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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fast Learner" data-source="post: 479364" data-attributes="member: 649">Self-Replication and NanotechnologyIt's a pun based on a Spoonerism (a Spoonerism is where you exchange the first sounds of two or more words).Mars Needs Women becomes Mars Weeds Nomen becomes Mars weeds nimmen (spelling changed to aid in pronunciation and not give away the joke too early).Of course an explained joke is also known as a lousy story, but that's besides the point. I enjoyed the pun. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Now my actual point:The key to sending very little to Mars or the moon while having great effect is, of course, self-replicating machines. Part of the difficulty of self-replication, clearly, is having the sent machines actually build mining facilities, smelting plants, factories, etc. Lots of complicated big things that would have to be built in a wide variety of places (to get all of the appropriate materials). Such plants don't scale very well (a smelting plant the size of a closet has a hard time doing any real smelting), so this idea has a lot of problems.The solution, of course, is doing it on a much smaller scale, where you don't actually have to smelt anything (as an example), but rather you can simply disassemble and reassemble molecules, all via nanotechnology.The naysayers, understandably, will say that nanotechnology is a pipe dream, or at best something we won't see for centuries. Fortunately humans have a very long and very poor history of estimating the advance of technology, both in direction and in speed, leaving me with plenty of hope.My hope for reasonable terraforming and settlement is in nanotech. Wanna get more oxygen in the air? Molecular disassembly of CO2 will do the trick, and in the meantime you can assemble the extra carbon into nanotubes, buckyballs, diamonds for lasers, and what-have-you, including assembling it into additional nanomachines.Ah, nanotech, make my fantasy come true.</blockquote>

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