Drexlerian nanotech

[Rynn]

Technically, that description *does* apply to some OA tech, it's just in no way the best way to do things.

starting with something that can fit on the head of a pin and remaking entire worlds or solar systems

Right, sorry. That.

I still don’t get how you’ve come to this conclusion that, in every case, this is the worse approach. Like Todd said one huge advantage to starting from a small spore is that it weighs very little making it more attractive for setting up an automated industrial complex across interstellar (and even interplanetary) distances. Sure a few spores are going to take a lot longer to build up than starting with a factory full of specialist fabs along with thousands of bots, a power grid, megatonnes of refined material etc. But all of that is huge and would result in exponentially more fuel needed. And at the end of the day you might shave off a few months, maybe a year or two. Virtually nothing in the grand scheme of things, and you can use those saved resources (material, energy and fab time) to build something else. For the same resources as sending one factory ship you could send a thousand spores to a thousand different locations.

Technically building a Neumann on a pinhead would be very hard for modosophont technology. They’d have to have very good data on the environment it’s going to land in. Any deviation runs the risk of it dying before it replicates into a sustainable colony. Make things a bit bigger and it gets easier. An insect sized Neumann could rove around for resources if it needed and have more redundancy. Another big consideration (that is often ignored) is replicators aren’t going to be identical. You start with generalists suited to the environment you’re landing them in and once they’ve grown in population enough they begin building different breeds that are specialised for different roles/conditions and can begin building macroscale installations (like how insects build hives; synsects could specialise and build a starter fab).

TL;DR sporetech and neumanns are a more attractive option than dedicating mass industry in cases where the resource/fab time savings are judged to be more valuable than the extra time constraints. We’ve focused on colony probes because it’s the most obvious but there are many examples where it might be true. E.g: Bob the baseline lives in the middle of a vast savannah. He decides he wants a thousand trees planted. He could get his house fab to multiply and specialise until he has a factory complex that can synthesise and plant the trees in a single morning, but it would mean not having access to his fab for a week. Or he could have it make a bottle of replicators that he can spray over the area and wait a month whilst they grow in number and force grow trees. It’s longer, but he doesn’t have to have a giant factory appear next to his house and doesn’t have the inconvenience of not having a fab to use. Of course those are extremes and there are middle grounds but yeah; either way you make a financial decision as to how valuable your fab time and resources are compared to the time to wait for the product.