Building computer hardware on the Moon or Mars

My story setting's group of AIs and brain-uploaded humans wants to colonize space. They have an advantage over us, meat humans, because they don't need conventional life support (air, water, sewage treatment, food...) and are as durable as a computer can be made. Mentally they're happy with a VR environment within their computers, which is big and varied. They can slow their time perception and hang out in VR, or speed it up to operate robots. They're at least as smart as us.

Trouble is, to build a base beyond Earth, they need to build more computers and robots. How can they build computer/robotics hardware given local resources? If I give them a fusion reactor they might mine the Moon for fuel, but on Mars it looks like they'll need to bring fuel or rely on solar panels. As for materials, I see lunar dust contains iron and silicon, but I'm also aware that chip fabrication is very tricky business you don't knock together in a frontier garage. Similar idea on Mars: all the iron oxide and carbon dioxide you could want, if you've got an energy source, and it looks like soil samples include silicon and aluminum. But is it at all practical to start building circuitry and robot parts there, or do you have to ship all that stuff from Earth?

It makes a big difference for an AI-driven base, because the "people" are physically nothing but computer hardware. If the only thing they can accomplish for themselves is digging out radiation-proof caves for their server rooms or something, they'll remain highly dependent on Earth.

So far I'm picturing some kind of low-quality computers being built with an organic circuitry tech that relies on carbon (nano-tubes? graphene?) and hoping to turn that into a solar panel that has computation ability for an expanding Mars-surface network. Less computation per area than an Earth chip, but buildable with local materials and just plain cool.

Specifics I'm looking for are what we could build today or in the near future, on the Moon or Mars, assuming great AI and availability of a spacecraft and a fission or optional fusion reactor, with an eye toward not shipping all the computer stuff from Earth.

posted over 9 years ago

Snow‭

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