Isaac Asimov's 1950 story "The Evitable Conflict", (the last part of the I, Robot collection) features the Machines, four supercomputers managing the world's economy. The computers are incomprehensibl ...
Some critics assert that no computer or machine will ever achieve human intelligence, while others hold that the definition of intelligence is irrelevant if the net result is the same.Steven Pinker st ...
Main article: Accelerating changeSome singularity proponents argue its inevitability through extrapolation of past trends, especially those pertaining to shortening gaps between improvements to techno ...
The notion of an "intelligence explosion" was first described thus by Good (1965), who speculated on the effects of superhuman machines:Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can ...
Nicholas de Condorcet, the 18th century French mathematician, philosopher, and revolutionary, is commonly credited for being one of the earliest persons to contend the existence of a singularity. In h ...
Many of the most recognized writers on the singularity, such as Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, define the concept in terms of the technological creation of superintelligence, and argue that it is diff ...
The technological singularity, or simply the singularity, is a hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of a greater-than-human intelligence, radicall ...
Main article: Space stations and habitats in popular cultureAlthough established space colonies are a stock element in science fiction stories, fictional works that explore the themes, social or pract ...
Organizations that contribute to space colonization include:The Space Studies Institute funds the study of space habitats.The National Space Society is an organization with the vision of people living ...
A corollary to the Fermi paradox—"nobody else is doing it"—is the argument that because no evidence of alien colonization technology exists, it is statistically unlikely to even be possible using th ...
The first known work on space colonization was The Brick Moon, a work of fiction published in 1869 by Edward Everett Hale, about an inhabited artificial satellite.The Russian schoolmaster and physicis ...
The most famous attempt to build an analogue to a self-sufficient colony is Biosphere 2, which attempted to duplicate Earth's biosphere. BIOS-3 is another closed ecosystem, completed in 1972 in Krasno ...
Space colonization can roughly be said to be possible when the necessary methods of space colonization become cheap enough (such as space access by cheaper launch systems) to meet the cumulative funds ...
Location is a frequent point of contention between space colonization advocates. The location of colonization can be on a physical body or free-flying:On a planet, natural satellite, or asteroidIn orb ...
There are two main types of space colonies:Surface-based examples that would exist on or below the surfaces of planets, moons, etc.Space habitats — free-floating stations that would orbit a planet, m ...