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Making artificially intelligent robots, all with the capacity to reproduce, is not necessary. It will be wiser to design robots following the social insect model. Replication will be the duty of the Queen. The queen will be the largest robot; she will essentially be an automated factory in space. A queen with a few mining robots and workers, constituting a small swarm will be sent to an asteroid. The miners, probably nuclear powered, will get to work and supply raw materials to the queen. Inside the queen, the material will be processed chemically, magnetically and electrically to get metals and gases. Electron beam sintering additive manufacturing units will produce parts of all sorts and sizes. Multi-purpose robot arms with various tool attachments will assemble the parts to produce more mining 'bots, haulers, fuelers, assemblers and new queen components. It may not be possible to manufacture computer chips with forseeable robot systems. A precious stock of robot brains might be carried along. A mere ton of chips will go a long way. Assemblers will obtain metals from the queen's chemical processing units. She will also churn out new chemical processing units and reagents will come from asteroidal sources. Assemblers will then build space habitat. Haulers will move raw materials from the mining sites to the queen and metals to the assemblers at the construction site. Fuelers will keep the robots filled with gas for their maneuvering thrusters. Specialization will be paramount to robot efficiency. No robot will be burdened with unecessary components, and that includes reproductive parts. When the time comes, entirely new queens will be built and even more robots will be born. One queen leads to two queens, two to four, four to eight, etc. |
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