"Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:
>
> On Sun, 29 Aug 1999, Brian Atkins wrote:
>
> > "Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:
> > >
> > > I think it would be nicer to live on some nice, moderately
> > > small vista close to your friends, while supervising the assembly
> > > of nanotech reefs that could serve a shelters for small fish to
> > > promote the repopulation of the oceans?
> > >
> >
> > Wouldn't it better to just have your nanosystems construct
> > perfect replicas of living fish? You could repopulate as
> > many fish as you like. If you can master that then you can
> > have transporters similiar to Star Trek.
>
> Eghaads, no! The whole point of more reefs is to enjoy the
> beauty of survival-of-the-fittest game. Provide little
> homes for the baby fishes and let them grow up. If they
> are clever enough they escape from the bigger fishes
> they get to make more baby fishes. (I'll admit that we
> have distorted things somewhat by creating more "artificial"
> environments, but its a fairly passive distortion.)
Well to express my point a little more clearly, what I meant was to only replicate the fish once.. just get them started back again. And you could actually get a whole bunch of samples to replicate.. not just do one particular fish a million times. Then when you've got them restored to normalish numbers, let the evolution continue.
>
> I believe one of the books about the Physics of Star Trek
> (or something similar) points out that classic "transporters"
> are difficult or impossible due to the information and
> energy requirements. You definately have a *real* problem
> without a receiver at the destination. Replicators are feasible.
> Deconstruction with replication is possible. Approximate copying based
> on intensive internal surveying seems possible as well. But
> moving me atom-by-atom to another place over a carrier wave?
> Not! No Magic Physics.
:^) Yeah... I did say "similiar" not exactly like. You would have to have a base station pre-built, and do a destructive upload.
>
> This does raise an interesting point however in a nanotech
> world we will have three very interesting possibilities
> 1) Let the Earth return to a "natural" state.
> 2) Garden parts or much of it.
> 3) Engineer parts or much of it.
>
> Another poll perhaps?
> Robert
I vote for: what we have at any given time should be considered "natural". For instance I think the development of cities and everything else humans have created is a perfectly natural extension of the evolution of our brains.
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