Tag Archives: NASA
The Replicators
In 1970, noting the extreme cost of space exploration, the physicist Freeman Dyson proposed a wild idea: send a machine into space that is capable of building copies of itself from materials it finds. This would provide an unlimited production and exploration capacity for a finite cost.
Although just a thought experiment, Dyson’s idea is not as crazy as it sounds. In the early 1980s, NASA funded a series of investigations into cheap space colonization which involved building self-replicating factories on the moon. It’s theoretically possible, but robot factories building more robot factories poses a huge maintenance problem. After all, you’d need an army of repair robots to fix things when they break down. And, who repairs the repair robots?
Eric Drexler, a proponent of nanotechnology, describes a more elegant solution. He envisions tiny, molecular “assemblers” that can build copies of themselves and other items of greater complexity — a bottom-up version of the self-replicating factory idea. He also notes that such technology, if not tamed properly, could replicate out of control consuming all the resources on the planet resulting in the so called Grey Goo Scenario.
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| Copyright Shane Willis |
Thought experiments aside, some researchers have succeeded in building primitive, yet practical self-replicating machines. Adrian Bowyer from the University of Bath developed a rapid prototyping machine called RepRap that can make most of the parts necessary to build… another RepRap machine.
Bowyer’s RepRap project is now replicating “in the wild”. On November 30, 2008, the first user outside the lab used one of the machines to produce and sell a set of RepRap parts to someone else. Being a prototyping machine, RepRap is not limited to copying itself. It has been used to create ordinary objects including a coathook, a pair of sandals, and a fly swatter. The potential for such a machine is vast and is fortunately not likely to turn the world into goo anytime soon.
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