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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
 |
| Computronium | ||
| Intelligent matter; nanocomputing processors masquerading as ordinary material. |
| "NASA are idiots. They want to send canned meat to Mars!" Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table. "Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now - dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. |
| Technovelgy from Accelerando,
by Charles Stross. Published by Ace in 2005 Additional resources -
|
From Router, one of the original stories:
See also the opposite - dumb matter.
The hazy shells of computronium that ring the sun—concentric clouds of orbiting nanocomputers, powered by sunlight, like the packed layers of a matrioshka doll—are still immature, holding barely a thousandth of the physical planetary mass of the system, but they already support a classical computational density of 10^42 MIPS; enough to support a billion civilizations as complex as the one that existed immediately before the great disassembly.
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'So, Ender, we will now begin your education.'
'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
