The Singularity

potential impact on the future development of orbiting habitats?
Here's my 2 cents, from my FAQ at http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/spacsetl.htm: Won't we be to a post-human future before getting to a High Frontier future?
Almost anything is possible, but the post-human concept (the prediction that technology will eventually allow us to trade in our flesh-and-blood bodies for newer models) is predicated on the capability of "reading out" the consciousness from a human brain and "uploading" it into an artificial one. At present, we have so little understanding of how our own brains work. It's always possible that dramatic advances in this area lie ahead, but equally dramatic advances in space transportation technology are also possible, and might even be derived from present knowledge.
But even if a post-human future does come first, most of O'Neill's arguments regarding 24 hour/day solar power, the building of large yet flimsy structures in 0-G, not being at the bottom of a gravity well, environmental control, mobile territories, and long-term limits to growth would be just as compelling to a machine race as to ours. In fact, it's likely that a machine race would have even less of an attachment to the planetary concept than do we planetary-evolved biological organisms. The only difference would be that we might expect the space platforms they would build to be much less Earth-like than present artist's conceptions of space habitats designed to support biological humans.