The Telepresence Model of FTL Exploration

           The Telepresence Model of FTL Exploration

 

          Space colonization by humans, rather than robots, is a negative-profit venture. Maybe you can con some cultists, and force some convicts, to live in a tin can forever: but it’ll be cheaper to put those losers on Antarctica. Meanwhile robots will do the exploring and mining. Robots are made for space; we’re made for this paradise planet. Telepresence is the best spacesuit!

I speculate that the main use for FTL communication will be to control telepresence robots. Put on the gloves and goggles, and you are there! FTL itself is for sending the robots there, and manufactured products back.

The Telepresence Model of FTL Exploration is that it is done entirely by telepresence. Humans stay on Earth. They send the telepresence robots by FTL to a distant star system: humans on Earth put on goggles and gloves, and see though the robot’s cameras, and move things with its waldos, in real time. The humans can see through the robots, not only in light, but also in infrared, microwaves, radar, sonar, ultraviolet, X-rays, gamma rays, and neutrinos. Also telescopically and microscopically. Through the robots they can do ultra-heavy and ultra-fine labor.

In many ways it’s better, and in many ways worse, than ‘being there’. One huge advantage is security. If something goes terribly wrong, then at worst you lose the robot. Also you don’t need space suits. The workers will breathe Earth’s free air. At workday’s end, the workers will take off their gloves and goggles.

 Maybe some humans will eventually go to distant planets, but only if humans can survive FTL flight, and if habitats had already been built telepresently. Only cultists, convicts, and the desperate need apply.

 

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          Afternote:

Rudy Rucker’s “transrealism” thesis is that science fiction doesn’t really predict the future: it imaginatively describes the skiffy present. It’s as if we all live in a sci-fi movie, with brilliant special effects, amazing speculations, and idiotic writing. (It’s the bad writing that turns sci-fi into skiffy.)

I write this Telepresence Model of FTL after more than a year of doing all of my work by Zoom, to avoid a pandemic fought by revolutionary new biotechnology, but prolonged by partisan disinformation.