Crazy idea: can new boats be assembled from the wrecks of old boats: the parts are already in the ocean, you can't reuse metal, but you could reuse masts, wood, and hulls, etc.

The big difference is that it's very cheap to get something in the ocean, and quite expensive to get something up in orbit. For a mast on a boat, 99% of the cost is in the mast and 1% in getting it where it is; For a solar panel in orbit, the panel itself was cheap but the majority of cost was spent in pushing it to orbit.

So you are saying it’s possible?

Yea this thread hurts my brain, I legitimately can't tell.

But I believe it would be, Water World style. Why not re-purpose scrap parts, you could even make other helper robots with the scrap.

I'm reminded of Seveneves with the robots that make more robots tk make more and bigger robots. Man I'm gonna re-read that now.

Sorry my “so you are saying it was possible?” was supposed to just be a little joke to the guy talking about ships.

I think what you are describing might one day be possible, but it’s so far in the distant future that technology would have to move along way before we start to think of this outside of science fiction.

The level of processing and manufacture required to turn junk into a robot is huge, and would require a large facility on land. You would need to be able to melt and smelt metal, remove impurities, cast parts etc and doing all this in space with tiny robots rather than a floating mega-factory would require a level of technology that we don’t yet have.

Note that you can’t just reassemble parts because they won’t fit together unless they are all standardised, they could be damaged, and they likely suffer from metal fatigue and wear (eg to the boat point, this is why we make boats from fresh wood rather than reuse rotten wood from a shipwreck).

yeah, this thread "hurts my brain" because people aren't getting that my reply was sarcastic.

Good question—DARPA has asked it, too: https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/darpa-unveils-roboti...

Even if you assume there are sufficient working parts in orbit to construct working satellites, doing that reconstruction in space would require gathering them together in space either by people (super expensive) or by a sufficiently flexible robot, in which case we're already sending up something, just send up the desired new satellite instead.

Alternatively we could deorbit components without them burning up and assemble new ones down here, but that would also be vastly more expensive than just making new ones down here to begin with.