Harbinger of the not awesome future

[james_davis_nicoll]

Can human will be extended across the solar system without enabling some lantern-jaw stalwart to pose heroically, fists on hips, on some distant alien hilltop as his adoring girlfriend looks on with admiration? Experts fear the worst.

Comments

[seawasp]

Fine, go ahead, give control of our solar system to the heartless machines. If we're LUCKY they'll leave a few of us in a zoo as curiosities. We all know how this works!

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

I thought the adoring (and brazen-brassiered) girlfriend was supposed to be writhing in the grip of a slavering, tentacular horror?

If these things must be updated, I suppose a brazen-codpieced boyfriend may be substituted.

[seawasp]

Or a tentacular horror writhing in the grip of the brazen-codpieced boyfriend?

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

Whatever floats his antigrav skimmer.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize the girlfriend was so turned on by the slavering tentacular horror.

I guess I need to watch more Japanese animation.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Is it actually worth sending humans to L2, vs. having a telescope and relay there?

"On a given work day, NASA sends a list of commands for Curiosity to execute in the morning and then receives word about the robot’s progress at the end of the day.

“It’s almost like doing exploration by overnight FedEx,”"

Sure, reducing that to 200 ms would be nice. But seems like you could reduce the turnaround to at most 20 minutes for a lot less, if you didn't treat entire days as batches.

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

Days are treated as batches because of the turnaround time for digesting current results and using them to plan future actions.

[bwross.livejournal.com]

The thing is that with a turnaround of 20 minutes, if you tell the robot to do something stupid by accident, there's a very good chance you lose it. So you end up spending 12 hours analyzing and planing to try to make sure you don't do anything stupid. The only way you get around that is if the delay is negligible.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Yes. And if the "check to make sure you don't do anything stupid" takes 12 hours, there is not much incentive to speed up the "make a plan and code the command sequence for transmission" step which precedes it.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

It occurred to me the other day that the sensible way to do time travel (if your goal is finding out as much as possible without changing history) would be to send back photographing drones to film stuff from too high to be seen by back-thenners' technology. I'm sure someone else must have thought of this.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

In Marooned in Real-Time(?) there's plenty of forward time travel. I seem to recall that long-lived very covert recon satellites were used to keep an eye on things while the protagonists were time-travelling further into the future.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Yes, although I don't know about "covert." By that time there's not really anyone to hide from, you know. But we do see a home movie that's a time lapse of millions of years of Earth's history.

[(Anonymous)]

I seem to recall a Lester Del Rey story in which, to save on fuel, the planets were explored by very, very, short people. The explorer featured in the story was nonetheless "handsome as a hollywood leading man" so there may have been some lantern-jawing going on, though.

William Hyde

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Articles that tell me that something is not what I think have an extraordinarily bad track record at guessing what I think.

[(Anonymous)]

Perhaps we could build some lantern-jawed robots?

Bruce

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Maybe like Bob?