Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!wind.bellcore.com!perry
From: perry@WIND.BELLCORE.COM (Perry E Metzger)
Newsgroups: sci.nanotech
Subject: Money and Goo
Message-ID: <8906150843.AA06258@athos.rutgers.edu>
Date: 13 Jun 89 19:11:26 GMT
Sender: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu
Organization: Bellcore, Morristown, NJ
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Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu

This is a two part message.

1. Money vs. Nanotech

Someone pointed out that in a nanotech society, money becomes easy to
counterfeit. My question is, why should we care? The existance of
nanotechnology will so thoroughly disrupt our society that it isn't
even clear that money will be NEEDED any more. I mean, in a world
where anyone can simply grow anything that they could possibly need,
why would they need to buy anything?

I mean, in our current world, you can counterfeit money and then go
out and buy a stereo. But in a nanotech endowed world, you could
simply copy your friend's stereo and save time. I think that people
will stop competing for resources for a long time. Need more room?
Move to another planet. Need more raw materials? Ship them from
whereever you need them from, and who cares about the cost when the
robot you send to retrieve them can make its own fuel and as many
copies of itself as needed to complete the job. Need an object? Just
grow it. This makes the whole concept of a monetary economy silly.

2. Gray Goo vs Blue Goo

Lets face it: thanks to nanotech, we will be able to destroy anything
on the scale of a single planet without much trouble. Why bother with
gray goo per se, when you could send out nanomachines to construct a
100 teraton nuclear bomb in a remote part of the ocean bed and blast
the whole planet to smithereens? Forget having "Blue Goo" defend
against that; a nuclear detonation is too fast to stop.

On the other hand, there is the very real possibility that, freed of
most resource considerations, we will no longer live on just the one
planet, and will no longer have the space and other considerations
that drive so many people to psychosis. I guess the real question is,
will we survive the transition period?

Perry

[A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that it would take
 2.76 billion 100 teraton bombs to blast the planet to smithereens...
 --JoSH]