From: Bathsheba Grossman (sheba@bathsheba.com)
Date: Thu Mar 24 2005 - 22:18:09 EET
On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, Adrian Bowyer wrote:
> > If I were building such a machine, I'd be looking very hard at the way
> > analog and digital mechanisms interact in those systems. There's an
> > entropic principle that has to be overcome, and the way DNA does it is
> > an awesome hack; any other such machine would have to be built around
> > an equally awesome hack. DNA relies on the uniform nature of
> > elementary particles, and therefore its existence may not imply a
> > useful model for larger scales. If this problem did turn out to be
> > soluble on the macro scale, that would have consequences far beyond
> > having cheap SLA in every household.
>
> Hmmm. Doesn't human engineering as a whole also constitute a self-replicating
> machine?
OK, I'll buy that for a quarter. It certainly did have vast
consequences. But I only buy it if that system is taken to include
DNA-based replicants -- if you take them out of the system at any
point, it immediately stops perpetuating.
So who's this Matt Moses guy? I'm not finding anyone by that name at
unm.edu.
-Sheba
-- Bathsheba Grossman (831)429-8224 Sculpting geometry bathsheba.com
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