“Would aliens also have X?” for almost any X tickles the brain a lot.
The X that primed it for me just now (again) is stainless steel, but almost any generalization of it works.
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Does feel like the right way to rate the progress of a species is material technology!
Alien species prob relied on stainless steel during a brief phase of their existence? Humans have only had it for a small fraction and will likely move beyond it in time?
Great material tho!
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I’d say humans are <100 years from atomic level designer materials. Specificy the properties you want, a quantum computer figures out the optimal atomic composition and then a “printer” drags atoms intro the right place. I’d guess any sufficiently advanced civ has these 🧐🤞🙏
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Fascinating. Is there a defined path to getting there yet? Like is that <100 years a set of known challenges to solve or is the path still unknown?
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The two camps are
1. Use progressively better tip-based techniques (a la scanning tunneling microscopes)
2. Use progressively better bio-based printers.
My hypothesis is that a better path takes pieces from both (but I don't have a good answer for which pieces those are yet.)
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(Terse because it's hard to unpack in a tweet.)
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Wasn't the OG Drexler approach to use bio first to build second gen diamond-based atomically precise tooling?
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In a (to my eye unsatisfyingly vague) way, yes.