Couldn't discount nano technology here. Why so? It seems if you needed the optics and instrumentation to accomplish the task of research, if a corresponding piece of hardware could developed in a streamlined manner relative a predecessor, why use bulkier more massive technology that would increase fuel requirements for travel. If you could significantly reduce mass you reduce fuel, and this in turn leads to an added possibility that the first interstellar voyagers would indeed not only be machines, but one's that were quite small. It would be added risk cost factors should also diminish or at least the acceptability for loss threshold would only increase with declined cost otherwise. Or in other words, the first interstellar visitors could be also likely those that were completely unseen to the naked eye? Seems less glamours or spectacular to the idea of gargantuan structures, or at least designed around the premise of housing so much a human colony, but likely it seems the reality of possibilities outside of faster then light travel.
Of course, I mentioned in some past attempt at a bit of science fiction the idea, that such machines themselves (a sort of adaptation from Clarke's envisioned Von Neumann device), a sort of generic self assembler that should work in adaptive arrays. Ideally for instance, they might also contain maps, something like genetic blueprints in which surveying and assembling indigenous materials for any desired structures, or in other words, why spend all the fuel to send the materials in building something that could be built readily with materials around.
It seems much of mission work at present were spent devoting resources to travel to one and one destination only rather then forming a mission that could accomplish the task of sweeping an area for study at one time. Seems wasteful to me in a way...or in other words, if arrays of nanos could spend the task building colonies for research purposes at many given sites that were part of an area sweep, why not send colonies to multiple hosts sites at once. You wouldn't be limited to one crater site, or one ideal candidate in theory but many sites on a given site with a fleet of nanos for instance, which in turn build larger scale research structures at the site rather then delivering mass and spending all the fuel and limiting candidate site study possibilities.
Of course, I mentioned in some past attempt at a bit of science fiction the idea, that such machines themselves (a sort of adaptation from Clarke's envisioned Von Neumann device), a sort of generic self assembler that should work in adaptive arrays. Ideally for instance, they might also contain maps, something like genetic blueprints in which surveying and assembling indigenous materials for any desired structures, or in other words, why spend all the fuel to send the materials in building something that could be built readily with materials around.
It seems much of mission work at present were spent devoting resources to travel to one and one destination only rather then forming a mission that could accomplish the task of sweeping an area for study at one time. Seems wasteful to me in a way...or in other words, if arrays of nanos could spend the task building colonies for research purposes at many given sites that were part of an area sweep, why not send colonies to multiple hosts sites at once. You wouldn't be limited to one crater site, or one ideal candidate in theory but many sites on a given site with a fleet of nanos for instance, which in turn build larger scale research structures at the site rather then delivering mass and spending all the fuel and limiting candidate site study possibilities.
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