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Comment Re:Singularity (Score 1) 648

If we meet aliens, they won't be flesh. They will be machines.

What, precisely, is the difference?

And anyway, what's the benefit of going metal over just tweaking the carbon to our liking? Think about it. If we go metal we throw away a vast life support system. If we stay squishy, we get to keep relying on an ecosystem that:

  • Gathers and converts the most abundant energy in the solar system into a portable, stable, compact form.
  • Produces the catalyst needed to unlock said chemical energy.
  • Mines Carbon and other elements we rely on from the environment, putting it in easily absorbed forms right next to the energy molecules that we already spend time harvesting.
  • Has built-in mechanisms for automatically concentrating said energy and nutrients into even more concentrated (if sometimes hard to catch) forms.
  • Is easily manipulated into convenient arrangements.
  • Recycles our waste products.
  • Self-repairs.
  • Self-replicates.
  • Tunes itself to the environment, even if the environment changes.
  • Does its own design and QA.
  • Builds its own redundancy against design faults.
  • Actually fixes its own design faults.
  • Won't go Skylab on us.

Recreating all of that out of silicon and metal is...nontrivial. Delving into our genetic code to fix the stuff we don't like seems like a far more productive use of our time.

Comment Re:wtf (Score 1) 379

even if this system could detect the bullet the instant it was fired and then somehow compute it's exact trajectory in that same instant and then figure out how the target must move to avoid it, do you really think it would be physically possible for a person to move fast enough to dodge not one but multiple shots in that kind of time frame?

And how could that suit possibly find out about the velocity of his car? However, don't let us forget that this seems to be an absolutely new technology. Give it twenty years and it will be usable.

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