Creative Commons

Last Exit To Earth Creative Commons

GOING HOMEA space vehicle designed to venture into deep space with robots as crew would be a fairly Spartan construct. No sleeping quarters, no spacesuits hanging on the bulkheads, no tons of food and water for a trip of a thousand years, no galley, no head, no sickbay, no life support system to malfunction, no radar systems, no radios, no TV, no reading material to entertain them. They might recharge occasionally by plugging in to a solar panel. And that would be the extent of their habitat. They would, in effect, just be one part of the spaceship rather than something that lived in it and depended upon it for continued existence. The robots and the ship would be one thing, existing forever or until its mission was completed or until it failed for some reason and crashed on an inhabited planet, or sailed powerless forever into the space between the stars. How many derelict alien ships do you imagine might be out there without power, with robot crews that have been shut down or terminated for one reason or another? How many might have crashed right here on Earth?We may be on the verge of finding out.