758
too bad they made space really big
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
758 points (100.0% liked)
Microblog Memes
10926 readers
1209 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Absolutely no NSFL content.
- Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
RELATED COMMUNITIES:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
If you look at the growth of travel speeds in the first half of the twentieth century and project them forward, it really wasn't such a crazy prediction.
Hell, right now, we're one technology away from being able to build actual interstellar vessels. You need a robot that can harvest materials from an asteroid, build a copy of itself, and do some useful work before breaking down. If you have self-replicating robots, building big giant dumb objects in space becomes practical. And no, if you're not an idiot about it, the robots diverging from their original programming and multiplying out of control is not a problem.
This would allow you to build large spacecraft, cities in space capable of carrying tens of thousands or more. And that's the scale you really need to be thinking about when discussing interstellar travel.
How do you actually move the things? Giant solar-powered pushing lasers. Hell you might even put them directly in the Sun's outer atmosphere and use the Sun itself as the lasing medium. And if you're clever about it, it's also possible to use a laser around Sol to slow down at the destination. You can build an interstellar ark propelled entirely by pushing lasers in the Sol system.
A lot of problems of space colonization and travel can be solved if you can build stupidly large objects for cheap. And self-replicating robots are just such a technology.