Comment by Nevermark

Comment by Nevermark 6 days ago

6 replies

Fortunately, any state of the art ship with ChatGPT on board will quickly get passed by the state of the art ship of a decade later, with a decade better AI too.

The universe really doesn't want ChatGPT!

It is fair to say, that given space travel tech improves slowly relative to AI, but the distance to be travelled is so great that any rocketry (or other means) improvements will quickly pass previous launches, the first intelligence from Earth that makes it to another system will be superintelligence many orders of magnitude smarter than we can probably imagine.

adrianN 6 days ago

Space ship speeds are unlikely to keep ever increasing. In the limit you can’t do much better than turning part of the ships mass into energy optimally, eg via antimatter annihilation or Hawking radiation, unless you already have infrastructure in place to transfer energy to the ship that is not part of the ship’s mass, eg lots of lasers.

  • SJC_Hacker 6 days ago

    Mass drivers on a asteroids or the Moon could change the game

    • adrianN 6 days ago

      Accelerating something macroscopic to hundreds or thousands of km/s (i.e. the speeds you can achieve with nuclear pulse propulsion) on a ramp that fits on the moon seems quite difficult to me.

      • SJC_Hacker 5 days ago

        Mass drivers don't need to be a linear ramp, portions can be circular

        It would work better for smaller, unmanned craft, especially when you consider g force limitations

        NPP is only theoretical, and still has major problems such as finding a material that can withstand a nuclear detonation at point blank range. Mass drivers have been proven to work, albeit at a smaller scale