Comment Re:FIrst step toward feasible long term space trav (Score 1) 210
I'm not sure that a bodyless brain solves many problems that either long-term hibernation or virtual reality would solve better.
I value human space exploration for reasons orthagonal to the hard science, but I think advancements in virtual reality are going to make it an even harder sell. I know that communications lag is something of a stumbling block for serious interactivity.
But maybe with enough sensors and data streamed back some of the interactivity could be generated locally but with remotely gathered information. Maybe using some of this you could "act out' what you wanted the rover to do in VR with preliminary and interpolated data. The rover could then actually execute this autonomously and then if you went back and re-do what you acted out, enough specific data would have been generated that it would give you an extremely lifelike VR experience.
I think of it sort of like the way Google Street View works now. You can drive up and down the street looking at houses, and you can zoom in and out and turn your head but nothing else. What if you could walk up to an item of interest in a yard in VR. With just the street view data, it would look bad (warped perspective, excessive zoom, etc). But if the system knew exactly what you were interested in, sent in a camera setup after to mirror your examantion of the yard item but in complete detail you could go back to that same street view scene and actually walk up to the item.