Nothing says self-replicating like a parasitic organism, and as a special manifestation, see the winner of eVolo Architecture’s annual design competition. The project describes the use of the empty space between skyscrapers as a city growing between buildings. Unfortunately, the website for the competition is all-flash and in general pretty terrible for linking (or reading anything) so here is one description: http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/urban-encrustations.html
Flash back to Arnold movies with this next post: yes, I’m talking about terra-forming mars. In what appears to be a perfectly situated paper for this class, self-replicating systems are used to produce, in addition to themselves, useable oxygen to pump into the atmosphere. Or electrolysis, or ancient Martian technology and “QUAAAAIIIIIIIDDDDDD”. Oh, also they talk about Venus (who knew?): http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/TerraformSRS1983.htm
Next up is a particularly cheery description of what must be done to the earth, given the humans have some inherently negative effect on the place – get out of town. This also appears to mesh with many ideas form the class, and may shed some light on some: http://hiddenway.tripod.com/earthpark/
Holy Cats why hasn’t this site been spotted yet??? Here we have a copyright 2004 online behemoth of a book on kinetic self-replicating machines. Breaking down many issues related to SRS and containing at least one thousand references, this has it all: http://www.molecularassembler.com/KSRM.htm
And my absolute favorite is the wikipedia description of self-replicating spacecraft, or von Neummann probes. Very fascinating, especially this tidbit: It has been theorized that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e. no exotic faster-than-light propulsion such as "warp drive", and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years. Although I think to be truly effective, such probes would have to be equipped with some form of superluminal communication device, and to become a galaxy (or universe) sized neural network, the smartest being to ever exist ever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_probe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superluminal_communication