How much energy does it take to balance a broom. L1 is unstable, but that is a benefit not a hinderance. It means that when you want to leave you just "lean" in the direction you want to go while to leave the moon you have to fight its gravity.
Not only can you leave without much effort, you can also get there with as little. You just have to plan well and accept a long trip.
Using the Lagrange points requires a different philosopy to mission planning.
> So how exactly do you train a monkey to think about doing something without doing it? I'm quite surprised that they were able to do that with the current level of communication between primates and humans.
What you do is you get him to watch an action, say a dot moving from the center of the screen out to the edge, and train him to follow it with his hand (a juice reward is the motivator). The key is a long pause right before the dot moves. As time goes on he comes to expect the dot is going to move and it sits around waiting, thinking about how he is going to move his hands when the dot actually started moving. So what he ends up doing is first thinking about moving his hand to follow then actually following. Watching this you can correlate signals from the planning stage with what he actually ends up doing.
BTW, I work very peripherally on this project (helping move the electrodes in and out of the brain automatically to optimize the signal quality).
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How much energy does it take to balance a broom. L1 is unstable, but that is a benefit not a hinderance. It means that when you want to leave you just "lean" in the direction you want to go while to leave the moon you have to fight its gravity.
Not only can you leave without much effort, you can also get there with as little. You just have to plan well and accept a long trip.
Using the Lagrange points requires a different philosopy to mission planning.
> So how exactly do you train a monkey to think about doing something without doing it? I'm quite surprised that they were able to do that with the current level of communication between primates and humans.
What you do is you get him to watch an action, say a dot moving from the center of the screen out to the edge, and train him to follow it with his hand (a juice reward is the motivator). The key is a long pause right before the dot moves. As time goes on he comes to expect the dot is going to move and it sits around waiting, thinking about how he is going to move his hands when the dot actually started moving. So what he ends up doing is first thinking about moving his hand to follow then actually following. Watching this you can correlate signals from the planning stage with what he actually ends up doing.
BTW, I work very peripherally on this project (helping move the electrodes in and out of the brain automatically to optimize the signal quality).