what do you think the meaning of life is?

[Phylum]

It's one thing to theoretically encode information in a sub-atomically, but it's another completely to interpret that data with a real physical outcome. What are your hypothetical nanomachines going to do? Compute Fibonacci numbers?

[Bullet Magnet]

We're back to miracles here, people.

[Phylum]

So why not just accept that we're all going to live for eternity in heaven or hell?

[Bullet Magnet]

I'd only spend all my time trying to make them collide at high speeds to see what happens.

I hypothesise the generation of exotic new afterlives.

[Havoc]

We're back to miracles here, people.

Just because that sort of stuff seems impossible now doesn't mean it always will be. We're just coming up with hypothetical ideas that assume humanity will some day reach that level of technology. Don't read so much into it.

[Bullet Magnet]

What's happening here is little different than taking ancient mythology and swapping out random nouns and verbs for scientific terminology. That doesn't make it science. It doesn't even make it science fiction. It's fantasy wearing a sci-fi hat. It's all the same mistakes human beings have made for centuries, except worse because you're encouraged to say that it is scientific. There are fundamental rules in the universe that must constrain our imagination if we want it to be real one day. For example: you can't model information of a given complexity in a medium that is less complex than the information, or even equally complex. In familiar terms, you cannot simulate a computer on another computer of equal or lesser power and complexity than your model. In nanotechnology terms, even truly advanced nanomachines have severe limits on what they can be made to do and react to because the processing power of individual atoms is quite limited. You can't invent a better atom.

[Manco]

Just watch me! *rushes to laboratory*

[Varrok]

I believe in times when ENIAC was popular BM would say that pocket calculator would be a miracle, citing the same argument.

[Bullet Magnet]

No. What I'm saying is that you don't realise how hard some of these problems are, and your imagined solutions require the violation of known laws of physics. I'd be happy to see them proven wrong and those limitations removed, but I know better than to wish them away and then extrapolate from there.

It's the equivalent of wondering "well, what if you could pick up the ball in soccer?" and then devising a revolutionary new tactic for the game. Interesting, sure, but don't anticipate every seeing it in play.

True genius is not in breaking the rules, it's in making the rules think it was their idea all along.