Super-habitats

--- In spacesettlers, "Robert" wrote:

> the problem with self repliacting robots is that is all they build.

I've never heard von neumans, santa clause machines, nanoassemblers,
etc. described this way. I've always heard the self-replicators
described as "general assemblers" which can build just about anything,
given enough materials, energy, and information. It so happens that
"just about anything anything" would include copies of themselves. So
no, self replicating robots would build copies of themselves until
there were enough of them to build the habitat, then they would build
the habitat.