[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)