[ExI] No mirrors, was Deceleration mirrors

[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 5:00 AM,   Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se>

snip

> In my "spamming the universe" scheme I looked at enormous coilguns,
> essentially a Dyson sphere with light-second long coilguns (a Dyson
> urchin?) since they also get around the rocket equation. Eric D pointed
> out that lasers would be even more effective, and the lens trick could
> allow focused acceleration for a surprisingly long time.

I don't know if he ever published it, but heard Eric Drexler proposing
to send out laser pushed vehicles that would reorganize themselves in
flight as a coilgun.  When they were close to a target system, they
would fire bacteria sized nano seeds backwards, scattering them in the
direction of planets with air at a low enough relative speed that they
would not burn up.  The seeds would settle through the atmosphere till
they reached the surface, then grow into something like a Larry Niven
stage tree.  The nanomachines, augmented by microwaved instructions,
would find an asteroid in the target system and build a breaking laser
used to slow down subsequent vehicles while the original went on to
seed many stars.

Keith