RE: NASA is back on track to colonize the moon, by destroying some grains of moon material brought back by Apollo 17.
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I love the competition for space lift ability. It is wise, and will force down costs. It is coming into range for private companies to build lift vehicles.
I did not recognize his name, but I have followed Space X. If I were single, I would likely go there and help them. Remote control is clunky from here to the Moon, and impossibly difficult on Mars.
IF Remote control was possible, we would Not need A.I. software. We need boots on the ground, to develop the resources on the Moon. Robots can data collect, but to develop a surface and harvest resources; we will need people.
Machines by definition wear and break. That does Not mean they are not useful, but they do not Heal themselves. Basic repairs might be possible after creative programming. It is so expensive to build and lift machines there, that reuse after repair, becomes very important.
Solar power is important for a Moon installation, and splitting water and storing the Hydrogen, while breathing the Oxygen with the solar power, will allow you to run fuel cell during the evening! Lava tubes, once sealed, will make a good living space, and subsurface is safer....
The Space X design has been optimized to land on, and colonize Mars. They will need the experience we can get on the Moon, before someone gets killed up there. That said, I would Love to go anyway! If we can pull fuel from the moon, we have a much smaller gravity well to fight, to fuel a Mars Mission.
There is Much to be gained, by using the moon, as a stepping stone to the stars!
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With the Mars Rover, they would give the rover missions, tasks. Now, technically, that is not remote control, directly speaking, but close enough. If they can do it on Mars then they can do it on the moon. And keep in mind that the Mars Rover has been on Mars for around 20 years now. So, this is not new technology. It is old. 20 years is old. I remember watching it twenty years ago. I remember watching videos about how they control it. I'm not saying don't put people on the moon. I'm saying one step at a time. I'm saying they should do their best to take advantage of what the moon has to offer. They need to study the moon as much as possible in order to make the best plan possible for where to put the people on the moon.
I did a post on the final reporting of the Mars Rover, she was a tough little robot! She was only supposed to last 30 days, kind of ran way past that, LOL!
The electronics are older, and even older than you think, because they selected a radiation resistant microprocessor of a much lower ability. So more like 30+ years on the electronics!
We should be aggressive with the moon, because we must learn everything we can there; before we leave someone hanging out to dry on Mars!
The best place on the Moon will be the location with Lava Tubes, to provide easy habitation space. The Moon must be a laboratory to support the future...beginning with Mars. Colonization is well within our ability now, and can prove to be financially lukerative; fairly quickly!
I would Love to give it a try myself, it would be exciting, and I could keep the robots running!
I like robots myself, I am planning on building a CNC Mill (Robot) from a manual mill I already have. They are good servants, and we should use them as much as possible, to protect life and limb!
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Wow. Mars Rover. Older than I thought. So, with the moon, when you say Lava Tubes, does that mean there is lava on the moon? I don't mind having people keep robots together but I would prefer using people as a last resort if at all possible.
Humans + Androids
For example, ideally, I would send people to the moon with robots. I would have the robots do the repairs. The astronauts would give the bots, drones, machines, tasks. I would try to make sure that the robots could repair each other upon command.
Last Resort
But for anything that goes wrong, the humans could come in and fix whatever goes wrong. And I understand that.
Flexibility Like Trees
I just want to try my best, if I were them, to minimize the need to repair. For example, in architecture, some of the stronger skyscrapers which withheld earthquakes were made to be flexible like trees as opposed to rigid. I know robots are a lot more complex than buildings. So, I know my analogy here is not perfect.
Robot Body Guards
Yes. We should have robot body guards to protect ourselves from future robot police, robotic terrorism, etc.
They had to be sure it would survive the cosmic radiation, so they picked a mil spec rad hardened microprocessor (AKA Old). The Lava tubes are something from the moon's past, and are simple to seal up. The will provide a lot of space, and be Safe from small meteoroids.
