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Has anyone ever done a systematic study of the laws of engineered systems? Like how we have laws of physics and principles of biology? Thinking stuff like: - they have lots of right angles - they have pure materials - weak fractal structure - symmetries etc
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People are misunderstanding. I mean how would you determine that an artifact was engineered rather than natural? Like an alien object? What specific heuristics would you apply? It feels obvious with human ones but making the principles explicit is not easy.
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All that tells us is that this is how our human aesthetic imagination is primed. Things grown, rather than things made, feel more advanced. Crystals like, or tree like etc. It's possibly all cultural bias.
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Oh I like this thought. Things that are different (afaik): - Natural systems fractal - Right-angles are engineered - Rotating axles are engineered
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The sci fi story where the little alien probe parks inside the human station and they test it extensively and declare it inert "as a rock", meanwhile its quadcasting exabytes/sec of 'squark wavepackets' back to base. Only part of the story i remember but I think about it a lot