/sci/ - Science & Math

But the methods were there! Everyone had a Drexler at home, a molecular assembler! What happens when people realize the machine on their desk can build the parts of the most delicate of spacecraft? What happens when villagers realize they can start a space program?
Spacecraft were built – Not the crude spacecraft of the early days, inefficient Space Shuttles and non-SHLV Soyuz craft, but ultra-light polyfullerene constructions as efficient as the laws of physics allowed – out of dirt and rock, the first skyscraper-sized space planes, the first ships that took thousands of humans into cislunar space and beyond.
After a semi-catastrophic failure of the Tycho Brahe's VASIMR, its crew managed to land on the cold, rust-covered Mars.
The Marie Curie flutters in orbit around the Moon where only a handful of humans and a million robots have stood, and the IPV (InterPlanetary Vehicle) Karl Schroeder has reached the plasma currents of the solar system's most prominent world: Colonies are set up on Callisto, Ganymede, and clinging to the ice roof in Europa's no-longer-dead oceans.
Cisjovian space is now the home of matter that can think, the home of life and the furthest frontier from Earth. People were finally free, the first pioneers to escape the future-shocked streets of Earth and start their own lives in their own worlds.