The best way to work (for people) is to have a recovery robot to send to pick up the damaged unit, and bring it to a central facility. The person can repair and upgrade, then send it back to the recovery Robot; to be returned to it's test site. That way, it can go back to work quickly.
The people run the central facility, and figure extraction of materials; and direct the Robot exploration. The people provide the thought required to push things forward.
Flexibility is Not a robot's kettle of fish, so the people will fill this gap. The A.I. decision level needed for 'robocop' is why they made him into a cyborg.
Still need some programming to get there. The processor speed is beginning to get there, it was a processing speed problem on prosthetic limbs a decade ago. That is something I would like to build, especially with electrodes to allow the user to move the limb by thinking....
:)>So, you don't think we are anywhere close to having Terminator robots, Star Trek Data, Wall-E androids, the Robin Williams Bicentennial Man, Short Circuit Johnny Five with the wheels, the danger danger bot from Lost in Space, C3PO from Star Wars, R2D2, Alita, the Cylon from Battlestar Galactica, etc? Yeah, that does make sense, that they put a human inside an avatar, I mean RoboCop. They did a similar thing to General Grevious and Darth Vader in Star Wars.
They are trying, but to date they are just bairly able to walk. We will need a lost more processor power, and a better power source first. A lot of today's robots are teathered for power, and some need charge after just a few hours. Tracked units have trouble with dust in bearings, even with sealed bearings.
Not hopeless, just an Inherent oroblem. They could recover the lunar rover for recovery use....
:)>Don't they have robots that can run?
Not that I have seen, the ones that walk use almost all their processor power to do so. It is hard to balance and to walk, you have to actually fall forward (in a controlled way). We will get there, a lot of progress has been made already.
Progress is the sum of many small steps, and we are tallying up a lot of small steps! It will happen soon.
The power problem worries me more, especially in space. We need to find a power system with a significantly higher power density. Solar power, as a primary source, is what killed the Mars Rover. We need to do better!
If we had People local, we could recover and reset that robot. We also need satellites to allow remote reporting for the long range prospecting robots. I really would enjoy working up there, it would be exciting!
We are getting close!
:)>How did solar power kill the Mars Rover? Did it have no backup power in case there was no sun or was there some kind of surge, as in too much power all of sudden, like EMP or something that fried the power? Was there no like buffer or surge protection or what about solar power that would kill the rover on Mars? I'm asking because I love solar power and I hate to see it cause problems at all. If it was just a lack of sun, I'd understand.
I also love solar power, and I am building a full system for my homestead.
The problem was that the rover was stuck in a sand storm for over two weeks, and her onboard battery died. When sun returned, she undoubtedly recharged; but no longer knew where Earth was due to memory loss. Further communications are no longer possible without antenna alignment reprogramming.
She was a tough little rover that was supposed to only run for 90 days, and she hung in a little longer, LOL!
I wrote on herr about a year ago, a salute to a heroic little robot! They got weather data that changed some of the colony planning from this little beast. We really got our monies worth from this mission!
She should be recovered and placed in the first Martian Museum.
:)>Did you say she is still moving around on Mars but that we are not receiving a signal from the Mars Rover any longer? So, the memory was lost because it was not powered for the two weeks? Don't they have external hard drives that can retain memory like a DVD or how long can drives last without power? Did the sand storm create an EMP or something that would shock the memory? Did her program not have a if-then protocol for what to do if there are storms? Did she have the ability to scan the weather in order to attempt to run away from storms or to dig a hole and turn off to wait the storm out?
Likely she is moving again. Without the exact location of the Planet Earth, she can no longer point her antennae to report in. That storm was a long duration problem, and the reboot would go back to her original programming from a decade plus before.
She would "loose" Earth, having moved way past her originally intended location and mission time. A hard drive would be fine, as long as the seal was intact.
Storm covered a third of the planet, couldn't out run it. They should have used the watchdog timer to reactivate the processor after a hard shutdown; to save power. They could have doubled the memory retention time that way.
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