"Steven Mix" <stevenmix at prodigy.net> wrote:
> Life is out there. Somewhere.
Off-topic, but what the hell? No doubt it is out there. I noted Vinge's
hierarchy of explanations as to 'where are they'? Someone replied that
getting about would be difficult. Doubtless, unless we understand what
constitutes separation better than we do at present. Assuming the problem
is intractable, and that there are reasons to explore (itself an
assumption) then how would one go about it?
The answer has to be very small objects, hugely replicated, that can (a)
unwrap themselves when they find a chunk of suitable matter and (b) produce
more of themselves. A bacterium-sized nanomachine could be boosted to near
light speed with relative ease - light or microwave pressure, for example -
and teratonnes of these could be made and sprayed about at random (in the
galactic plane) in decades by anyone with the technology. If these are
programmed to repeat the process, the galaxy would be fully populated by a
generation of such machinery in a time not much longer than its diameter
measured in light years. This offers a fairly tight test: either (a) this
cannot be done or (b) there is nobody to do it or (c) it has been done,
because it only has to be done once.
If it has been done, then the logical extension is to spray the local
system with recording-transmitting nanomachines. Who knows, you may have
just such a thing nesting in your cortex, transmitting your thoughts in
polarized sneutrinoes, or whatever, to a database in the Oort cloud and
thence to day time TV, somewhere far, far away. Paranoia starts here.
_______________________________
Oliver Sparrow
