From: CurtAdams@aol.com
Date: Tue Sep 10 2002 - 09:28:33 MDT
In a message dated 9/10/02 3:12:45, eugen@leitl.org writes:
>On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, Avatar Polymorph wrote:
You're a little sloppy with your attributions. Most of this is mine,
to which he was replying.
>> "We don't know the minimum size for a seed. It needs a lot of data
>
>My guesstimate is a few kg for the payload. The sail could be a few tons.
That's a complete guess from where the sun doesn't shine. The non-water
part of the human brain is about 0.15 kg and it's vastly insufficient. We
couldn't even figure out what it would take to recreate civilization and it
would certainly be enormous - gigatons of equipment and people, minimally.
How much more efficient could nanotech be? We don't know.
>> and the ability to operate in space, which requires lots of
>
>Space is a simple environment. It is not obvious that more than insect
>intelligence is required to create a bridgehead/receptacle on the other
>side. Less than a cubic micron is required to encode that information. A
>sugarcube is enough for a sentient probe, less for a sentient probe seed.
>> propellant.
Like I said - propellant, not data, for space operations. It's big and things
move very fast.
>>And your redundancy is heavily limited if (as I
>I haven't done the math, but it's grams of matterenergy for each kg of
>mass at ~0.9 c (0.5*mv^2, no need for relativistic mass corrections at
>these speeds), right? I don't see how this is going to be a problem given
>that fluxes like 10^12 g/s are available.
The problem is that even with excellent focus your fluxes have to
cover an enormous area - solar system size. You can't keep it focused
on a little sail at 10,000 AU.
Actually you do need corrections at 0.9 c 5-fold mass increase at that point.
Not night-and-day, but not trivial either.
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