From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rms2g@virginia.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 10 2002 - 16:31:42 MDT
CurtAdams@aol.com wrote:
We don't know the minimum size for a seed. It needs a lot of data and
the ability to operate in space, which requires lots of propellant. And
your
redundancy is heavily limited if (as I calculated) launches require billions
of solar energy equivalents.
### As Richard Feynman calculated, all the words written in the history of
the world could fit in a cube 1/200 of an inch. We are not far from reaching
equivalent density, with the current atomic memories using 20 atoms per bit.
You won't need more than 3 times redundancy, but you could have a million
times redundancy and still fit in a payload smaller than R2D2.
As for energy needs, according to
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Tech/Space/laser.txt, you might need as little as
6 billion dollars to generate the energy for a one-way trip.
The only problem is deceleration at target, since this would require the
star-tapping abilities that Eugen is writing about - not unreasonable once
you have spaceborne self-replicating entities.
There is some talk about self-focusing of lasers in vacuum, at least as a
theoretical possibility - if that works out, the rest would a trifle.
Rafal
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