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> sending robots first and let them build at least a rudimentary base first and mine resources and teleoperate the whole thing from a save distance The main pr

by mabbo 9y ago

> sending robots first and let them build at least a rudimentary base first and mine resources and teleoperate the whole thing from a save distance The main problem is that robots (currently) suck without humans to guide them. And with an up-to 20-minute speed of light delay each way, it's really hard to guide robots on Mars. Curiosity, the most complex robot we've landed on Mars, is managing something like <5 km/year. Autonomous robots would be needed- multiple, very smart and very tough. We don't have that yet.

sqeaky 9y ago
Curiosity is also a unique tool of science. A business could approach this differently. A business doing this would drop several hundred of the same machine on mars. If they were semi-autonomous like Curiosity and controlled from earth each one might get a dedicated driver instead of a team of scientists. A command might include placing location markers, flattening the surface between two markers, pick up dust inside a region and filtering it for some material. The driver would determine what tasks he needed to get done (probably from a jira ticket :( ) then would coordinate with other nearby drivers and even with high latency they could get decent throughput. It might even be that one driver might get several construction machines if the tasks were simple enough. If a machine breaks, the simply move it out of the way until a manned mission. It might also be that there could be a small team on the surface and a slightly larger team in orbit. The surface team could do maintenance and the team in orbit could control a small army of machines. These people could be rotated around or semi-permanent depending on the details of the work and the economics of this situation.
hutzlibu 9y ago
"Autonomous robots would be needed- multiple, very smart and very tough. We don't have that yet." We also don't have self-sustainable city's yet. But autonomous robots (or even self replicating ones) are very helpfull for reaching self-sustainable citys. So ... we should work on both ... while Elon Musk is doing the rockets ...

by mabbo 9y ago

sqeaky 9y ago

Curiosity is also a unique tool of science. A business could approach this differently. A business doing this would drop several hundred of the same machine on mars. If they were semi-autonomous like Curiosity and controlled from earth each one might get a dedicated driver instead of a team of scientists. A command might include placing location markers, flattening the surface between two markers, pick up dust inside a region and filtering it for some material. The driver would determine what tasks he needed to get done (probably from a jira ticket :( ) then would coordinate with other nearby drivers and even with high latency they could get decent throughput. It might even be that one driver might get several construction machines if the tasks were simple enough. If a machine breaks, the simply move it out of the way until a manned mission. It might also be that there could be a small team on the surface and a slightly larger team in orbit. The surface team could do maintenance and the team in orbit could control a small army of machines. These people could be rotated around or semi-permanent depending on the details of the work and the economics of this situation.

hutzlibu 9y ago

"Autonomous robots would be needed- multiple, very smart and very tough. We don't have that yet." We also don't have self-sustainable city's yet. But autonomous robots (or even self replicating ones) are very helpfull for reaching self-sustainable citys. So ... we should work on both ... while Elon Musk is doing the rockets ...