On Ansible Waldos
A “Waldo” is a telepresence robot. If you put on the gloves and goggles, then you see through the robot’s eyes, and move its grabbers. Waldos are used in glove boxes, as drones, and on submarines.
The term “waldo” comes from a Robert Heinlein science-fiction story, named after a disabled man who used waldos to play an heroic role in a space emergency.
I figure that waldos would be useful in low-earth orbit, or even in high-earth orbit. The limit is lunar waldos, for there is a three-second round-trip delay due to the lightspeed limit. On the Moon, waldos would be slow to respond; and since they’d need onboard processing, they’d have minds of their own. Slow, stubborn, and willful; so I propose to call them “moon mules”.
Beyond the Moon, the lightspeed limit prevents telepresence. To transcend that limit, we’d need faster-than-light communication. That would be the “Ansible”, so named in Ursula K. Leguin’s science-fiction novels. Ansibles would provide instantaneous communication across interstellar distances.
Make the gloves-and-goggles interface with the waldo via ansible; that is the “Ansible Waldo”. With it you can explore strange new worlds on distant stars, and do so from the comfort of your home planet.
Interstellar probes carrying ansible waldos won’t need to carry air, water, food, or as much radiation shielding. Those ships would be faster and cheaper than any ship carrying humans.
I imagine a sphere of human influence expanding at some fraction of the speed of light, as the ansible-waldo ships fly out; and once at their destination, that planet would be in instantaneous contact with Earth. One of the things that the ansible waldos would do is manufacture more ansible waldos. That way, ansible waldos would be disposable.
All in all, I’d say that translight telepresence robots are the best spacesuits. By comparison, manned space flight is like packing ape meat into a tin can.
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