[HN Gopher] Autonomous restructuring of asteroids into rotating ...
___________________________________________________________________
Autonomous restructuring of asteroids into rotating space stations
Author : belter
Score : 68 points
Date : 2023-03-06 17:06 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| jjk166 wrote:
| Everything important seems to be handwaved away.
|
| You can't just say making a "truss building unit" would take a
| spider 10550 hours of labor, or that spiders operating TBUs will
| produce truss 416 times faster - show me the design for this
| spring powered truss builder that takes precisely 3 hours and 3
| minutes to produce a unit of truss; show me the spider that
| builds it, show me the steps along the process of the spider
| assembling the unit, show me where these numbers are coming from.
| It would be one thing if these were rough order of magnitude
| estimations, but the level of precision implies that not to be
| the case.
| more_corn wrote:
| If we only had self replicating robots we could have everything
| we want without having to go build it.
|
| This is the engineering equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| its thr holy grail
|
| Like Nuclear Fusion, AGI, faster-than-light travel and
| Biological Immortality.
|
| I have a feeling holy grails will stay out of reach for a
| while.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| One of these thing is not like the others...
|
| I mean, FTL is probably a pipe dream. Nuclear fusion is an
| economic problem, AGI is on track to happen within our
| lifetime, biological immortality is in principle possible if
| you're not super strict about the definitions (i.e. can't
| beat the heat death of the universe with it), and self-
| replicating robots are quite literally what _all of biology
| is_.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| They all represent the pinnacle of their respective branch
| of science.
|
| By biological immortality I mean your body doesn't fail, or
| is fixable - you don't die of old age or random kidney
| failure.
|
| You still die if someone cuts off your head.
|
| > self-replicating robots are quite literally what all of
| biology is
|
| By the same argument AGI is just same as human brain.
|
| Many people think ChatGPT is so ompressive, that we are on
| the cust of AGI. I am convinced otherwise - chat gpt makes
| limitations of current AI approached very clear.
|
| My best guess is that AGI will be one of the last items,
| maybe after FTL
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _By biological immortality I mean your body doesn 't
| fail, or is fixable - you don't die of old age or random
| kidney failure. You still die if someone cuts off your
| head._
|
| That sounds entirely possible then. I'd wager the limits
| we'd hit would be memories - it's not known if our
| brains, in their current form, would be able to cope with
| hundreds of years of memories.
|
| >> _self-replicating robots are quite literally what all
| of biology is_
|
| > _By the same argument AGI is just same as human brain._
|
| Yes, but the main difference is that biology is _merely_
| too big for us to keep track of - it just has too many
| moving pieces that have been, from our perspective,
| heavily overfitted. Still, we 've reached the level where
| we can reprogram some of the nanobots. In contrast, the
| topic of intelligence still has a lot of big mysteries.
|
| Another way of looking at it is, we already have a well-
| mapped way of building nanotechnology: reprogramming the
| one that is around us, and is us. Plenty of little self-
| replicating programmable bots to pick from. But we're not
| at similar stage with poking in brains just yet.
|
| > _Many people think ChatGPT is so ompressive, that we
| are on the cust of AGI. I am convinced otherwise - chat
| gpt makes limitations of current AI approached very
| clear._
|
| I agree. Though to me, it also revealed limitations of
| _human cognition_ (or rather, it was already quite
| apparent at GPT-2 level; ChatGPT is only rubbing it in
| everyones ' faces).
|
| Have you ever felt that your own thinking, in many
| situations, is mostly cache lookups? That your speech and
| inner monologue (if you have one) both resemble a Markov
| chain, and your "self" mostly just observes and censors
| the output? I certainly did, quite a lot over the
| decades. I know others did, many obviously rejecting it
| as silly association. But what the recent LLMs show us is
| that maybe, just maybe, it's not silly at all. Which
| invites the question, if a lot of our cognition works
| this way, then just how much more complicated are the
| bits that don't?
|
| (Another thing ChatGPT and the like are making apparent,
| is that AI risk isn't tied to reaching AGI. I think
| people kind of assumed it would take AGI taking off to
| end human civilization, but at this point I believe it's
| pretty clear that LLMs as a class of models are up to the
| task already - all they need is to have more memory,
| access to APIs that let them affect the real world and
| observe the results, and being run continuously; Reddit
| corpus already supplies the token association patterns
| that would let them end the world if given the means...)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _If we only had self replicating robots we could have
| everything we want without having to go build it._
|
| We have. Life is just nanotech, one that we didn't design, so
| we can't control it (yet). But in context of this topic, it's a
| sufficient proof that:
|
| > _This is the engineering equivalent of a perpetual motion
| machine_
|
| is false. In fact, if you squint, self-replication and in-situ
| resource utilization are the only ways humans ever done
| anything substantial.
| Teever wrote:
| But self-replicating machines already exist?
|
| Life is a good example of one, but the global economy is
| another.
