User talk:5BYv8cUJ

Starships on Moon

Astrochicken idea do outshined by what is known in my language as Von Neumann probes. Closest article here - Von Neumann probes. It is much easier to imagine them, but IMHO synergy/composite idea, when self replicating starships used for first couple generations, or even first few dozen generations, and then model switch to simple "build a single starship" for every star system out there would be more efficient, both in terms of complexity and in terms of speed of exploration. My current understanding (we talking about very distant future, like 70 years from now), there would be more economical to build not a Von Neumann probe per se ("just" a single one!), but instead robotic based industry on Moon or Eris, and use that body as a base to build a billion, or 5 hundreds billions probes to target every star system in Milky Way. If for any reason that would not be possible, then create similar base on nearby Alpha Centauri or any other nearby planetary system. And use it for mass production. But it looks like potential damage to Moon would be so negligible, thus Eris or close-by star systems do not have to be targeted. Not to mention trillions of bodies in Oort cloud... My original question was - how damaging would be such activity to the Moon? Hopefully no one cares about Eris. Seems that Moon still be pretty much intact after massproduction of billions of starships. Anyhow, here is science paper that was exploring different strategies of Milky Way exploration: http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/ComparisonReproNov1980.htm Hope you find it interesting.

Please reply on original page, i.e. Ref desk/Science :)

76.64.30.242 (talk) 01:54, 19 June 2011 (UTC)