Hacker News Reader

Moving matter around takes far too long for star travel. We need to figure out how to assemble machines from long distances using light. (Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_tweezers)

View on HN

Why not just launch a seed factory and send the instructions to build via light?

That seems a hell of a lot more practical and cost effective

Also more possible haha. It's all fun and games until you predicate the success of your project on trying to collimate a laser beam from here to alpha centauri, so that it can manually assemble a (dielectric!) robot one piconewton at a time.

That sounds pretty impossible assuming that we're aiming for a planet with an atmosphere. Maybe if the planet has a moon, and then all we have to do is remote-construct a machine that can both do our research and make the small hop down to the surface?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com