[extropy-chat] Re: Self replication again (was MARS: Because

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2004 at 12:12:36PM -0500, Stephen J. Van Sickle wrote:

> Hmmm....then this brings up the question of how one safely and cheaply
> disposes of used/defective/outdated devices. Ideally you would want to

There's value in building failure-tolerant, gracefully degrading nanoware.
Outdated, yes, if we're arguing in tracking fitness in a co-evolutionary
context.

> close the material loop and turn it into feedstock, but as you say it is
> not obvious that this is simply an inverse operation of construction. 

Thermal utilization, pyrolysisis, hydrogenation, disassembly. There's a
bandwidth of options available.

> Worst case, I suppose, would be some sort of high pressure and
> temperature decomposition, but the costs would be significant,

If it's passivated (sapphire or silica-coated) CHNOPS organics, just make a
big heap of it, and burn it up. Pyrolysis is a more controlled version of
above. Using catalyst and hydrogen lets you retain most of fixated
combustibles.

In space, situation is obviously different.

> especially in comparison to the cost of manufacture.  However, it seems
> a necessary area to investigate when trying to evaluate the cost or
> effectiveness of large scale MNT.

Right here and now, it's a complete waste of time. Let's figure out how to
build the damned things first.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20040418/315f7557/attachment.bin>