hkhenson@cup.portal.COM (06/12/89)
[The recent posting of Megascale Engineering was enthusiastically
received but apparently was truncated. Even my archive copy
got truncated. Keith very kindly resent it, and I have carved it
into pieces so it will all get through. This is part 2. --JoSH]
The Last Few Pages
Besides the ability to rework the solar system and lives as long a
we want, what else can we do with nanotechnology?
The information gluttons among us can contemplate a monstrous but
short-lived feast. A few years after the nanotechnology breakthrough
we will have the ability to drill the entire Earth to the mantle on a
1 mm grid at trivial cost and without disturbing anything. We are
going to suck all the available information out of the Earth. When we
do, we will be able to revive at least some of the dinosaurs by
sorting through amber for their DNA. A few years ago it was reported
in *Discover* that readable DNA from 70-100 million-year-old insects
has been found embedded in this natural plastic. Surely a few of
these bugs were blood sucking or biting like deer flies and we will
find DNA from at least a few of the dinosaurs. We may find enough in
an exhaustive search to revive the Neanderthals and possibly some of
our other ancestors. Neandrerthals seem to have made their living by
wrestling cave bears, were immensely strong, and may have been smarter
than we are. The first guy to raise enough for a football team will
clean up.
We can clone or computer simulate the famous people from history in
cases where we can locate enough fragments of undecayed tissue to
decipher their genome. Leonardo de Vinci, for example, is known to
have painted with the tips of his fingers, leaving bits and pieces in
hardened oil paint. There is enough left of Einstein's brain, and it
was preserved soon enough after death that really advanced
nanotechnology might allow us to recover his memories and personality.
With even the faintest hope of doing so, it seems a shame for
researchers to keep whittling on it. Preserving the pieces left in
liquid nitrogen with the cryonics patients now in storage might be a
good idea. In any case, the cold would stop further degradation.
The feast won't last very long. Extracting information from the
rest of the solar system will take only a few years and promises to be
much less interesting. (I don't expect artifacts to be found on
Mars.)
After we have discovered all the local information, knowing where
*all* the fossils and artifacts are buried, and knowing exactly what
they look like right down to the placement of atoms, what can we do to
fill the post-nanotechnology equivalent of *Scientific American*?
The Far Edge Party
Some new information can be obtained with large telescopes. And,
given really large space-based telescopes, we will be limited only by
the amount of material we want to move and tie up in mirrors. I
expect we will resolve continent-sized features on planets out to 1000
light years or better within a few years following the breakthrough,
and locate the oxygen atmospheres (if any) out to a much further
distance.
But there are real limits to what we can find out with remote
sensing, so someone will have to take a closer look. What is the
optimum way to sweep out the Galaxy and obtain most of the available
information? Going out and sending back information works, but takes
too long for my taste. Besides I want to *see* the wonders of our
galaxy, all of them. There are 100-200 billion stars in our galaxy
alone and even with nanotechnology to help it will take a year or two
per star system, not counting travel time between stars. Visiting
every interesting object in serial is literally impossible, since the
interesting places won't last long enough. I don't want to take such
a long time looking over this one small flock of stars that most of
them burn out.
The only way clearly available is to explore the Galaxy in
parallel. This is a topic that hard to discuss, even with readers of
science fiction. Most of my friends in the cryonics organizations are
very uneasy about xeroxing people.
To explore the Galaxy in parallel, we need to make only a few
starships, say 100 and recruit crews for perhaps 10, but we make
copies of the crews to fill all 100. At 1,000 people per ship, and
100 ships (100,000 adventurers) this would probably be necessary