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DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures

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Re: DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures

#41

Post by asoneth »

beefnugs wrote: post #11
heyitsguay wrote: post #2

Cool idea, very ambitious, is there any prior research or feasible testing setup that would support getting from 0 to 1 with this?

Yeah this seems crazy to just throw out into the public. How do they decide what and when is worth funding? Does there have to be some kind of shining light of progress... or is it just moonshot after moonshot of blind hope?

DARPA Program Managers have a lot of leeway to write these sorts of requests.

PMs are typically experts in their field and often come from an academic, industry, military, or government research lab. DARPA gives them a budget for grants, autonomy, and 3-5 years to fund interesting work. Many fail, many have mixed success, and a small number revolutionize their field.

(Source: worked on a few DARPA-funded projects decades ago.)

Re: DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures

#42

Post by L_226 »

I almost wrote a short story about colonising Mars by firing radioisotope bullets with genetically engineered fungi coatings into the surface. These would metabolise the radiation and use the minerals in the crust to grow into large habitat volumes thick enough to retain atmosphere and insulate against radiation and thermal losses. Maybe it can be real one day!

Re: DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures

#45

Post by ryandamm »

I saw this at a DSO* presentation ("Darpa's Darpa") back in ~2018. Hope they've gotten some early traction, that was some of the least wild crap that was being presented.

My company was pitching holographic cameras, and we weren't scifi enough. The investigator wanted to know if we could do hyperspectral 3D imaging from something the size of a sugar cube. ("Uh, no?" was our response.)

* Defense Sciences Organization: https://www.darpa.mil/about/offices/dso

Re: DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures

#48

Post by ballooney »

laughingcurve wrote: post #25
ckemere wrote: post #18

When reading these program announcements, it's important to keep in mind that the (unofficial?) mandate for a DARPA program officer is to fund proposals that lie in the boundaries of [Doesn't at face violate laws of physics, P(Success) = 0.2]. A program where the vast majority of aims were clearly successfully delivered would be a program that should have been funded by other government agencies. Of course, with R&D…

If they come for DARPA then we are all in deep shit because that means things are far worse than we could have imagined.

Things already are that bad, you’re standing an inch beyond where the previous wave washed up to and saying “well if it gets here in the next few waves then suddenly we become in deep shit’ while all around people are shouting at you about the existence of a concept called ‘the tide’. This is happening right now. fight back.

Re: DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures

#50

Post by ButOneDuck »

Looking at the comments, most people are approaching this as 'grow, like trees'.

We're literally talking moonshot projects here and nowhere does the brief mention specifically trees, or aerobic respiration/processes, there is plenty of room for using Chitin, Spider silk, keratin or a combination of biopolymers to form resilient composite structures.

There's already been videos of people using these as doping agents or additives for bulletproof armor, to middling success. The synthesis via yeast or e.coli for most of these are partially solved problems, its more texturing them or using bio-mechanical processing to form thread or ply or load bearing panels that seems to be the major hurdle. Also, being able to reliably source component and materials from near vacuum or whatever asteroid that happens to wander by that makes this a much more difficult problem to even define.

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