Edward F. Moore proposed "Artificial Living Plants", which would be floating factories which could create copies of themselves. They could be programmed to perform some function (extracting fresh water, harvesting minerals from seawater) for an investment that would be relatively small compared to the huge returns from the exponentially growing numbers of factories. Freeman Dyson at Harvard University in 2004 Freeman John Dyson (born December 15, 1923) is an English-born American physicist and mathematician. He worked as an analyst for the British Bomber Command during World War II; after the war, he moved to Princeton. In the years following the war, Dyson... Freeman Dyson also studied the idea, envisioning self-replicating machines sent to explore and exploit other planets and moons, and a NASA group called the Self-Replicating Systems Concept Team performed a 1980 study on the feasability of a self-building lunar factory. More information on Edward F. Moore can be located in the Artificial life, also known as alife or a-life, is the study of life through the use of human-made analogs of living systems. Computer scientist Christopher Langton coined the term in the late 1980s when he held the first International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems... artificial life article. You may also want to view Homer Jacobsen's article, dealing with artificial life.