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3 things needed to take space to the next level. 1) Habitats (we gotta live) 2) Energy (this will cover fuel, heating, automation, defence) 3) Mining (this g

3 things needed to take space to the next level. 1) Habitats (we gotta live) 2) Energy (this will cover fuel, heating, automation, defence) 3) Mining (this gets us the resources to do all the above) You corner the market in any of those three and you will be set for the imaginable future.

BerislavLopac 4y ago
> Habitats (we gotta live) Why exactly do we need to live in space at all? Can't we send more or less autonomous spacecraft to retrieve the resources, and stay safely here on Earth? I mean - we extract oil from under the sea without having to move to underwater habitats, don't we?
- throwaway889900 4y ago
  Maintenance is always done on site. Do you think the workers on oil rigs take a commute to land every night? No, so people are going to need to live in space to solve problems in space.
  - BerislavLopac 4y ago
    Maintenance can be done by robots. Unlike on oil platforms, there is no free air in space.
    - throwaway889900 4y ago
      Until a general purpose robot that can do all the things a human can do is developed and can be more cheaply deployed than a human, a human's gonna do it instead.
      - BerislavLopac 4y ago
        That is true. But keep in mind two things: first, the robot does not have to be fully autonomous, and second, maintaining a human in space is so expensive that we already have such robots. Just look at Curiosity and its cousins.
        throwaway889900 4y ago
        I don't think Curiosity and its cousins can tighten down leaky bolts on pipe connections, which is what I think of when the term "maintenance" comes up. The closest we have right now in that vicinity is Spot from Boston Dynamics, and it basically only acts as a universal monitoring tool to go yell at a human to fix things. I guess what I'm saying is that robots can identify problem points, but at the current time can't actually troubleshoot or resolve those problems. Those are really difficult problems to solve.

BerislavLopac 4y ago

> Habitats (we gotta live) Why exactly do we need to live in space at all? Can't we send more or less autonomous spacecraft to retrieve the resources, and stay safely here on Earth? I mean - we extract oil from under the sea without having to move to underwater habitats, don't we?

throwaway889900 4y ago
Maintenance is always done on site. Do you think the workers on oil rigs take a commute to land every night? No, so people are going to need to live in space to solve problems in space.
- BerislavLopac 4y ago
  Maintenance can be done by robots. Unlike on oil platforms, there is no free air in space.
  - throwaway889900 4y ago
    Until a general purpose robot that can do all the things a human can do is developed and can be more cheaply deployed than a human, a human's gonna do it instead.
    - BerislavLopac 4y ago
      That is true. But keep in mind two things: first, the robot does not have to be fully autonomous, and second, maintaining a human in space is so expensive that we already have such robots. Just look at Curiosity and its cousins.
      - throwaway889900 4y ago
        I don't think Curiosity and its cousins can tighten down leaky bolts on pipe connections, which is what I think of when the term "maintenance" comes up. The closest we have right now in that vicinity is Spot from Boston Dynamics, and it basically only acts as a universal monitoring tool to go yell at a human to fix things. I guess what I'm saying is that robots can identify problem points, but at the current time can't actually troubleshoot or resolve those problems. Those are really difficult problems to solve.