Re: Neuron stars (was: Re: Setting the controls for the sun)
Dan Clemmensen (Dan@Clemmensen.ShireNet.com)
Sun, 17 Aug 1997 11:34:38 -0400
Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> At 10:09 PM 8/16/97 -0400, Dan wrote:
>
> >The question, of course, is whether
> >or not neutronium can exist in the form of collapsed atoms.
> >If so, some sort of chemistry should be possible, and therefore
> >nanotech may be possible. [snip]
>
> > may require new
> >physics. Of course, the instant you start depending on new
> >physics the entire speculation becomes unconstrained.
>
> A big problem with using neutron stars as computational platforms (a.k.a.
> turning them into neuron stars) is that they might actually be kaon or
> strange stars, and who knows what the physics is then? [snip]
True. We haven't yet sent a probe to the Dragon's Egg
(as in Robert L. Forward's book) to find out. But we won't
necessarily need to use the natural form of a neutron star.
We may be able to construct a different for of collapsed matter.
To build a collapsed-matter computer, we just need a for the
laws of physics to allow some form of the stuff that will
act analogously to atoms. We don't necessarily need to
use the neutron star configuration.