I’d like to add on to this, that you can assume whatever you want about energy costs and power generation.
If we don’t do it, and it hasn’t been done, you only have theoretical speculation and an idea.
Meanwhile, I have Sojourner, Curiosity, and Opportunity as my main points of evidence here.
I have no reason to believe we will hit some magical breakthrough on power density allowing us to have vehicles capable of lift in ANY atmosphere,
with a cheap enough energy cost to justify flying around on every body we land on.
I mean, our best batteries in mass production for nearly TWO DECADES are stagnant.
Lithium Ion, is the best we’ve done since alkaline Duracell, in terms of production cost, and ability to mass produce with minimal harm. (Nuclear
sources while more efficient, have great costs of tragedy for mistakes.)
I’m not going to delude myself into believing that Moore’s Law will somehow scale to power density and energy storage.
It only has to do with our computational and transistor technologies. Batteries don’t get better, just because tiny chip power needs go down. If you
need a motor, you need power. If you need motion, you need a motor.
Motors aren’t aided by tiny transistors.
edit on 15-4-2018 by Archivalist because: out to our, spelling error