
electronics don't work around Hogwarts.

Interesting, Man versus Machine. With robots there would be no
bodybags in wars too. While welcoming developments in automatically
piloted aircraft at one level , I feel they will lead to more wars.
I think if you want to go the the Moon (or Mars) and you can raise the
money by public subscription, sponsorship etc. If you can get
broadcasting rights for a 60m board championship, or Quiddich no one
should stop you. What is wrong - very wrong, is that public money
should be used.

I am inclined to believe that perhaps (eventually) an emphasis on
robotics might indeed reduce the cost.

Congress is far more likely to fund a manned lunar base than an
unmanned lunar outpost. Putting humans on the moon is the objective,
and you can't do that robotically. Though of course, the more robots,
the easier it is.

I am not sure about the way Congress would react. Overshadowing
everything in Space and publicly funded Science is the question of
Intelligent Design.Bush definitely believes in it, Gore says he does,
but whether he really does or not I really don't know. It seems hard
to justify a scientific program of any description in the light of
this. Nobody in this group has really faced the question of ID.

The world was created <10kY ago. How are gravitational waves, missing
mass etc. relevant in the light of this? These people are going to
decide the rival merits of these two projects.


- Ian Parker

.

Relevant Pages