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Meanwhile, on the Moon, your first robot has become stuck. The advanced manufacturing task it was attempting was that of constructing a heap of dust.
On the Moon even the dust is hateful. Toxic, electrostatically charged, it sticks everywhere. Absent the abrasion and weathering of atmosphere and rain, many flecks of lunar regolith are sharp as shattered glass, agglutinates of meteoric impact from fountains of ancient volcanic fire interspersed with peculiar molten droplets and spherical nodules. About 45% is silicates, 23% aluminium oxides, 10-14% each calcium and magnesium oxides, 7% iron and less than a percent titanium oxides, including solar wind implanted FeTiO3 ilmenite grains, that potentially yield the rare and elusive Helium-3. It smells like burnt meteorites but breathing it in will inflame the lungs. Your robot is coated in moon dust, and immobile.
>roll1d100
>Attempt to wipe off the dust with a robotic arm - will this scratch delicate sensors and instrumentation?
>Send another robot to clean this robot. But will this only create a concatenated chain of ensnared robotic victims?
>Try reversing the robot out the way you came in. Clearly you encountered some unexpected irregularities in the terrain. Recalculate the optimal traversal route. But what if ahead there are only even more craters?
>How did your terrestrial testing not anticipate this? Attempt to recreate the terrain using some lunar regolith simulant on Earth, and try to dig a way out somehow
>This robot design has clearly failed, it is completely inadequate for lunar terrain. You must now completely redesign everything and create a MOON SPIDER robot, one that can climb boulders and wriggle out of pits
>You need to invest in advanced perception, LIDAR and stereophotogrammetry algorithms, negative obstacle detection, more detailed terrain mapping. More robust components and actuators. Exploring the treacherous lunar terrain without safe routes led to this inevitable conclusion...
>Perhaps you need a modular design, incorporating greater redundancy. A robot constructed of several cuboid modules, that can disassemble and reassemble as needed, each retaining independent sensors and mobility subsystems? If immobilised, the separate components could separate and pursue their own paths? Multi-agent autonomous swarms...
>This entire pitfall could have been avoided with the simple technology of a TETHER. Fortunately, you anticipated for this already in your design. Reel the robot in and try again
>Your solution for extreme terrain locomotion is hopping. You created a maniac hopping robot, that leaps over boulders and pits
>Activate the autonomous subroutines and cognitive architectures. Surely the robot wants to navigate out of this for itself?
>This is it, humanity is doomed. All dreams of conquest end here. Pivot the robotic camera and capture a lamentful robotic selfie, entrapped and imprisoned forever in the inescapable confines of the lunar desolation
>write-in...?
