Terence Tao

And this ended up working.

So what I realized is that if you could pull the same thing off for the actual equations, so if...

The equations of water support a computation.

You can imagine a steampunk, but it's really a waterpunk type of thing.

Modern computers are electronic.

They're powered by electrons passing through very tiny wires and interacting with other electrons and so forth.

Instead of electrons, you can imagine these pulses of water moving at a certain velocity.

Maybe there are two different configurations corresponding to a bit being up or down.

probably that if you had two of these moving bodies of water collide, they would come out with some new configuration, which would be something like an AND gate or OR gate.

The output would depend in a very predictable way on the inputs.

And you could chain these together and maybe create a Turing machine

And then you have computers, which are made completely out of water.

And if you have computers, then maybe you can do robotics, hydraulics and so forth.

And so you could create some machine, which is basically a fluid analog of what's called a von Neumann machine.

So von Neumann proposed, if you want to colonize Mars, the sheer cost of transporting people and machines to Mars is just ridiculous.

But if you could transport one machine to Mars,

And this machine had the ability to mine the planet, create some more materials, smelt them, and build more copies of the same machine.

Then you could colonize the whole planet over time.

So if you could build a fluid machine,

Yeah, so it's a fluid robot.