Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to bandwidth and latency

re: bandwidth and latency
TB — (archived)

Great post, but one point:

Looking at the whole picture, then, flying an autonomous spacecraft with its own bridge requires the information processing and decision-making capabilities of several hundred human-level intelligences.

I'm not sure this has to be true, or for that matter, why it's true for so many NASA-type missions. Military robotic planes usually run with one or two operators to take care of all the systems during actual operation. Undersea exploration robots rarely use more than a couple of operators. Of course, this doesn't count maintenance personnel between missions.

Just plain human exploration ran just fine for hundreds of years with small autonomous groups with no communication at all to any "bases" back home.

If you need hundreds of people looking at screens to monitor every little twitch of the machinery, you haven't designed something right.

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