More thoughts on nanite starships.

[ffutures]

Another random thought on nanite starships further to my post on the 7th.

Since they live at hundreds of times normal human speeds any nanite starship would by definition have to be a generation ship or a sleeper ship, totally self-contained with no chance of returning to the culture that produced it. Even at warp speed the shortest interstellar journey would last many generations.

Unless, of course, they combined space and time travel. Travel out to the stars at a (to a nanite) crawl, with the passengers and crew in the nanite equivalent of suspended animation, then travel back in time to a few seconds after they left their homeworld (unless they really want to screw up causality they won't travel back to an earlier time, in case someone decided to travel back to the home world and arrive before he left). If you want to interact with something in the macroscopic universe (such as Jean Luc Picard) you use a robot probe which from the nanite viewpoint is heading into the extremely distant future. Tell it to say or do something, observe the results, then return to your time. If you don't like the results program it a little differently and send it to a slightly earlier time, so that the timeline it creates will overwrite the original. Repeat until you like the look of the future.

It's a VERY strange viewpoint, but it seems implicit in the nature of nanites and the Star Trek universe. If you don't like the way the future is turning out, change it before it happens.

I know that this would NOT be very popular with Hawking etc., and that even the nanites would have to be careful not to screw up their own causality, but essentially they'd simply be tailoring the legs of the Trousers of Time (©T. Pratchett) before going down them.

Am I missing something?

Comments

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

Almost sideways to your actual question it took me a little while to work out what you meant by Hawking. I thought it was something from the star trek universe......

....so now I have vision of Stephen Hawking as some sort of Time agent travelling through time to prevent the disruption of space and time.....

[doctor-toc.livejournal.com]

You know, he did appear as a character on the holodeck once.

But I'm digging your idea too;

Stephen Hawking, Chronology Protection Agent!

[adrian-middle.livejournal.com]

Maybe the nanites harness Hawking radiation as a power source!

[parakkum.livejournal.com]

"...with the passengers and crew in the nanite equivalent of suspended imagination..."

Interesting passenger storage mechanism.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Bollocks.

Thanks!

[jgracio.livejournal.com]

Why stop evolving? Their ships could contain a way to harvest the molecules that exist even in deep space, providing them with raw materials and allowing them to continue to grow. Besides, they probably reuse the raw materials of previous generations, and if they didn't in a few short generations with little to no raw materials, scavangers (or even hunters) would be bound to evolve.

Time travel would be problematic, because a nanite culture with access to it, without any sort of rules governing their growth, would grow from nothing to encompass the entire Universe in virtually no time flat.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I know. But given the time scale that nanites live on, and the existence of numerous teeny wormholes in the trekverse, they would do that anyway, and fairly quickly. I think that they'd do the nanite equivalent of transcending first, but who knows?

[ci5rod.livejournal.com]

Ah. The teeny wormhole approach might be a better one, particularly since time behaves strangely in wormholes anyway (if DS9 is to be believed). Just find yourself a micro-wormhole that gets to approximately the right place, squirt materials and nanite crew through before it can destabilise, assemble your ship and complete the journey normally. In an ideal world the nanites would find a wormhole large enough to drag Picard into so that they could talk without taking generations.

[vitruvian23.livejournal.com]

Given their relative time scale, unless the nanites have practically instantaneous travel, they'll either be generation ships or the individual nanites/assemblies will be (from their own perspective) extremely long-lived to the point of being immortal. Imagine a human being living long enough to explore the galaxy at a tiny fraction of light speed, then multiply by the relative time scale... even individuals might evolve in a sense over this kind of interval, especially if they have conscious control of their constituent parts. The time travel bit helps from the perspective of the point of origin, but not so much for the subjective viewpoint of those doing the traveling. Of course, by parallel to software entities, perhaps they spawn different iterations of themselves, and know how to merge and compile back to one when they meet again.

On time travel, there are some potential issues in Stargate as well, the nearly instantaneous passage through the gates coming up against the complete *lack* of meaning of the concept of simultaneity in Special Relativity. If you have two worlds in contact via gate, what time on the other world does one see if looking at it using a conventional (if extremely powerful) telescope? What happens when you have either sublight or FTL starships also tooling around between them? You almost certainly end up with a situation where clever users can come up with schemes for causality-breaking time travel....

[adrian-middle.livejournal.com]

That's pretty similar to the outcome I suggested in the earlier post.

This particular variant does smack of Adam Roberts' Stone though (although his version of physics didn't quite work).