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Comment by qrendel | Hacker News Reader

A similar proposal from a while back was one on "Rapid Bootstrapping of Space Industry," essentially concluding we could have a robust space industry with an industrial output 1,000,000x that of US GDP within about four decades - for as little as 12 metric tons landed on the moon to kickstart the process. The proposal relied heavily on automated systems and coming advances in robotics, but ignored other likely improvements such as atomic-scale manufacturing. Other than perhaps sheer disbelief I'm not sure why there hasn't been more interest in it.

[1] http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/affordable-rapid-bootstrap...

[2] Paper - http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09...

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From that paper: " A 1980 summer study at the NASA Ames Research Center (Freitas and Gilbreath 1980) showed that self-reproducing machines are theoretically possible."

I remember that crowd. They wanted to have self-reproducing machines on the moon by 2000. I asked, "how soon can you do it in New Mexico". They didn't like that.

The proposal in the paper is at least somewhat different: it wouldn't become fully self-sufficient until the later stages of about a seven stage process. The earlier stages just involve unmanned robots controlled from Earth, beginning with around 17th century technology and moving towards autonomy with each successive generation. I definitely see your point, but this isn't quite the same as proposing a lunar colony of self-reproducing robots within the next few years (besides, robotics have come a long way since then).

> I remember that crowd. They wanted to have self-reproducing machines on the moon by 2000. I asked, "how soon can you do it in New Mexico". They didn't like that.

To be fair, I'm not entirely fond of the idea of self-reproducing machines in New Mexico either. ;)

We've already got cheap, self-reproducing labor on Earth. Getting that model to the Moon and maintaining it there is expensive enough to defeat the purpose, though. The kind you're talking about is much more practical in a lunar context than it is dirtside.

I always ask this to myself:

  If we haven't been able to make our human civilizations sustainable here on 
  planet Earth (where we have the perfect conditions to do so), how will we 
  ever create sustainable environments in much harsher conditions such as on 
  the Moon or Mars ?

Simply because you have to in order to survive. On earth resources have often been seen as abundant and even though we know oil is running out we still undertake inefficient journeys in cars with a single person in because running out is sometime in the future. If you build on the moon it has to be sustainable from the outset, it isnt something you can set as a future goal because you need it to survive day one.

Yea, sustainability is largely a collective action problem, and it's quite difficult for 7 billion humans in hundreds of interacting societies, governments, and economies. Moreover, "sustainable" has a somewhat different meaning on Earth, which already had an enormously productive biosphere.

Lack of sustainability is more about lack of political will than technology and resources. A lunar colony presumably won't have any dipshits saying "Don't bother recycling the waste water, just dump it on the surface. I'm sure we'll find more somewhere."

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