Well, it can't grow in the same places, but bamboo into paper is already a thing. And it grows quite quickly in the appropriate environment.

To be useful in deep space, you're going to have to deal with very harsh radiation, far harder than the Vikings dealt with. You really want to have some large number of computers, where the number has to be odd and exceed 5. The reason it has to exceed 5 is that you need 5 in order to be able to use the Byzantine General's Problem to discern which computers are working correctly and which are radiation damaged. Since some will be damaged over time and you want 5 computers still operating around the time the power runs out, you have to start with more than that.

Massively radiation-hardened highly-robust low-power chips could be done. If you were clever enough, you could do this as a wafer-scale system where you marked parts as bad and networked around them. Free space optical communication across the wafer might be doable.

They might well still end up being low-density CMOS discrete logic.

Lead-lining the electronics isn't as much of a problem if you've launchers capable of handling heavy objects and don't mind burning through a lot of ion drive propellant for course corrections. This would improve the hardening beyond what can be done through the usual operations.

But, yeah, you'd need defect-free microelectronics. You really can't handle F00F bugs or defective instructions once you pass Earth orbit. And I can't think of anyone who knows how to do that.

Well, not just the solar system but the heliopause as well, and the near-Sol galactic winds. We can estimate the effects of space from just about any ancient near-Earth space junk, but I'm not sure how we'd go about calculating the impact of the galactic winds on something. The Voyager sensors won't be sending back nearly enough high-quality data to establish that.

It's actually a lot harder. The fly-bys invovled gravitational slingshots, which not just steered the probes but vastly accelerated them. Without the slingshots, human rocketry of the time would not have had the capacity to get probes to solar system escape velocity.

Our understanding of asteroids is now reasonably good. We know they come in solid and rubble-pile formats. We know that several show signs of lava flows, suggesting they come from disintegrated planetoids with a liquid core. We've managed to land on some and even retrieve samples from one.

Our understanding of comets is much weaker. We know that several appear to be multiple bodies fused together with ice (the one we tried sending a lander to was of this type) and the break-up pattern for Shoemaker-Levy 9 is suggestive (but not proof) of it having been a composite structure too. The one icy body we've seen in the Kuipier belt was also two bodies frozen together. Photographs of the core of Halley's Comet also suggests two bodies fused together with ices. This leads to some interesting questions. Obviously the probability of this configuration is very high, but what is the probability of other configurations? Is it so incredibly low that the odds of finding single-body or triple-body configurations is practically non-existent?

(This is kinda important if NASA is serious about a DART-type project to redirect one.)

Our understanding of solar system captures is non-existent. If there are extra-solar objects flying through every few years, then there is a definite non-zero probability that there are significant extra-solar objects that have been captured by the solar system in the last 5.5 billion years. That would be kinda very useful to know.

Current solar system formation models don't work well, but planets have sorted their composition by mass. Studying them only tells us so much. Asteroids are more useful but hit each other too often, so we don't know how much mixing and reconstitutuing has occurred there. The Kuipier Belt is much better, from that point of view. The density is far too low and most of the objects far too small. A lander could obtain a lot of extremely useful data about how the solar system formed that we can't obtain closer.

The Oort cloud is theoretical only, at this point. The only way to find if it is real is to send something out there.

If we're to get any probes in the future to go between solar systems (and such missions are entirely possible), we need to know a great deal more about the heliopause and the galactic winds.

Probably LRO vs. Danuri

Well, viruses and bacteria. And that last one is critical.

We know that the microbiome alters blood chemistry and we know that this alters brain function.

I do NOT postulate bacteria cause mental illness, but I do postulate that there is a non-zero probability that bacteria can aggravate mental illness. And that is all that we need here. If we can develop a vaccine that triggers the immune system to either attack the bacteria directly OR to produce antitoxins which attack those changes in the chemistry which are harmful, then the vaccine would lessen the impact of this particular vector.

That would not prevent mental illness, but that's fine. Reducing it is perfectly acceptable.

We know that brain function is altered by the blood chemistry changes made by gut bacteria. This means that any mental illness exacerbated by this route where the chemistry added is verifiably unique to an undesirable bacterium can be targeted by the immune system.

Will this be all mental illnesses? Obviously not.

