Question: Do you think you can create a robot to get to a faraway star or planet to fulfil part of your previous dream career?

Carson Vogt answered on 17 Nov 2017:

Ah, it’s definitely the dream 🙂 Where I work now, the University of Edinburgh, we have a robot called Valkyrie which is made by NASA. It’s a descendent of Robonaut (you can check it out on Youtube) and it’s purpose is to allow scientists to explore the possibility of sending robots to Mars to prepare it for human arrival. I’m more interested in the places really far away, ie, other star systems like you mention. I think in the future it will be very possible that robots will lead the charge effectively. I think one of my favorite books that hints at the subject is “A Fire Upon the Deep” which I’d definitely encourage you to check out. As far as my personal career goes, I hope to one day work on deep space probes that will hopefully explore some of the more interesting moons around our gas giants, and that would fulfil the dream career criteria for me 🙂