TL;dr an interesting frame through which to view Ingenuity use of off-the-shelf components, is as an indicator of where we are in the Moore's Law (etc.) type v

TL;dr an interesting frame through which to view Ingenuity use of off-the-shelf components, is as an indicator of where we are in the Moore's Law (etc.) type views on the inverse performance and cost curves in our computational infrastruture. There was some implicit dotted line in N-space representing the necessary reliability, performance, weight, etc. characteristics required for multi-million-dollar NASA missions. The take-away is that we have now advanced the industry generally such that with are we can be over that line. I can connect this, observationally, to a hardware startup I was employee #1 at many years ago. At the time a friend started his company, it had only just—perhaps in a 12 month window—become viable for two people to design, program, and ship a hardware product based on embedded systems on microcontrollers, fast-turn PCB fabrication, and to do mechanical design in e.g. Solidworks on a PC. At the time, data sheets were still delivered via FAX trees. McMaster-Carr and Digikey were all we eneeded. It COULD be done, and we did it. It felt at the time like what we were able to do represented a collective crossing of some event horizon. The garage was back, baby. That we have now crossed a similar threshold wrt putting largely autonomous flying bots on Mars I didn't foresee. Nonlinearity is hard. But at moments like these I do like to try to look over my shoulder, ahead. Where in another 25 years? I'll play. Autonomous mesh-networked group-mind self-repairing and possibly bootstrap-replicating vestigial von Nuemann probes, populating and mapping the ocean worlds of the gas giants. And I'll bet that's conservative—one X factor being just how long it takes to get out there. But I'm cautiously optimistic we will be getting there in sub-year travel times by then.