Call me biased, but I would rather trust my life to a human than autopilot any day.
Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins went to the moon with the computing power of a modern SMARTPHONE. The Apollo program had 1 major failure (Apollo 13) and no casualties. HUMANS CAN IMPROVISE.
As for the person who put arse naked in the poll: seriously? In the bay12 forums? You might have well put a 'this poll is stupid' option.
I propose that for our starting ventures (I.e. the lunar resort) we call ourselves Twelfth Bay Enterprises.
Before we declare independence.
You're biased. A human pilot can never improvise fast enough. Besides, thanks to G forces and ionization due to orbital reentry, the pilots can't see or do a thing. A computer can run on GPS data, and radar. A human can't. Besides, the computer can, when there's a failure it can't cope with, give control to the humans. The humans however can't, because by the time they have reached the button they will have vapourized.
Take the following examples:
-The lander was hit by a meteor, leading to a partial failure of the control systems. The computer is fast enough to calculate the influencing forces and can use the engines and remaining control systems to stabilize the craft. Humans can only fiddle with the controls, and never get the required accuracy.
-The craft starts spinning. Humans are suffering from G forces, computer can stabilize without problems.
-An engine is damaged. The computer can rapidly calculate what chances to the flight path are needed to stabilize the ship, and can do so with pinpoint pressision.
For non spacecraft:
-When an airplane looses hydraulics or part of a wing, it is possible to keep steering the plane by using the engines as control. Humans have only used this succesfully once or twice. A specially developped program can stabilize and land the plane nine times out of ten
-The only reason that there are still pilots in the cockpit is PR. It's within our capabilities to make an automated craft. In fact, during most emergencies, the autopilot is vital for succes. It's much better than humans at pulling planes out of a stall/ loop. In fact, there have been multiple crashes only to blame on the fact that the humans panicked. If they had just let go off the steering wheel, the autopilot would have stabilized.
-There have been countless crashes due to human error. There have only been a few that are to be blamed on the autopilot.(The pilots calibrating the autopilot wrong is human error, not the fault of the autopilot)
Also, you're overestimating the computing power of the apollo program. I'm pretty sure the NES was stronger. Also, that computer ran the autopilot when communications with Earth where interupted, and the lads back at Earth couldn't tell the astronauts what to do.
Well, we WILL need the super AI on a ship. We could have simpler autopilot AI's for other ships, but i'm not assembling the entire thing on-site.
And yes, a lack of females is not good. Even if we arent arse-naked.
How are we going to solve this problem? We could clone ourselves and genetically modify our clones to be female, but that has some ethical problems.
Autopilot will probably not be AI, but a simpler, dedicated program. Nevertheless, a supercomputer has been build into the design. After all, it's going to need to maintain 250 forts at 100 FPS.
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Topic: The Bay12 Space program - Open discussion (Read 344099 times)