Ariel Ekblaw
speaker
1,219 appearances
5 recordings
4 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 26 Jun
Ariel Ekblaw’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yes.
Yes, there are two related.
One is Ringworld, an oldie but goodie, Larry Niven.
Really stunning, grand space architecture idea.
How do you build a ringworld?
Something that is a ring at the scale of a planet.
This is now something that is coming into the window of feasibility because it's not really an open science question anymore.
It's a question of engineering, willpower, and funding.
And the space industry is starting to converge around an in-space economy that can make things like this feasible in the next few decades.
That's something that has just continued to inspire me profoundly.
And then the other one is much more modern, is Neil Stevenson's Seven Eves.
And one of the things I loved in that book is that he envisions swarms of little bio-inspired robots that have various critical functionalities for the space mission.
So we built a swarm robot that we call AstroAnt, an adorable little car the size of my thumb, and we sent it to the moon last spring on an MIT mission.
So it has sensors all over the car.
So it can pick up temperature, can do a camera payload and do imaging on the moon for future iterations.
The first one that we sent was very simple, but we're super excited now that we've developed the AstroAnt and we know it made it safely to the moon.
Now we want to do a swarm deployment of these little robots for inspection, diagnostic and servicing.
Yes, that's so true because I focus my life's work around space architecture.
I really do deeply believe why humans need to go.
But that's not to say that they're not, you know, profoundly supported by robots.
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