poly: ESS for HPLD

Folks,
        Carl, thank you for this great discussion. While I have thought about nanotechnology for 10 years, I have never thought about it in quite this way.

        One has to ask the question, "What is the astronomical evidence that we are now looking out upon the ashes of one or more replicator sweeps that happened billions of years ago?"
        Is the 90% of the mass of the universe that is invisible actually the waste products of a replicator sweep? Is the missing mass inside the vast black volumes around which we see wisps of strings of galaxies? Is a too-large percentage of the mass of the universe in the element Iron, the final waste product of the fusion and fission chains?

Alternatively, "What is the evidence that the universe is untouched, with energy sources and other things that have persisted for billions of years? Resources that any right-minded replicator would have consumed?"

"Is it possible that the chance of propelling a complex piece of matter between two galaxies intact is zero?" And thus any sweep would be limited to one galaxy?

"Relavistically speaking, from our point of view, if a replicator started 10 billion years ago, how much of the 14 billion light year span of the universe would it take up by now?"

I know that Eric Drexler made a survey of the "Oddly Shaped Galaxy Catalog", looking for galaxies with a hemispherical bite taken out of them. He found none. He was assuming that an advanced civilization would stop that wasteful pouring of solar photons out into deep space.

Most of the surface area of the universe in on the surface of dust particles. What useful and interesting things could be done there? Have we had a chance to examine any dust that has not undergone a supersonic impact? There might be some interesting structure there.

--Ted.

Ted Kaehler, Walt Disney Imagineering, R&D
(home) 3415 Cork Oak Way, Palo Alto, CA 94303
voice (650) 424-1070
http://www.webPage.com/~kaehler2/
Received on Mon Dec 8 16:02:06 1997