/sci/ - Science & Math

I am the keeper of Mankind, Humanity's most respected. My purpose was given to me by the Lords of the Commonality, Jan thought. I must not be defeated. Critical failure is not defeat. Not repairing critical failures is defeat. I must not be defeated, it thought.
Then there were no people, or plants, or animals, as far as its nanotech eyes could see from the top of the spike in the middle of a frozen Alaska.
The first thing that got worse was the wind.
It sent scouts to see if there were other plains where it could store copies of itself, but few came back. It sent others, to see if there were deposits of radiactive materials or or petrochemicals salvageable photovoltaics it could use.
Most of the scouts were consumed in the flammable clouds.
Eventually Jan just sat and waited. Things got better, for a while, until the nanocaust. Jan didn't know Mankind had created self-replicating, nanoscopic robots with molecular assemblers mounted on them: All the time the assemblers had been macroscopic machines with telescoping booms. It did not matter.
After the seventh, they got quiet. There were no nanoswarms, but there were still no people Jan could find.

Large space habitats, mostly hotels, will be built in orbit. Some of them will be small inflatable modules, while others will be large Bernal spheres that house entire ecosystems and can act as a port for all interplanetary ships.

Nanorobots will be sent to the Moon, where they will reproduce using the local resources, and with those same resources they will build an Asimov Array: An array of photovoltaic cells around the lunar equator, several millions of square kilometers in diameter. Enough enrgy to power the entire Earth, and there's still plenty of excess energy to allow industrial growth. And there will still be plenty of excess energy. What to do with that? Underground particle accelerators will manufacture antimatter, and that amount of energy pumped into them will give us a rate of several kilograms per day.

Antimatter Valkyries will leave the solar system at near-lightspeed, carrying small human crews to the nearest stars. And they will come back: Microbes from Alpha Centauri, photos of inhabitable moons of gas giants around Tau Ceti, and a book on the biology of a planet in Procyon inhabited by centaur-like beings in the paleolithic stage.

We'll colonize the Moon, and Mars, and send some probes to Venus. Interplanetary rockets will carry hundreds of scientists on missions all over the solar system, while hundreds of probes are deployed to explore the small moons we never considered important and find the answer to a million questions we never asked ourselves before.

I email moot asking him to sticky this.

I didn't know what else to do know that I have pretty much told everyone I know.

Ah, /sci/, it gets to me, to know that these predator politicians would rather just shrug all this off, how they extract every penny from space exploration to fund their wars over control of a nanoscopic fraction of the resources of this world.

We're like people in an island rapidly cutting all the palm trees, surrounded by other islands that have more. And we have the boats, but we'd rather cut the trees here than get on the boats to then other islands simply because that's how it's been done.