"Bruce Sterling - Outer Cyberspace (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

"Let us imagine that such a vehicle is circling Mars," Clarke
speculated. "Under the guidance of a tiny yet extremely complex
electronic brain, the missile is now surveying the planet at close
quarters. A camera is photographing the landscape below, and the
resulting pictures are being transmitted to the distant Earth along a
narrow radio beam. It is unlikely that true television will be possible,
with an apparatus as small as this, over such ranges. The best that
could be expected is that still pictures could be transmitted at intervals
of a few minutes, which would be quite adequate for most purposes."

This is probably as close as a science fiction writer can come to
true prescience. It's astonishingly close to the true-life facts of the
early Mars probes. Mr. Clarke well understood the principles and
possibilities of interplanetary rocketry, but like the rest of mankind in
1951, he somewhat underestimated the long-term potentials of that
"tiny but extremely complex electronic brain" -- as well as that of
"true television." In the 1990s, the technologies of rocketry have
effectively stalled; but the technologies of "electronic brains" and
electronic media are exploding exponentially.

Advances in computers and communications now make it
possible to speculate on the future of "space exploration" along
entirely novel lines. Let us now imagine that Mars is under thorough
exploration, sometime in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.
However, there is no "Martian colony." There are no three-stage
rockets, no pressure-domes, no tractor-trailers, no human settlers.

Instead, there are hundreds of insect-sized robots, every one of
them equipped not merely with "true television," but something much
more advanced. They are equipped for *telepresence.* A human
operator can see what they see, hear what they hear, even guide them
about at will (granted, of course, that there is a steep transmission

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lag). These micro-rovers, crammed with cheap microchips and laser
photo-optics, are so exquisitely monitored that one can actually *feel*
the Martian grit beneath their little scuttling claws. Piloting one of
these babies down the Valles Marineris, or perhaps some unknown
cranny of the Moon -- now *that* really feels like "exploration." If
they were cheap enough, you could dune-buggy them.

No one lives in space stations, in this scenario. Instead, our
entire solar system is saturated with cheap monitoring devices. There
are no "rockets" any more. Most of these robot surrogates weigh less
than a kilogram. They are fired into orbit by small rail-guns mounted
on high-flying aircraft. Or perhaps they're launched by laser-ignition:
ground-based heat-beams that focus on small reaction-chambers and
provide their thrust. They might even be literally shot into orbit by