Our path to other planets... moving to a new planet... [Hypothetical Brain Storming]

Many prominent people speak about humanity needing to colonize other planets. We hear it from the likes of Elon Musk who is actively working toward such goals with Space X, and we hear it from Stephen Hawking.

I believe we are in a position to do this sooner than people may think, but I personally would approach it perhaps a little different than most people. I don't claim to be an expert. I am simply a fellow human with a brain and I like to think.

This is therefore no appeal to authority. I have no authority. It is simply me brainstorming and sharing some thoughts I've had for awhile.

My ideas are actually inspired by robotics, drones, augmented reality, and virtual reality information that I have been keeping track of.

One of the challenges for immediately getting to another planet is overcoming the limitations of our human bodies, while eventually getting our human bodies to these planets.

I believe with a little work we are at a position where we could potentially make progress towards this. I believe we need to not focus on putting human bodies into space right now and supporting them. If we remove that variable from the equation it frees us up to do some things that can hopefully boost all of our endeavors towards being able to add the human body back into the equations.

If any of you occasionally check on the progress of Anthropogenic Robots (Humanoid) and the various annual competitions and obstacle courses that labs, and universities compete in you may have noticed some of the things I did.

There is a growing body of work being used in robotics where tasks are taught. This can be how to approach a nob, crank wheel, knob, lever, etc and interact with it a specific amount. The engineers building these projects have begun to use a level of AI for this. Not a self thinking AI that many people fear, but simply an AI that knows its position, and you can tell it go to this interface and do this. You then do not need to pilot it, the AI will move the robot as necessary and will even know how to properly turn a wheel, flip a lever, etc.

There are scary sides to this if we think of it in terms of military applications and indeed we very well could make ourselves extinct before we achieve these goals. I choose to look at it with optimism and look at the benevolent ways we can use these new tools.

I believe our first step should be to put many robotic drones into space. The key factor for them would be their power source. If they are nuclear then this is less of an issue, but there are obvious hazards with going that route. What if they have batteries and a solar charging capability?

We could then issue tasks to these robotic drones which they could carry out for us. These could involve building structures on the moon, asteroids, mars, etc. They could be used to gather the resources we may need to use from stellar bodies like asteroids, and perform construction. We could use them to construct habitats on planets, and the facilities that would support human bodies.

Furthermore we could also potentially construct many of our ships in orbit rather than on the surface which would reduce the cost considerably as we no longer need huge reservoirs of fuel to get these ships out of Earth's gravity well and into space.

Another thing. Drone does not have to mean small. These things could be as big as we need them to be.

This is where augmented reality and VR becoming so viable come into place. These are the techniques that could be used to pilot and operate such drones.

This also explains why the AI needs to be handle the intermediary steps. Until we master some Quantum Entanglement based communication system we are kind of stuck with the laws of physics in terms of communicating with our drones. Thus, there is no real joystick high precision piloting. There is a time delay (lag) in the communications that only gets longer the farther the pilot is from the drone. Thus, we need a way to be able to designate tasks almost like waypoints and have it so the drones AI can handle interpreting the intermediary steps that need to be completed.

If we began doing this I am fairly confident it would greatly accelerate our potential for getting off of this planet and expanding outward. It could also provide a lot of natural resources mined from asteroids and such.