There's an interesting story in the Times this morning about efforts to make robotic space probes more autonomous. The idea is that it would be nice to be able to explore the Solar System without the big delays introduced by light-speed communications lags. In the absence of an ansible, autonomous robots are the best way to accomplish this.
I don't really have anything to add, I just wanted to note the article. I'm going to start posting more short link-y things, for a variety of reasons, and this is one such post.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." -Groucho Marx
"While no one has proved that wormholes exist, that does not for a moment keep the more adventurous of thinkers from trying to figure how they might behave."
-Michael Lemonick, Time magazine…
Here's the day's final repost of an old blog post about space policy. This is yet another post from 2004, with the usual caveats about linkrot and dated numbers and the like.
This one is more or less a direct response to comments made in response to the previous post attempting to argue that using…
In the comments to yesterday's grumpy post about the Fermi paradox, makeinu raises the idea that advanced aliens would be using more targeted communications than we do:
On the point about electromagnetic communications: even we are now using lasers to target communications with space, because it’s…
I've seen a bunch of people linking approvingly to this piece about the "Fermi paradox," (the question of why we haven't seen any evidence of other advanced civilizations) and I can't quite understand why. The author expends a good deal of snark taking astronomers and physicists to task for…