[ExI] Meat v. Machine

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 11:04:54PM -0800, Samantha Atkins wrote:

> Well now we don't have the heavy lifters we had before.  

We're only trying to deliver a number of small parcels.
Each smaller than the one before.

> Are you sure you believe that the current huge cost to 
> orbit is good enough?  I have rarely been so utterly 

The parcels are very, very small. There are tens
of thousands of inviduals who could afford one.

> amazed and had as much trouble believing a statement 
> as that one.  Hell, we still don't have much better 
> than 80% success putting payloads into orbit.  Why 

It doesn't matter if you lose some parcels.

> in the hell is this good enough?  
> 
> Again, we are three decades from machine phase.  Are 

Or we're 80 years away. Or a century. Nobody knows.
Bootstrap is hard, let's go shopping.

> you sure we have that much time?  

Do you expect military ecovorous self-replicators 
to be a serious problem, in that time frame?