6 ms·
My guess is a nanotech slug impacting earth and turning us into grey goo/a matrioshka brain factory.
by antepodius 6y ago
My guess is a nanotech slug impacting earth and turning us into grey goo/a matrioshka brain factory.
- tlow 6y agoCan you say more about these nanotech slugs please?
- 0ld 6y agoI believe they are referencing James S. A. Corey The Expanse [0] series [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)
- antepodius 6y agoHaha, nah, it was more the general idea. An amalgam of sci-fi. Greg Egan had a story where an advanced civ sends a gram-sized slug into the gas giant of a solar system, which bootstraps to machinery that 3d prints people and machinery, which is a plausible enough inspiration that I can give it here. Just remove the implausible 'nobody just decides to go bacteria-mode' aspect from Egan's far-future stories.
- Intermernet 6y agoDo you happen to remember which story? I like Greg Egan and that one sounds interesting.
- antepodius 6y agoFound it eventually: https://outofthiseos.typepad.com/blog/files/GregEganGlory.pdf https://outofthiseos.typepad.com/blog/files/GregEganGlory.pd... All his stories are listed here, whether they be published on his website or elsewhere: https://www.gregegan.net/BIBLIOGRAPHY/Online.html https://www.gregegan.net/BIBLIOGRAPHY/Online.html
- Intermernet 6y agoThanks!
- brainbag 6y agoIt's not the Egan book but Accelerando by Charles Stross is my favorite near-current day up to post-singularity book and it covers topics like this in a fantastic and fun way.
- airstrike 6y agoSee also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain
- antepodius 6y agoImagine you're arbitrarily close to the physical limits of technology. You do or could understand how living things work, down to the molecular level, for example, and know how to engineer self-replicating machinery analogous to DNA. At the very least, you could build a 'spaceship' that can grow something at least as efficient as people, who can replicate however and disassemble earth for raw materials. Presumably, you can do much better, and you end up with something like a self-packaged deployable technological superintelligent ecosystem.
- api 6y agoThat already happened. Living cells are nanotechnology. Something loaded with them impacted billions of years ago, and we're currently working on AI and rockets.
- gota 6y agoThis seems a reasonable and straightforward scenario and I'll prepare accordingly
- antepodius 6y agoMake yourself intra-universally interesting enough that the alien construction management AI might instantiate a simulation of you from the cached info at some point. It's a strange sort of Darwinism, but it's all we've got.
- thelittleone 6y agoPerhaps we are an instance created by an alien construction management AI that is wondering if we will become self aware before the timeout.
- gubby 6y agoAn instantiation of me from a backup, however accurate, would be no use to my sense of having survived as I would have ceased to exist and not even be aware of the copy.
- antepodius 6y agoThat's fine! People with your philosophy of self will just cease to exist, as they presumably will refuse to optimize for likelihood of being simulated, and those with a more permissive notion of self-identity will be the ones willing to adapt to the hellish computational circumstances. (Of course, you could say that everyone's ceasing to exist, here, because your rules of what counts as a person and what's their copy applies to everyone. But please realize that, from the point of view of those who think having a copy survive is better than all of them dying, and is partial survival in some sense, that being simulated is a form of winning, even if you think both the person and the copy are deluding themselves.) (Though I do wonder how you go about the day without having a nervous breakdown, given that your evolving state is probably quantized, or at least sliceable, meaning there's no great physical difference between your pattern shifting from one [smallfractionofa]second to the next, destroying the old one and replacing it with a new one, and your old pattern being destroyed and replaced somewhere else. It's not like your past self is aware of your future copy in normal life, either!) (I'm not saying you're wrong; just that the situation is a lot worse than you think it is, and that we should all be living (and repeatedly dying) in absolute existential terror.)
- perl4ever 6y agoI think there was a HN thread not that long ago about speculation that (at least some) viruses come to earth from space, so perhaps it is happening all the time.
- pvaldes 6y agoEarth is perfectly capable to do it at home. Has created things more bizarre than viruses.
- kabacha 6y agoThis seems such a "flat earth" type of hypothesis. I mean viruses depend on their hosts 100% so them coming from somewhere with no hosts and successfully slotting in with new hosts just seems immeasurably unlikely.
- perl4ever 6y agoWell, you assume there are no hosts. I'm sure others have written more, and more intelligent things, but my general thinking about panspermia is: - it seems like a universal rule there are more small things than large things - there are more small red stars than stars like our sun - there should probably be more brown dwarfs than small stars - there are more small planets than large ones - planets can and do form without stars - planets should outnumber stars, and planets without stars should outnumber planets with stars - there are probably more oceans below the surface of objects in our solar system than on the surface - the universe existed for a long time before the solar system ...so it kind of seems intuitive to me that life should have developed underground where there's warmth from radioactivity and water, on countless free floating planets over billions of years and occasionally one of those gets blown to bits and something like that seeded our unusual planet. ...and it doesn't seem entirely implausible to me that there should be so much biological material in space that we get a certain amount all the time like micrometeoroids.
- antepodius 6y agoI was recently browsing my uni's master's projects, having to pick one. One of the projects was titled "did COVID-19 come from space?" I sort of regret not picking it; it's too funny. I'll definitely be reading it when whoever got it's done.