Do I know of any such chemistry? No, which is why I said "in principle". The potential for the vector exists and the potential for training the immune system to attack it exists, but the reality of such a vector actually existing is unknown and the safety of attacking it is also unknown.

"Potential" and "Unknown" are very important words here. They mean that we do NOT know if the probability of such a vaccine being possible exceeds zero, but equally we do know that a key underlying requirement has a probability that isn't zero. But that is all that we can definitely say at this point in time.

Although it would be wonderful if we could retrieve them, realisically we can't. And if we could get something to them to fit new nuclear batteries and replacements for components that cannot be revived, we could get newer probes out there with better sensors and a more powerful nuclear battery that could last a lot longer.

Having said that, I honestly wouldn't trust any of today's manufacturers to be capable of building anything with a comparable level of robustness, so a recharge mission isn't quite as stupid as it sounds. Almost, but not quite.

Still, fresh probes sent into the Kuipier Belt and the Heliopause would be extremely interesting.

So a murder suspect can appear in court and explain that someone gave him the wrong photograph, so it's not his fault?

The US, and many other countries, need to put forward a new law -- if an excuse applies to officials, then it applies to the citizenry. This is not because officials don't sometimes need extra freedoms, but because the vast majority of manmade disasters are "perfect storms" and because this case is a perfect illustration of the banality of evil.

Legitimate causes are just that and they won't cause problems. If, indeed, they are truly legitimate. Excuses mean that they knew they were doing wrong but felt that finger-pointing would confuse the issue for long enough for the storm to die down. Innocent people do not make excuses. Innocent people don't need them.

But this isn't something officialdom will ever accept. Nor will they tolerate a loss of power. So you don't take away their power, you merely insist that powers they claim are the same everywhere for everyone, and that the powers they deny are likewise denied to all. The sensible ones will see in seconds precisely where that's going to go and will get rid of the stupid ones very quickly. Not because they're morally better, but because such a rule is highly volatile and self-interest takes on a very different meaning when the consequences are unpredictable.

You need to read those stories again. The DIDN'T take over running society. There is, however, a backstory where they wiped out all non-human life in the galaxy to make it safe for people. (I don't think that was really in his mind while he was writing most of the stories, but he added it towards the end when he was trying to merge his story universes into one.)

If you read "Robots and Empire" the robots aren't really running the Empire, just trying to subtly guide it. The last book in the cycle does end up with an indication that the Robots are going to take over, but that's never really explored.

OTOH, if you were to take the English language version of the first law seriously, it would have the effect you postulate. But the English language version is supposed to be only a very rough translation of the actual mathematics behind the robot brains. (He didn't phrase that as "programming", but that's probably about what he meant.) If you try to translate a program into English, you're going to get something quite a bit different from the actual program. Especially if it's a complex program and you translate it into 3 short pithy sentences. Note that in different stories the robots are built with different limitations, but they always summarize it with the same 3 laws. Consider how in "Little Lost Robot" one of the laws is weakened.

That said, remember that these stories were fiction, designed to be an entertaining exploration of the problem space.

I think the problem you're alluding to isn't really dealt with by Asimov, but by Jack Williamson in the story "With Folded Hands". It was such a good story that Campbell had to accept it even though he hated the message so much he coerced Williamson into writing a solution ...and the only solution Williamson could come up with relied on magic ("The Humanoids").

And actually he was proposing them as a rough translation into English of the mathematical principles the positronic brains were based on. But it was clearly a VERY rough translation.

He had doubts from the beginning. Read the stories. I think I can remember 3 robots in the entire series (including Caves of Steel et seq.) that were trustworthy, though the background indicates that there must have been many more. And he appeared to even have doubts about Daneel...though he never wrote the story exploring those doubts.

Except instead of pursuing policies that would help open models at the expense of Big AI, anti-AI people pursue just the opposite - policies that can cripple open source AI but have no realistic ability to meaningfully hurt big AI. It's so short sighted.

Actually, no, what they usually do is much more insidious: fingerprinting rather than watermarking. The fingerprint isn't actually included in the audio, it's included in a database. If they want to tell if the track was generated, they just try to match the fingerprint in the database. Can't filter it out of the track like you can with a watermark.