What would Jupiter's Great Red Spot look like if it was colonized by sapient nanomachines?

You really shouldn’t be asking these questions that are so easy to Google. I got over a million hits on “What would Jupiter’s Great Red Spot look like if it was colonized by sapient nanomachines?”

@dpworkin Let me google that for you… Ohhhh. wait.

@Qingu There are much better sources of energy in the solar system. Scattered dyson spheres, heat pumps in asteroids, etc. All much better, why would you head to a rather chaotic spinning vortex when you can just farm all the energy you need in a much more stable place?

I think @Qingu was hoping for something along the lines of the “replicators” from the Stargate series. I like to think that’s what their civilization would end up evolving into.

@grumpyfish, man, what? Dyson spheres? Way more advanced engineering than what we’re talking about here.

Also, perhaps said nano-AI civilization has a soft spot for the GRS. To be specific, from certain standpoints, things like storms and flames are “alive” in much the same sense as cellular-based life. They grow, metabolize, respond to their environments, etc. Certainly the GRS is the oldest-lived storm in the solar system. So perhaps this race of sapient nanobots, eschewing the bio-centric view of life, feels a certain respect for the GRS—or perhaps even a desire to help preserve it from its inevitable disintegration.

Thus, deriving energy from the GRS needn’t be the only criterion for the nano-civilization’s decision to colonize there. Though I am assuming they would need to figure out how to extract energy to survive, and the arrangement might take on the appearance of symbiosis, like algae and corals.

What I’m mostly wondering about is what the structures of such an arrangement would look like.

@dpworkin Really? I got 2 hits and both were for this page.

@Qingu Wouldn’t deriving energy from the GRS increase the speed at which it disintegrates? When a hurricane hits land, it dissipates.

Dyson spheres are only complicated if you’re trying to build a rigid sphere, a dyson swarm is achievable with current technologies.

Ah, that is a good point.

Perhaps the energy extraction would come from the winds and cyclones that form around the GRS and doubly serve the purpose of preservation, acting as a “buffer” from interference?

And touche on Dyson swarms (had to Wikipedia it). I was only familiar with the shell version.

Jeez, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. You’ll future shock the natives. ;)

It might look like the hexagonal shape on Saturn.

@Qingu That’s a cool idea—you could steal energy by working like lubricant and just collecting friction heat from the outside. Neat =)

Do you think Jupiter walks around to other planets saying “Does this look infected to you?”