From: CurtAdams@aol.com
Date: Tue Sep 10 2002 - 12:10:25 MDT
In a message dated 9/10/02 10:45:45, eugen@leitl.org writes:
>Actually, we're talking about large-scale structures built by a hard
>vacuum form of gray goo on steroids. It doesn't take a lot more of
>information to create an insect than to create a procaryonte.
Actually, it does. There's also a lot of info in the physical layout of
the egg and it's components. DNA itself does not suffice.
>The
>effective seed itself is thus minimally few ten cubic micron sized, not
>considered redundant encoding for radiation hardening.
Minimal is putting it mildly.
>Besides, it doesn't matter whether the seed is the size of a poppy seed,
>an acorn, a coconut, or a truck. In fact, a larger sail is a target less
>easy to miss, and allows you to package lots of fancy stuff into it.
True; on this end the beam will be larger than the sail for high-speed
even if it's the size of the moon. But, of course, your have to stop
it at the other end too.
>We don't want to recreate a civilization. (At least not yet). We want to
>create a bootstrap bridgehead, a cosmic mitt for subsequent baseballs
>whirled thisaway, which requires orders of magnitude of an animal genome
>to encode, if done efficiently.
A catcher's mitt construction program is much smaller, true. But then
you're dealing with interstellar communication. It would take Aricebo
a mighty long time to transmit the Library of Congress.
>You can of course include complete
>civilization seeds, in the volume of a grapefruit or less.
How can you assume that? As I've pointed out a seed for our current
society would be truly enormous. How can you assume a technology
that may not even work will achieve efficiency improvements of 10
orders of magnitude?
>People are bitvectors. Gigatons is cheap, if your equipment is
>autopoietic. Image: you can grow a forest the size of a continent starting
>with a single acorn.
Yes, but the forest contains little information. Each person on this
planet carries their own information, and lots of it. The failure of
autarky attempts indicates you need at least a large fraction of the
population just to keep the technological lights on.
>> Like I said - propellant, not data, for space operations. It's big and
things
>> move very fast.
>That's the whole point of using photons for propellant. You leave your
>power plant at home, your propulsion is completely passive.
You've got to get around once you get there, too.
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