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Friday, February 24, 2012

Futurologists Anticipating Arrival of Japanese Space Elevator Advised to Hold Their Breath

Although "carbon nanotubes" do figure prominently in the usual, more or less magical, manner in the most recent Space Elevator cartoon, er, scenario, er, scheme, er, scam, io9 voices skepticism.

You see, if the latest proposal involved actual Very Serious Futurologists, they would also assure us the space elevator would rise from a free market paradise archipelago of off-shore oil platforms and luxury cruise-ships tethered to an orbital space hotel cum launch pad for a fleet of asteroid mining robots (ka-CHING!).

Space would obviously need to be provided in the scenario, either in an undersea base or possibly on the lunar surface, for the sooper-geniuses coding the history shattering Robot God AI arriving "sometime in the next twenty years," and one hopes 3-D printers would get into the mix there, too, even if multi-purpose programmable room temperature self-replicating nanobotic everything machines would be suavely nudged off onto a more distant horizon as a concession to hard-boiled futurological "realism" -- after all, Drexler is so nineties never gonna happen futurism rather than two-thousandsies never gonna happen futurism, don't get it all twisted!

3 comments:

jollyspaniard said...

There's been a lot of hype about 3D printers. They're going to get better but they're more limited than a lot of people realize. And they're not new.

Dale Carrico said...

Yes indeedy.

Lorraine said...

"3-D printer" is just a re-branding of "Bridgeport mill".