Neil Gershenfeld

speaker

1,202 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2023 last heard May 2023

Neil Gershenfeld’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

And so it really does lead you.

So let's see.

There's a wonderful series of books by Gingery.

Book one is How to Make a Charcoal Furnace.

And at the end of book seven, you have a machine shop.

So it's sort of how you do your own personal industrial revolution.

ISRU is what NASA calls in situ resource utilization.

And that's how do you go to a planet and create a civilization?

ISRU has essentially assumed gingery.

You go through the industrial revolution and you create the inventory of 100,000 resistors.

What we're finding is the minimum building blocks for a civilization is...

Roughly 20 parts.

So what's interesting about the amino acids is they're not interesting.

They're hydrophobic or hydrophilic, basic or acidic.

They have typical but not extremal properties, but they're good enough you can combine them to make you.

So what this is leading towards is technology doesn't need enormous global supply chains.

It just needs about 20 properties you can compose to create all technology as the minimum building blocks for a technological civilization.

Right.

And I say that not philosophically, just empirically, sort of that's where it's heading.

And I like thinking about how you bootstrap a civilization on Mars, that problem.

Showing 681–700 of 1,202 · page 35 of 61