The Space Program and the Precursors to Computronium
Virgin Galactic trips into low orbit, Planetary Resources to mine asteroids, robots to Mars, and 3D fabricators to colonize.The space program will involve altering our environment and ourselves to become more efficient and increase the intelligence of all that exists. Currently we are placing satellites in space, sensors in the earth, scanning asteroids, GPS in autonomous drones, predicting and monitoring the continental shift, monitoring temperature, RFID chips, barcodes, augmented reality, medical MEMS, personal identification, and security tags in our products. They will be used as an interface with our environment for real-time computational data. By distributing this information humanity can use it to acquire data and develop technology for practical tools and general knowledge. As we venture into space, or the depths of the oceans, and the crust of the earth, we are leaving information, and sensors, so that data can be easily retrieved. We are starting to coat our highways, roads, and parking lots to help vehicles react to the environment, giving our windshield, displays to show information about our surroundings, and allow autonomous cars to take over humanities pathetic, damaging, and deadly driving skills. This increasingly dense network of sensors and smart machines, is sometimes called the “Internet of Things”. As exponential technological growth continues we are headed to a point that our sensory networks and processing centers will be intimately connected to our entire environment because just as humans and computers will evolve, our environment will also evolve into computronium which changes everything. Computronium is described as “a material that is the ultimate computing substrate” our earth will become an interface for intelligence to interact and develop. We will leave our planet and our solar system to help “propagate” our future selves safely into the cosmos where our spacial diversity will protect us from regional cosmic catastrophes.
As we live forever with an abundance of products and knowledge, based on digital data, everything we have on earth can be made all over the universe with 3D printing and nanofabricators. The precursors to computronium include the Internet of Things, community activity tables, interactive wall displays, virtual assistants and avatars, photovoltaic materials, human machine interfaces, such as the Emotive EPOC headset, Leap, Google glasses, Kinect, autonomous vehicles, housekeeping robots, personal aid robots, and of course the many smart materials that can change their properties via stress, temperature, moisture, pH, electric or magnetic fields. Further down the road the precursors to computronium will be: programmable matter that has the ability to change its physical properties, sensors, programmable sources, embedded nano computers, molecular robots, molecular machines, autonomous molecular manufacturing, utility fog, and virtual artificial general intelligence (self-aware avatars).
