HackingTheUniverse

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The cradle is a modular “body support” system that is a hybrid of ideas found in the designs of an acceleration couch, exoskeleton frameworks, and nanotechnology spacesuits.

Acceleration couch - a couch designed to absorb acceleration forces and protect the human reclining in the couch. The most advanced forms use liquid gel nano-foams [...]

Mote Net Computing (MNC) was developed out of swarm technology. As self organizing swarm-nets of motes became more available, they started being used for background computational purposes. Each mote generally has a low level of computational power, but because there are so many of them, as the net becomes large, the power also scales [...]

Commerce in space will be driven by the demands of exchange and the economic factors involved.
Raw Materials:
Air and water are likely to be in high demand and even if they become somewhat abundant, will always remain treasured for their inherent importance. Food will be mostly manufactured locally, assuming you have the raw [...]

It has been said that “without hardware, software is nothing, but without software, hardware is something.” And you can even make an argument that some level of logic can be built into hardware simply because it must have some kind of ordered structure on many levels: time and space, atomic, molecular, chemical, even simple shape. [...]

We know that it is possible to transmit and receive energy via electromagnetic radiation with no wires. The problem is refining the technique to make it safe and make it work beyond short distances. It should be possible with current technology to make charging points in a working (or living) environment that allow [...]

Voyager1 is currently the most distant human made object from the Earth, somewhere beyond 10 billion miles from the Sun. When we launched Voyager1 in 1977, a “golden record” was included with it, in the hopes that it would be able to communicate something about life on Earth to any intelligent beings that found [...]

Before attempting to predict how commerce will occur in space or how government will be designed to regulate it, it is important to understand how the basic economic factors will be changed.

Comparison of Economic Elements

On Earth
ELEMENT
In Space

free
AIR
expensive

cheap
WATER
expensive

moderate
FOOD
moderate

expensive
ENERGY
cheap

expensive
TERRITORY
free

expensive
BUILDING MATERIAL
cheap

expensive
SHELTER
cheap

expensive
TRANSPORT
cheap

local-fast
COMMUNICATIONS
nonlocal-slow

Even though air and water may be available in abundant supply (in the asteroids and on moons) it [...]

Utility fog is a concept developed by Dr. John Storrs Hall that describes nanoparticles that are polymorphic. The microscopic particles, known as “foglets”, would have the ability to float suspended in the air as a fog, or connect to other particles to form solid objects. The foglet particles would need some form of [...]

As micro-fabrication units become more practical and available, the need to identify and trace individual products for a variety of reasons (security, business, legal) will promote the placement of nano-sized trace elements into each product as it is manufactured. Over time, this will evolve into the practice of using random identifiers for each trace element, [...]

In chapter six of his book, “Engines of Creation“, Eric Drexler describes a conceptual spacesuit that utilizes nanotechnology.
Space and Advanced Technology
Imagine that you are aboard a space station, spun to simulate Earth’s normal gravity. After instruction, you have been given a suit to try out: there it hangs on the wall, a gray, rubbery-looking thing [...]