2004-10-22

news.bbc cutup


rare genetic

french court rule

robot companions

climate change

google

plastic firm

#

let's see

something about prefab processes, the manufacture not just of objects but of
whole ecologies: a company, a supply, a demand, a strategy, shareholders,
community interactions

robots, climate change, robots in the upper atmosphere acting like rafts of
jellyfish with environmental ethics. floating in the atmosphere, they look as
large as the moon, slightly phospherent, feeding on the complex chemical and
breaking them down--how far?

all the way, the molecules bind to receptor surfaces during the night, on the
top of the jellyfish, which are single-atom-thick fabric balloons, several
kilometers across, with carefully constructed surfaces for complex molecules to
slot into. during the day, in the sun, the molecules start jiggling and there's
a ratchet effect as they slowly penetrate the balloon, and inside the jellyfish
it's the normal atmosphere but with a very diffuse haze of superstring mites.

if evolution had to build a wristwatch--well, evolution *has* built a
wristwatch. it took 2 billion years, a planet, and human-level intelligence.
evolutionary artifacts are much bigger than single-purpose created ones (but
then again, evolutionary artifacts have spin-off benefits like, well, the space
program, and sex, and books, and cities) because they have two purposes: 1, to
make the wristwatch; 2, to build a autopoietic loop capable of self-sustaining,
complexifying, and puffing out wristwatches.

as designers, we don't need to concern ourselves with 2. the wristwatch doesn't
need to feed, or breed, or repair itself, it just gets manufactured.

so, superstring mites. mites, real life mites, are collosal things, cells and
cells, and atoms upon atoms, which themselves are particles, and huge gulfs of
space and strings etc. but if the mites were designed: we can handcraft
subyoctotech, building cogs and wheels out of vibrating strings, tiny
harpsichords that are production lines. disassembly lines, with harps instead of
robot arms, tuned to resonate and bend then break the bonds in these complex
molecules,

so the mites, tiny mites, not even made out of atoms, but constructed machines
at the level of the fabric of the universe itself, these fill the atmospheric
jellyfish, tearing apart (slowly, over years) the chemicals we've dumped, the
bad people that we are, into the atmosphere, rendering the chemicals into atoms,
then into tiny knots of strings, artificial particle-knots that can't really
come about by accident (or if they did, they wouldn't prevail because they're
unlikely), but we have to make neutral particles anyway, and two things happens
to these now-harmless knots, after they're excreted:

some of them bump up to the top of the atmosphere, like the little bits of corn
flake that rise to the top of the box, and are lost from the earth. out in space
they fuzz out, smear out, because nobody's looking at them, the tight knots
loosen, and they join their frayed edges into the thinnest ever cloth, so now
there's a plume hanging from the earth which looks like a headscarf caught in
the wind.

others of the knots fall down to the earth and make a film over everything, a
light crust over every electron, every proton.

(we use the crust to search stuff, because it conducts search queries. the
search queries join with their results into cooper pairs that aren't cooper
pairs because only one side is well-formed, the other is a hologram of all the
different truths, an intensity field rather than a hologram, and the pair is
superconducted (because the pair means it can slide through the conductor
without obstruction), with the original query as a weight and the loose
network/field of results as a sail, it looks like a yacht.)