Japan’s recent advances in robotics sit on the leading edge of the industry as this blog post is published in late 2014.
In the popular science fiction movie epic “Interstellar” the central character returns from a momentous deep space voyage to other worlds in another galaxy via falling thorugh a wormhole AND an older black hole, to be confronted by the fact that although he has aged very little, due to traveling at near the speed of light for extended periods of time, his own daughter is now so advanced in years that she is a great-grandmother, now lying on her death-bed. Most everyone else he knew on earth before he left has long since passed on. He’s been gone for more than 100 years of earth time, but it only seemed as a few months to him during his transit.
The logistics problem presented by the attempt to find a way for human beings to traverse the colossal distances of deep space has always been the gnawing unsolvable riddle for modern astronomers and orgs like NASA. Beyond a journey to Mars, that being our first ‘baby step’ into local solar system space travel, any attempt to actually travel the unimaginable distances between earth and even near-by stars beyond our solar system, [ several dozens light years, give or take, at least] has seemed virtually impossible for any human being to endure. Maybe we need to re-arrange the way we think about the space travel riddle.
Pause to consider: maybe it won’t be us who will be doing the actual traveling. Maybe it will finally be our own robotic representatives instead, built to last for thousands of years, and programmed to manufacture their own “robotic successors” in deep space as they travel. After all, they will certainly have ample time on their hands as they rocket through deep space at more than 100,000 MPH or more. Might as well put these clever machines to good use during their transit.
This makes the conquering of local regions of deep space [ 1-15 light years distance ] and possible travel to nearby habitable worlds entirely plausible, does it not? I postulate that the next 20 years might see enough advances in the emerging industry of “Robonautics” and / or “Robostronomy” aka the development of “Deep Space Robotics” engineering, that we might just unravel and finally solve the riddle, or at least parts of it.
Leigh W. aka Screenshot, on 4.13.2015
Tags: Robotics, Robonauts, Robonautics, space travel, time-space continuum, our solar system, advanced robotics and astronomy, robonautic engineering, science technology, space robotics, robostronomy, conquering deep space travel
