Joe,
> I still see issues with what I will call volume of scale. Agreed. Does one want a larger number of smaller craft with a fair amount of redundancy or a smaller number of larger craft with perhaps greater capabilities? And does one deal with the volume of the Europa ocean better with a "swarm" or does one deal with the possible detection of a low life density with larger craft that process more material (for the detection of "life")? > I guess I am still thinking miniaturization. No, not completely. Part of the problem is how to get the signals back here. How much do we spend on sending larger probes (more power, bigger antennas, etc.) *there* vs. spending that amount of money to build bigger receiving dishes *here*??? With respect to sending & receiving -- area counts. Area costs money. It is a question of where you spend it. (This is one reason that NASA is working towards optical information transmission and Mars data relay satellites). Area requirements go down and information bandwidth goes up. > Next question then, how long does it take to 'build' nanobots and a > bacterium for that matter? E. coli (the ubiquitous) bacteria, can replicate itself in ~20 minutes. That means that if provided with sufficient nutrients it could grow to equal the mass of the Earth in ~3 days. D. radiodurans replicates significantly slower (hours, if not days) leading me to believe that if you want perfect copies of ones genome one has to be very careful in the replication process. The rates cited by Drexler in Nanosystems (for nanotech) are "capital stock" doubling times of ~10^4 seconds (2.8 hours). But subsequent work based on nanoassembly lines has (in my opinion) significantly reduced that number. As a piece of trivia (and some lessons with regard to volume scaling), it is highly probable that normally there are more copies of "alien" genomes in or on each human body than there are copies of human genomes (in large part because bacterial cells have such a reduced volume compared with human cells). Robert == You are subscribed to the Europa Icepick mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project information and list (un)subscribe info: http://klx.com/europa/
