The Fantastic, Robotized, One-Hundred-Meter Telescope in Space

Practically everything in space is run by robots anyway but the telescope project goes beyond that since scientists are planning to task robots with building it.  (Science Daily:  Modular space telescope could be assembled by robot)

It's probably no surprise that we're fed-up with trivial people who have powerful positions but no plans and therefore we look for those who rise above the mediocrity of the endless sameness of the majority.

NASA's Kepler space observatory, with a mirror diameter of under one meter, is searching for exoplanets orbiting stars up to 3,000 light-years away. By contrast, the Hubble Space Telescope, with a 2.4-meter mirror, has studied stars more than 10 billion light-years away.  Now Caltech's Sergio Pellegrino and colleagues are proposing a space observatory that would have a primary mirror with a diameter of 100 meters -- 40 times larger than Hubble's.

- Science Daily

Now here we have people thinking with the scope we like since a ten percent performance upgrade is not going to send them into fits of ecstasy but a forty times increase will get their attention.

There's no sci fi with this one since who can guess what they will see with such a powerful telescope. Maybe they will see the Face of God (reverent pause).  It's not implausible after Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle found "The Mote in God's Eye" so they're on the way already.  Find the rest of him and you've got a complete deity.

The robot sci fi in space is so much sci fi already but we definitely want to reduce the risk of sending humans to space to accomplish things robots should be doing.  For example, we frequently see space walks at the International Space Station to affix this or that appliance to the space station but likely all of that could be done by robots.

The intelligence in the robots is easily there since the Martian Rovers NASA sent to Mars have considerably more intelligence than conservative politicians but that's ok with NASA since conservative politicians don't believe in science and won't survive the landing anyway.

(Ed:  getting into the evolutionary mistake of conservative politicians might be a bit off-track)

Good point.  So were they.

(Ed:  relax.  They're nearly extinct.)

- Insert extended editorial on robots supplanting humans for most types of work including that which requires high brain-weight such as high-end medical diagnostics, etc. - 

It's getting beyond the scope of the article to go into the sci fi sociology of what happens when there's such a radical overturn of the existing way of society with these robots but we would like to see that change coming in such a way that it's not as brutal and clumsy as the way conservatives murdered the labor unions.  The change resulting from the robotization of the work force will likely be even bigger so just a wee bit of finesse might be a nice touch.