Comments on: Levitating ‘Nanocardboards’ . . . https://habitablezone.com/2020/04/23/levitating-nanocardboards/ Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:41:18 -0700 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: hank https://habitablezone.com/2020/04/23/levitating-nanocardboards/#comment-44404 hank Thu, 23 Apr 2020 21:32:54 +0000 https://www.habitablezone.com/?p=81147#comment-44404 Look up "Cat's Cradle", by Kurt Vonnegut. Ice Nine was developed for very sound military reasons. It was a molecular rearrangement of water that froze at room temperature. It also transformed any normal water it contacted into Ice Nine. A bit of it sprinkled on muddy ground would cause it to instantly freeze solid at any temperature, allowing it to support heavy vehicles. We spend a lot of effort avoiding contaminating other worlds with earth life, for very good reason. We should be just as careful about contaminating Mars with enormous numbers of microscopic autonomous robots. If anything should go wrong, how do we go about collecting all these things and disposing of them? This sounds like just the sort of project an engineer would come up with; ingenious, but reckless. To paraphrase Igor, "If anything goes wrong, your experiment will never end since there’s no way of stopping it." During the Vietnam War, a group of military engineers proposed dumping an enormous amount of phosphorus into earth orbit that would cause the sky to glow at night with the brilliance of a full moon so the Viet Cong couldn't hide from our troops in the dark. Of course, it wouldn't just work in Viet Nam, and it wouldn't stop when the war ended. Wiser heads prevailed, and we invented Agent Orange instead. Look up “Cat’s Cradle”, by Kurt Vonnegut. Ice Nine was developed for very sound military reasons. It was a molecular rearrangement of water that froze at room temperature. It also transformed any normal water it contacted into Ice Nine. A bit of it sprinkled on muddy ground would cause it to instantly freeze solid at any temperature, allowing it to support heavy vehicles.

We spend a lot of effort avoiding contaminating other worlds with earth life, for very good reason.

We should be just as careful about contaminating Mars with enormous numbers of microscopic autonomous robots. If anything should go wrong, how do we go about collecting all these things and disposing of them?

This sounds like just the sort of project an engineer would come up with; ingenious, but reckless. To paraphrase Igor, “If anything goes wrong, your experiment will never end since there’s no way of stopping it.”

During the Vietnam War, a group of military engineers proposed dumping an enormous amount of phosphorus into earth orbit that would cause the sky to glow at night with the brilliance of a full moon so the Viet Cong couldn’t hide from our troops in the dark. Of course, it wouldn’t just work in Viet Nam, and it wouldn’t stop when the war ended.

Wiser heads prevailed, and we invented Agent Orange instead.

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