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.
