I was chatting with a friend a long time ago about what, hypothetically, we thought we might find if we actually did encounter extraterrestrial technology from something millions or billions of years older than ourselves.
My thought was: software defined matter. This would be matter structured down to nano-scales or even below into the realm of the subatomic such that its characteristics and behavior can be dialed in with a software update. There would be no such thing as a bill of materials. To manufacture something just get a bunch of this stuff and load the right firmware into it. It could also likely self-reconfigure dynamically, at least to some extent, though one might see some cases where certain forms become limiting in the same way that stem cell differentiation is not always reversible.
The protomolecule from The Expanse is maybe the closest thing I've seen in fiction.
where some man gets shipwrecked on a planetoid with a beautiful woman and has to reconstruct technology from the foundation to repair his ship, or where the evil villain Blackie DuQuense stops on Earth to load up his spaceship with machine tools so he can build a bigger spaceship.
I thought about how you would build solar sails from a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid (I’ve been telling it people it’s coal for so long…) and you would possibly have a chemical factory that makes syngas to make organic compounds, reduce metals and such. You could probably make storage tanks and pipes from indigenous materials (though unfortunately you might want to degas the whole asteroid before the metal line is up) but you are going to have to bring some parts from Earth. And if you have to wait to get parts the project is set back years.
That is why Eric Drexler gave up on the idea of making this kind of space colony (see 1:36)
I'm not convinced that "sufficiently advanced" technology as the grandparent comment posits requires the kind of industrial manufacturing base we (or our foreseeable descendants) will need.
Think about how that other programmable matter, biology works. Organisms don't need big factories to turn basic environmental resources into sophisticated structures, only chemistry, cells, and "programming". There's nothing in principle stopping us from building similar systems for space exploration besides our own ignorance and primitive technology.
There was a paper that came out recently that said that at an oxygen level a little lower than the Earth you can still respire but you can’t start a fire, which blocks technology.
One could posit some kind of “biotechnology” for instance which could be based on life as we know it or with something like the DNA-RNA-Amino Acid complex with different molecules (it is already possible to change the amino acids repitoire.). How you get there without fire is unclear but it looks like something we can do.
This assumes that fire is the only path to technology in our type of environment, but it is hard to imagine others since you need heat to refine materials to do anything else.
Heat can be obtained from solar concentrators but what do you make those out of?
Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space novels describe a near future where humanity has achieved a similar level of molecular tech they called `Quickmatter`.
Entire cities are built with it, until a particularly nasty virus which makes no distinction between biological or molecular machines (or even software), becomes an existential problem.
Neil Greshenfeld of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms was recently on the Lex Friedman podcast to talk about self-assembling robots, FabLabs, and the future of last mile manufacturing.
It's very close to what you're talking about here. Breaking the material/tech of civilization down into a small number (double digits) of building blocks that can bootstrap a process of converting the building blocks into assemblers of assemblers for manufacturing.
You might want to read "His Master's Voice" or "Roadside Picnic" by Stanislaw Lem. The first one especially concerns what you're talking about, and the second (basis for "Stalker") is a little more of a tangent on it. Same for "Solaris" honestly. Lem's perspective on cosmic unknowable intelligence was really unique.
Lem wrote about software-defined matter in a more humorous way in Observation on the Spot. It was an exploration of a society whose needs are automatically fulfilled.
Adding to the replies which list SF examples of this idea:
The Collapsium (Wil McCarthy) has a plot built on a combination of this idea and extrapolation of the consequences of the fringe theory that gravity is really due to high frequency quantum oscillations.
(Almost everything in it's future is made of configurable quantum dot "pseudo-atoms" that can be reconfigured to states that don't exist in natural atoms.)
Doctor Who episode Smile is about a human city of the future built autonomously before the colony arrived, including farming crops. It was made by self reconfiguring microscopic robots that themselves became the structures and were free to disassemble back into a cloud of a tiny flying units.
The work is very much ongoing. I think the terminology is a little odd (I already have a settled definition for "metamaterials") but it's a pretty smart system. Combine with something that can coat it with a layer of regolith cement and you have a great start for a habitat when humans get there a year or two later.
Coating with the layer of regolith cement will probably make it much harder to disassemble. Maybe blocks themselves should have attachment points which aren't used for structure assembly, but can be used for unplanned extensions? And if necessary, those attachment points (some sort of one-time or reusable connectors) could be replaced relatively easy.
While I don't really get what motivates calling this a "metamaterial" as opposed to simply a "modular building system", it's still extremely cool. Watching the video was a real rollercoaster going from "hey it's not just a single robot arm but an autonomous bot walking on the structure" to "hey there's another one walking inside the structure".
I thought a metamaterial is something where you fundamentally change the peoperties of a material by giving it intricate geometry. I don't know where people officially draw the distinction, but I would call any foamed material a metamaterial too.
Living Architecture Lab (RC3),Tyson Hosmer and his students, were doing similar fun things at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London the last few years. They might have been inspired by others, I'm not sure.
I really don't understand this metamaterials hype.
While obviously this stuff is cool, is it science worthy?
This is basic engineering isn't it? How is this different than a bridge designer designing how a bridge will deform and different kinds of stress?
Sure they make it modular more abstract and general, but is it truly novel its the same science as the bridge designer isn't it?
My thought was: software defined matter. This would be matter structured down to nano-scales or even below into the realm of the subatomic such that its characteristics and behavior can be dialed in with a software update. There would be no such thing as a bill of materials. To manufacture something just get a bunch of this stuff and load the right firmware into it. It could also likely self-reconfigure dynamically, at least to some extent, though one might see some cases where certain forms become limiting in the same way that stem cell differentiation is not always reversible.
The protomolecule from The Expanse is maybe the closest thing I've seen in fiction.