In news:1143152351.628159.155300@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com,
ianparker2@gmail.com <ianparker2@gmail.com> typed:

Well I was going to say that in some ways I couldn't see the point
in robots when genetic engineering might be a more effective way of
creating a self sustaining slave race. OTOH though machines
certainly have their uses they can go places biological entities
can't and perform mindlessly repetitive tasks without complaint and
it is possible to control how much free will a machine has and if it
misbehaves you can simply switch off it's power, without permanently
killing it, they are so turn-off-an'-onable ;)

Reproduction and self repair imply only a knowledge of Engineering
Phsics, they do not imply consiousness or free will. Chlorella is a VN
machine that has neither intelligence or free will. All a VN machine
consists of is a route by which elementary materials, say sunlight and
Moon rock enter at one point, and are sufficient to assemble the
assembly. This is a misconception.

A machine can't apply knowledge independently of a user without the ability
to make decisions on it's own, which would mean it would either have to
think for itself or be directed and controlled by some form of central
electronic brain or even a biological cyborg brain. If these machines had no
means of making decisions, and adapting and evolving to different situations
as they arise they would fail fairly quickly.

IMO you can't have a self sustaining machine without some form of
consiousness. Because the machine would have to be "self aware" it woulds be
pretty useless at maintining itself if it couldn't even reconise it's own
reflection in the mirror to give itself a new paint job LOL

This would seem to be a major problem with the concept of VN
machines at least at present, micro circuitry is particularly
susceptible to radiation contamination and there is no way around
that at present using electronics which doesn't involve making it
bigger and heavier. e.g adding extra circuitry to cope with errors,
or adding insulation such as lead.

The space probes up now are not doing too badly. Radiation damage is
not a show stopper, it simply means that the rate of doing damage must
be less than the reproduction/repair rate.

It's not so much damage that's the problem.

The problem according to a NASA podcast I was listening to the other day is
micro-curcuitry is so small, being bombarded with particles of radiation in
the Solar wind, stray electrons etc, causes multiple errors in the chip
curcuits, which means you have to have say for example 3 curcuits all doing
the same job, or process the same data over and over, so the results can be
compared, and the data in effect cleaned to minimise errors. However unless
you have clean pre-processed contol data which of couse wouldn't exist
outside the laboratory in the void of space, AFAIK there is no absolute way
of ensuring against computer errors in space. What that means in practice is
the computers they can send into space are about 1/5 the power of state of
the art chips used in consumer electronics on earth.

Of couse that doesn't stop VN machines being feasable, but it does mean
computing power available in space is about 10 years behind the technology
available on earth.

Of course it appears that may already have been done and it may be
what the grey aliens are, which considering they have been seen by
millions of people most of whom describe their appearance in a
similar way would seem to indicate that they actually exist and of
course the fact they appear to remove genetic material from people
and indeed farm animals and have been doing this a long time before
human beings had any understanding of the possible reasons behind
this activity i.e genetic engineering and cloning of their own kind
would seem to indicate there is some truth in these sightings.

I watch CSI. My wet dream is shooting at coconuls with a 9mm semi.
This will give all the DNA that is ever needed. This is what I mean,
aliens simply will NOT act in the way reported. This puts the roots
of my doubts in a nutshell.

Well maybe they do it for the same reason people do course fishing as a kind
of sport. :)
-- 
Amanda