Terence Tao

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.

And what it would do, its purpose in life, it's programmed so that it would create a smaller version of itself in some sort of cold state.

It wouldn't start just yet.

Once it's ready, the big robot, Configured Water, would transfer all its energy into the smaller configuration and then power down.

And then it'd clean itself up.

And then what's left is this newer state, which would then turn on and do the same thing, but smaller and faster.

And then the equation has a certain scaling symmetry.

Once you do that, it can just keep iterating.