You need two of everything to make one of anything. That is, references to the nature of DNA and the fact most of us have two hands aside, to gain universal manufacturing capability, it is necessary and sufficient to have two instances of every tool in a universal factory, including each machine tool, so that each tool can first operate on a copy of itself, modifying that copy, and then the copy can operate on the tool that made it, thereby modifying it, allowing for self-upgrade, self-modification, and self-reproduction in a universal factory.
This is because machine tools make and are composed of machine parts, and are in most instances operated by people, who themselves are universal self-reproducing factories. Machine tool input, structure, and output are all the same thing. Computers are not like that. Computers manufacture and use software, but as you, the reader, may recognize, computers are made of both hardware and sofware. Since the hardware component of a computer is not self-reproducing, a computer is not a universal factory. It's more like a fancy printing press, able to copy a Bible, a book, a CD or DVD, or an arbitrary snippet of code or text, and distribute it, via internet acesss, printed copy, or perhaps a serial port or another method, to other computers.
Toward the goal of machine tool self-reproduction, Replikon Research combined two drill presses, two collet indexers, two four-jaw chucks, and two cross vises of inexpensive Chinese cast iron and steel design and manufacture as a test of the concept during the years 1995 to 2000, then marketed one copy of the resulting four-axis universal milling machine as a "self-reproducing machine tool" in a local classified advertising publication, sold it to an enthusiastic craftsman, and documented the transaction as representative of a new business model of small, self-reproducing machine shops. (1) The Replikon vision of such factories is not a vision of "gray goo" spreading across the world uncontrolled; such factories lack energy and control closure and are so doubly-redundant in their resistance to uncontrolled growth. They are safe by design.
This new business model, in a world marked by the losses and associated griefs of the 2001-09-11 attacks, offers society the advantage of distributed infrastructure resistant to terrorist attack, and so Replikon Research maintains with the U.S. Federal government Central Contractor Registry an update registration as a for-profit small business entity capable of delivering this technology at any time it should be requested. Replikon-dot-net is an outgrowth of that registration.
"Safety, comfort, and fun." Those are the watchwords in any manufacturing shop. Craftspeople cannot have fun if they are not comfortable, and nobody can feel comfortable if they do not feel safe. Too many people do not feel safe, but with a distributed infrastructure, we can all feel safer. In a truly post-2001-09-11 world, we'd all have integrated the experience and the losses of horrifying magnitude into our awareness and so, be aware of how it affects us. We'd have gotten over it, but we are not in such a world, not yet. Much remains to be done.
Suffering is optional. Short of a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, compassion and nonattachment can do much to alleviate suffering, because all personal and societal discomfort is proportional to and based on the difference between the way things are and the way people think or a person thinks they should be. Yet without some notion that our world is not the way it should be, no progress can or would be made. Even the notion that suffering is optional is something of a paradox; does it mean that suffering is a bad thing, and that we should move to alleviate it? To believe so is to accept the presence in your life of a kind of meta-suffering that can never be alleviated.
A replikon is a self-reproducing univeral factory providing a benefit to a human population. Replikon Research researches replikons. That much is clear. Beyond those two points, as you have just read, or perhaps heard if you are using a screen reader, much remains to be done.
The moon phase and IP address gadgets originally placed at the start of this text symbolized when written on 2007-02-27 the mysteries of reproduction (a largely female principle; in humans, it is related to moon phase) and the magic of technology (a largely male principle; as an image of the sun, appearing as magic when misunderstood) which combine to produce self-reproducing machine tools. Ironically, the IP address gadget stopped working, which might symbolize magic that we can see right through.
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(1) Robert A. Freitas Jr., Ralph C. Merkle, Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines, Landes Bioscience, Georgetown, TX, 2004 http://www.molecularassembler.com/KSRM/3.12.htm