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

Jules Vernian "space guns" that use the intriguing, dirt-cheap
technology of Gerald Bull's Iraqi "super-cannon." This wacky but
promising technique would be utterly impractical for launching human
beings, since the acceleration g-load would shatter every bone in their
bodies; but these little machines are *tough.*

And small robots have many other advantages. Unlike manned
craft, robots can go into harm's way: into Jupiter's radiation belts, or
into the shrapnel-heavy rings of Saturn, or onto the acid-bitten
smoldering surface of Venus. They stay on their missions,
operational, not for mere days or weeks, but for decades. They are
extensions, not of human population, but of human senses.

And because they are small and numerous, they should be
cheap. The entire point of this scenario is to create a new kind of
space-probe that is cheap, small, disposable, and numerous: as cheap
and disposable as their parent technologies, microchips and video,
while taking advantage of new materials like carbon-fiber, fiber-
optics, ceramic, and artificial diamond.

The core idea of this particular vision is "fast, cheap, and out of
control." Instead of gigantic, costly, ultra-high-tech, one-shot efforts
like NASA's Hubble Telescope (crippled by bad optics) or NASA's
Galileo (currently crippled by a flaw in its communications antenna)
these micro-rovers are cheap, and legion, and everywhere. They get
crippled every day; but it doesn't matter much; there are hundreds
more, and no one's life is at stake. People, even quite ordinary people,
*rent time on them* in much the same way that you would pay for
satellite cable-TV service. If you want to know what Neptune looks

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like today, you just call up a data center and *have a look for
yourself.*

This is a concept that would truly involve "the public" in space
exploration, rather than the necessarily tiny elite of astronauts. This
is a potential benefit that we might derive from abandoning the
expensive practice of launching actual human bodies into space. We
might find a useful analogy in the computer revolution: "mainframe"
space exploration, run by a NASA elite in labcoats, is replaced by a
"personal" space exploration run by grad students and even hobbyists.

In this scenario, "space exploration" becomes similar to other
digitized, computer-assisted media environments: scientific
visualization, computer graphics, virtual reality, telepresence. The
solar system is saturated, not by people, but by *media coverage.
Outer space becomes *outer cyberspace.*