[ExI] fw: Drexler's Star Seeders

[Robert G Kennedy III, PE]

On 2015-09-21 08:00, extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org wrote:
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2015 22:45:27 -0700
> From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
> To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> Subject: [ExI] No mirrors, was Deceleration mirrors
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAPiwVB6us9uCVSfCJcOTnWfNhUKBUu69Fuij2K14ZmQ85dUHkQ at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> 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
>

-- 
Robert G Kennedy III, PE
www.ultimax.com