Re: Re: starship-design: Suspended Animation

[Kelly St <KellySt@aol.com>]

In a message dated 5/10/98 6:54:58 PM, arocha@bsb.nutecnet.com.br wrote:

>Kelly,
>    Remote control of a "steady push" starship on a b-line and at constant
distance
>in unimpeded space, 50 years from now, will be quite more simple - and sure -
than
>present-day control of manuvering military aircraft at variable range in the
atmosphere.
>Its going to be as easy as controlling a present-day VCR. Redundancy could
assure
>against failures. --

You don't need remotre control for steady bland flight, you need it for
emergencies and judgement.

Also since the ships would be moving away from one another over great
distences the time lag eats you.


>---Critical manuvers could count with a temporary human crew from
>the "main" ship. Tugboat "command" ships, or a travelling attachable "bridge-
ship"
>might suffice.
>    Active repair crews would be composed of dozens or hundreds of year 2040
model
>maintenance bots and AIs for each human. Life-support, accomodations and R&R
requirements
>would be correspondingly lessened. They would also multiply the human crews
response
>capacity  to emergencies. As in todays industries and stock brokers, expert
systems
>and AI would allow the crew to "bring along" as earths best as consultants
and
>managers.
>    If asteroid mining spurs the development of automated mini-foundries,
mini-refineries
>and mini-factories (or pre-processing plants) - and raw materials asteroids /
comets
>are sent along with the ship / fleet - then the main foreseeable non-human
obstructions
>to the mission will have been resolved.
>
>Antonio


AI has gotten good at dealing with routine things in a very limited relm.
They are still pretty useless in an unconstraind environment like ship repair.
So again I'm assuming the systems can't be much more then a couple orders of
magnitude better then today.

Kelly