| jagraff wrote:
| This kind of concept is explored in the (science fiction) novel
| Seveneves [0] by Neal Stephenson, specifically the first half.
| Also explored: reshaping and vaporizing the ice on a comet with a
| nuclear reactor to create an impromptu propulsion device.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves
| nlawalker wrote:
| 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson features the idea heavily (the
| main character is a former "asteroid terrarium designer"). The
| Expanse series has quite a bit of it too.
| gooseyman wrote:
| Came here to recommend 2312 & the Expanse as well! Any other
| content in this genre you enjoy/would recommend? I'm looking
| for my "next"
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I for one welcome our new spider replicator overlords.
| bdg wrote:
| Have we solved how to make one spider?
| frankreyes wrote:
| The Expanse, scifi book and tv show, explored this concept. So
| fun
| wklauss wrote:
| The novel 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson, explores this idea and
| has a fun chapter describing the process of hollowing out and
| terraforming an asteroid, using the ejecta to give it artificial
| gravity and a stable orbit in the solar system. Highly
| recommended.
| adamwong246 wrote:
| Cool but why send people to space? Keeping humans alive in space
| makes the problem so much more difficult. Just move all our
| industry into space and have the humans stay home.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Can't the robots pull together space junk instead?
| gene-h wrote:
| Using automata is a bit silly and has problems. The biggest
| problems are vacuum welding and lack of lubrication. Vacuum
| welding can cause higher wear or even failure on metal
| components. Gears and cams absolutely need lubrication, which is
| liable to evaporation in a vacuum or requires exotic elements
| such as molybdenum.
|
| Gears and cams also need to be machined, and machining processes
| do not work well in a vacuum for some of the same reasons
| mentioned above. That being said, one ton of microchips goes a
| long way. Why bother with automata, when simple vacuum tubes(in
| space, a vacuum tube is a couple funny shaped pieces of metal in
| close proximity) and magnetic amplifiers could be used to amplify
| signals from microcontrollers into something capable of doing
| useful work?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > exotic elements such as molybdenum.
|
| What? Molybdenum disulphide grease is available everywhere.
| shagie wrote:
| It's not "exotic" in that it isn't used (it has major
| industrial Uses) but rather that it is one of the less common
| materials in the crust. It's less common than many of the
| "rare earth" elements and less common than uranium (Uranium
| is the 49th most common element while Molybdenum is the 58th
| depending on source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_o
| f_elements_in_Earth... ).
| gene-h wrote:
| On asteroids it will be harder to obtain. It's been found to
| be present in iron meteorites at about 30 ppm[0].
| [0]https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190647926.013.206
| balaji1 wrote:
| Can they build a demo on earth? Maybe reshape a small hill-side
| into something fun or pretty with "Autonomous Restructuring".
| That would be fun to watch.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Can they build a demo on earth? Maybe reshape a small hill-
| side into something fun or pretty with "Autonomous
| Restructuring". That would be fun to watch.
|
| If you are restructuring an asteroid, containment isn't much
| of a problem; if you want to do it to an isolated site on
| earth, it is more of a concern.
| balaji1 wrote:
| what is containment?
| foobarian wrote:
| > in space, a vacuum tube is a couple funny shaped pieces of
| metal in close proximity
|
| I can't believe this never occurred to me before. The
| possibilities are staggering :-)
| Teever wrote:
| Why not just move the asteroid or pieces of the asteroid into a
| pressurized environment?
| AustinDev wrote:
| Fascinating paper, I'm going to have to spend some more time with
| it later today. I did love this quote though which captures the
| ethos of what they are proposing:
|
| >: Our asteroid restructuring approach can be compared to the
| effort of early pioneers. A wagon heading west in America in the
| 1800s could not carry enough supplies to support a family for the
| journey or at the destination. These pioneers brought tools with
| them to be self-sufficient [Williams 2016]. Our restructuring
| relies on self-replication, but more important, on the production
| of tools to make the restructuring effort self-sufficient and
| sufficiently productive.
| idlewords wrote:
| This is a great example of the space fallacy, the idea that
| things that are impossible to do on Earth are somehow practical
| technologies for space. If it's all so easy to do, then go hollow
| out your local mountain; I promise it will get people's
| attention.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Hallowing out a mountain would be much easier and in fact not
| all that impressive if (1) it was actually a rubble pile, and
| (2) no gravity.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I'd settle for hollowing out an actual rubble pile as a demo.
| I'd be ecstatic, honestly, if you dumped any package of
| machines on a rubble pile and it autonomously, with only
| solar power, produced any machine more complicated than a bar
| of metal (and even that bar of metal would be no joke).
| Refining raw materials is hard. At least in space you'd be
| able to melt things in the open without them immediately
| oxidizing to hell.
|
| Gravity is dubious as pro or con. It's honestly kind of handy
| sometimes, as a spatial organizing principle if nothing else.
| idlewords wrote:
| It's our bad luck that all the easy stuff got put in space.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-03-06 23:00 UTC)