Star Dust to Explore Planets
Forget about "to boldly go where no man has gone before" - it looks like future space exploration is going to be a lot different - as now we find out that 'Smart dust (is) to explore planets
Smart dust could be packed into the nose cones of planetary probes and then released into the atmospheres of planets, where they would be carried on the wind. For a planet like Mars, smart dust particles would each have to be the size of a grain of sand.I would think that chucking all this "smart dust" into the atmosphere of another planet would violate the "Prime Directive" as well - not to mention what could happen when this new "panspermia" seeds another planet with self-aware swarming robots ...By applying a voltage to alter the shape of the polymer sheath surrounding the chip, dust particle could be steered towards a target, even in high winds.
The polymer sheath surrounding the computer chip could be made to wrinkle or flatten out.
Wrinkling the plastic sheath would increase the drag on the particle, lifting it higher on the wind. Flattening out the sheath would cause the particle to plummet.
Wireless networking would allow these particles to form swarms, and Dr Barker's team has carried out mathematical simulations to see how this would work.
"We envisage that most of the particles can only talk to their nearest neighbours but a few can communicate at much longer distances.
"In our simulations, we have shown that a swarm of 50 dust particles can organise themselves into a star formation, even in turbulent wind."
The ability to fly in formation would allow the processing of data to be spread, or "distributed" between all the chips, and a collective signal to be beamed back to a "mothership".
Tags: space science, space exploration, panspermia, swarms, ai, dystopian nightmare beyond our wildest dreams