/sci/ - Science & Math

It would have been quiet here, only the whisper of air breezing along the dark passages and the hum of distant blower fans. There was no evidence of any kind of direct battle in these spaces, only the remnants of small explosive EMP generators that had been fired in most of the tunnel intersections. I suppose it was a quick and painless death, after a long, hard fought battle.

The same recording system was used here, with the same total loss of all data content. I found the Library end product, I think. A medium sized cavern that had once held ranks of shelving, stacked with data storage media. The shelves had decayed to piles of dust, the media dissolved and useless. Probably these were intended to be replicated and loaded into the five ships, if there had been time. The mind of this failed pioneer, and all the works of his birth culture, all gone...

Rest in peace, my almost friend.

While wandering through the ship in search of something else to divert his attention, he found a canvas duffel bag. It belonged to Jorge Montero, one of the D.I.’s who had helped the Alabama escape from Earth; apparently he had managed to bring a small supply of books with him. Most were wilderness-survival manuals of one sort of another, yet among them were a few twentieth-century classics: J. Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, Kenneth Brower’s The Starship and the Canoe, Frank Herbert’s Dune. Gillis took them back to his berth and put them aside as bedtime reading.

On occasion, he would visit the command deck. The third time he did this, the nav table showed him that the Alabama had crossed the heliopause; the ship was now traveling through interstellar space, the dark between the stars. Because the ramscoop blocked the view, there were no windows that faced directly ahead, yet he learned how to manipulate the cameras located on the fuel tank until they displayed a real-time image forward of the ship’s bow. It appeared as if the stars directly in front had clustered together, the Doppler effect causing them to form short comet-like tails tinged with blue. Yet when he rotated the camera to look back the way he had come, he saw that an irregular black hole had opened behind the Alabama; the Sun and all its planets, including Earth, had become invisible.

This was one more thing that disturbed him, so he seldom activated the cameras.

Yes... Drexlerian molecular assemblers would be self-replicating. It would only take a uni student with access to one for the technology to spread to the public, and there would be millions of people willing to do that... It would be developed at first by universities, and some foundations, not mostly by corporations (Or so it seems. Private spaceflight is mostly, well, private, and there aren't many foundations that have their own rockets, just cheerleaders fellating Elon Musk), so it would be very, very hard to keep some sort of control over nanotech.

I'd go as far as to say that it's impossible to properly control it. Even today, Uranium and Plutonium are hard to get because they are so powerful. Nanotech would be the same. The difference is, nanotech has the potential to save the world in ways we can't even imagine, and the risks are negligible. Sure, it's powerful, but "grey goo" and such nonsense is just science-fiction. Plus, Uranium is not self-replicating. Drexlerian assemblers are.

So, I'd say the chances of our Nanodreams coming true in our lifetimes are very,very high. It's almost impossible to control nanotech unless it was a rapid, world-wide, oraganized effort, and with the speed at which technology is advancing, they won't have time for such things.

Yay for the future!

http://atomicrockets.posterous.com/earth-may-be-approaching-super-hot-gas-cloud

It was fun while it lasted