On Saturday, December 17, 2016 at 10:24:17 AM UTC-6, Doc O'Leary wrote:   
   >    
   >    
   > > It's pretty pointless to talk about "long-lasting" without agreeing   
   > > what order of magnitude timeframe we are talking about.  A century?   
   > > A billion years?   
   >    
   > It’s not even a question of that, but what *purpose* is to be served    
   > by something lasting for a long time.  Yes, a tree can last for    
   > thousands of years, but the “tech” of a rock can last even longer.     
      
   I once posited, in a discussion of how buildings and structures could endure   
   for geological ages with only automatic maintenance, that one good approach   
   would be for the maintenance robots to replicate (with the necessary   
   precautions against Darwin Error)   
   , but for the structures themselves to be big, simple, and made of durable   
   materials with long-lasting properties.   
      
   That is, stone.  The image I conjured up was that alien ruins made of heavy,   
   chemically enduring types of rock with good compressive strength, and the   
   robots would cut new stone blocks and replace damaged ones as needed.    
   Cyclopean Lovecraftian stone    
   buildings, maintained by alien robots...   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)