Re: self-extracting zipware AI 'casting

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Sep 16 2000 - 18:07:39 MDT


At 02:40 AM 17/09/00 +1000, Emlyn wrote:

>You could always go on the assumption that there is life out there already.

I was going to add this in parenthetically, but really to maximize your
wavefront's chances the system has to be as self-supporting as possible.
After all, the rest of the available cosmos *might* lack any other sophont
species or they might initially be very rare.

>Add to your signal the design of a machine/substrate that will decode the
>rest of the signal and do whatever it takes to "run" you.
>Hmm, I think I just ripped off most of the plot of Contact.

You just ripped off Fred Hoyle's A FOR ANDROMEDA (perhaps he was the first
to come up with this, unless Lem beat him). And it was used rather nicely
in Donald Moffit's THE GENESIS quest and SECOND GENESIS, where aliens
reconstruct the human population from signals received in Andromeda.

Damien Broderick



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