Daily Archives: December 22, 2009

FastForward Radio — Countdown to Foresight 2010 (Part 2)

Economist Robin Hanson and futurist Brian Wang join us as we continue our special series leading up Foresight 2010. The conference, January 16-17 in Palo Alto, California, provides a unique opportunity to explore the convergence of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence and to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Foresight Institute.

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 About Our Guests 

Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University, and chief scientist at Consensus Point. Robin is a pioneer in the field of prediction markets, also known as information markets or idea futures. He was a principal architect of the first internal corporate markets, as well as the Foresight Exchange beginning in 1994, and of DARPA’s Policy Analysis Market, from 2001 to 2003. Robin has diverse research interests everything from health incentive contracts, to Bayesian classification, agreeing to disagree, self-deception in disagreement, to growth given machine intelligence, and interstellar colonization. He blogs at Overcoming Bias.
Brian Wang is a futurist
who blogs about all things future-related at NextBigFuture.
He is the Director of Research for the Lifeboat Foundation and a member
of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology Task Force.

The Thrust of the Matter

New Scientist provides a list of 10 possible propulsion technologies for deep space technologies, ranging from the ion thruster (plausibility: just a few years away) to wormholes (plausibility: almost certainly impossible.)

It’s a great list. My sentimental favorite has got to be the Bussard ramjet — a fusion drive that runs on hydrogen collected in deep space along the spacecraft’s route, ramming fuel into the ship’s maw using a vast scoop. Cool! But I think the most realistic choices, for interstellar travel, anyway, are the ion drive and beam-driven space sail technology.

Something like a fusion drive would be great for moving big Starship-Enterprise style craft around the solar system, but I think that’s as far as we’ll want to go with what I’m going to call Macro Human Space Travel (the original term for this idea was “manned spacecraft.”) Nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will enable us to explore interstellar, and perhaps eventually intergalactic, space much more efficiently using very small space vehicles.

How small?

With sufficiently advanced nanotechnology, we could fit all the equipment required to explore a star system and build several new ships to continue the mission, as well as the computing power required to run an interesting virtual world on the ship, along with a crew of several thousand downloaded explorers on something the size of an iPhone — or smaller. The real limiting factor would be how small we could make an effective ion drive or how accurately we could hit such a small target with a propulsion beam across vast distances.