And because they are small and numerous, they should be cheap. The entire point of this scenario is to create a new kind of space-probe that is cheap, small, disposable, and numerous: as cheap and disposable as their parent technologies, microchips and video, while taking advantage of new materials like carbon-fiber, fiber-optics, ceramic, and artificial diamond.
The core idea of this particular vision is "fast, cheap, and out of control." Instead of gigantic, costly, ultra-high-tech, one-shot efforts like NASA's Hubble Telescope (crippled by bad optics) or NASA's Galileo (currently crippled by a flaw in its communications antenna) these micro-rovers are cheap, and legion, and everywhere. They get crippled every day; but it doesn't matter much; there are hundreds more, and no one's life is at stake. People, even quite ordinary people, *rent time on them* in much the same way that you would pay for satellite cable-TV service. If you want to know what Neptune looks like today, you just call up a data center and *have a look for yourself.*
This is a concept that would truly involve "the public" in space exploration, rather than the necessarily tiny elite of astronauts. This is a potential benefit that we might derive from abandoning the expensive practice of launching actual human bodies into space. We might find a useful analogy in the computer revolution: "mainframe" space exploration, run by a NASA elite in labcoats, is replaced by a "personal" space exploration run by grad students and even hobbyists.
In this scenario, "space exploration" becomes similar to other digitized, computer-assisted media environments: scientific visualization, computer graphics, virtual reality, telepresence. The solar system is saturated, not by people, but by *media coverage. Outer space becomes *outer cyberspace.*