Robot, build thyself - envisioned society of self-replicating robots that fulfill much of society's needs

ACCORDING TO THE VISION of Klaus Lackner and Christopher Wendt, a few short decades from now the desert chaparral of what was once the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico will be transformed into a strange new world. For hundreds of miles in every direction the alkali flats will be covered with a blinking array of solar panels. These might look familiar enough, but not the little suitcase-size robots scurrying among the panels on a grid of white ceramic tracks.

The robots, called auxons (from the Greek auxein, "to grow"), are designed for specialized tasks. Digger auxons scrape an inch of dirt off the desert floor. Transport auxons carry the dirt to a beehive of electrified ovens. Out of these ovens, which work at superhigh temperatures, come useful metals, like iron and aluminum, or the silicon required for making computer chips. Production auxons shape these materials into machine parts and solar panels. Assembly auxons fit them into place. Then the process begins all over again as a new batch of self-replicating automatons rolls into the desert to scoop up another load of dirt.

This electrified grid of tracks and bustling robots grows exponentially across the New Mexican mesas, doubling in size every six months. Though it started out the size of a football field, in ten years it could cover the continent. Before this happens, however, some built-in constraint will tell the system to stop growing. Instead of continuing to reproduce itself, the huge array of solar panels will feed its electricity into the national power grid. This one colony of auxons alone, limited to the test site where the world's first atomic bomb was exploded, will produce enough power to meet the current electrical energy needs of the United States.

Elsewhere on the continent, other auxon colonies stretch inland from the coasts. When switched from reproduction to production, the colonies will desalinate seawater, pump freshwater to the nation's farmland, and suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, transforming carbon dioxide into mountains of limestone. Another exponentially growing auxon colony, once it covers a bit more than 10 percent of the Sahara, will be able to meet the world's total energy demands three times over. No longer starved for power or limited to the polluting technologies once used to get it, people will be looking forward to the twenty-second century, when things should really get interesting.

The vision began to take shape in the summer of 1992. Klaus Lackner, a 43-year-old physicist in the Los Alamos National Laboratory's theoretical division--which researches such classified phenomena as bomb blasts, and such unclassified ones as climate--and his friend Christopher Wendt, a 36-year-old particle physicist at the University of Wisconsin, were enjoying a beer in Lackner's house on the Los Alamos mesa when they began wondering why scientists no longer think about big projects. Back in the 1950s people weren't afraid to pop off ideas about interplanetary travel or terraforming Mars into a space colony. But today, with fear of technology in the air, no one talks about building big projects on the scale of the pyramids or the great cathedrals of Europe.

After a few more beers, Lackner and Wendt started thinking big themselves. They talked about the problem of global warming and how it could be solved by transforming carbon dioxide into carbonate rock--a stable form of matter that would give us no more trouble than the cliffs of Dover. But to make these chalky white cliffs of stabilized C[O.sub.2] would require so much machinery that the cost of buying or manufacturing it would bankrupt you. The only way you could do it would be to produce the machinery automatically. "So we concluded that the means of production, as part of their job, would have to build copies of themselves," says Lackner. The number of these self-replicating machines at work, then, would increase exponentially.

Lackner and Wendt did some back-of-the-envelope calculations. During the day, some 300 to 1,000 watts of solar power rains down on every square meter of land. Harness this power into a self-reproducing system and two things happen. The system grows big fast, and it produces a phenomenal amount of energy. A million-square-kilometer auxon system, which represents 4 percent of North America, or half the cropland in the United States, could produce 25 times the world's current output of electricity. A 10-million-square-kilometer auxon system would provide all the elements for a sustainable world economy. The price tag for developing this system? Anywhere from $1 billion to $100 billion--cheap compared with, say, the current military budget of $264.7 billion.

"Once you start talking about projects this big," says Wendt, "the amount of energy available to you becomes staggering."

"We live in an energy-starved society," says Lackner, "and here was an idea for getting virtually unlimited energy, which would be a great thing to have."

At this point in their discussion, they had only a vague idea of what could be done with an automated industrial process growing like algae over the surface of the planet, but they knew it was big and powerful and could be programmed for a wide variety of human uses. They would bring the dark, satanic mills of the nineteenth century into today's sunlight. They would scoop up the free energy raining down on Earth and use it to put the spark of life into dirt, water, and air, which were all that were needed to build artificial life.