Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: cphoenix@csli.stanford.edu (Chris Phoenix) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Nanotech thoughts Message-ID: Date: 20 Nov 89 16:17:19 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U. Lines: 75 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu This reminded me of an earlier thread. Well, actually it wasn't a thread, because no one responded to the comment, but IMHO it should have been. So, I'll bring it up again... Several months ago, we were talking about artificial grass. I asked why not just use real grass, slightly modified for our needs. One of the responses was very disturbing. Sorry if this is a misquote or out of context, but as I recall JoSH said that he expected that low-level infestations of gray goo would destroy a lot of our biological inventory. This is disturbing, for several reasons: 1) I thought we had been assuming that active shields would be able to successfully combat gragu. Now I find out that you don't expect to be able to protect grass. How can we protect ourselves, then? I hope the comment just wasn't well-thougt-out (or that I'm remembering it wrong), but it looks like either we have some innate quality that makes it easier to protect ourselves than to protect other life forms, or that our resources will be so limited that we can't afford to waste them protecting other life forms, or we'll lose a lot of our human biological inventory too. The first is improbable, the second implies that the situation is a lot more touchy than we (at least I) thought, the third is bad for obvious reasons. 2) Even assuming for some reason we can protect ourselves but not some other organisms, it seems like an infestation big enough to wipe out a major species would automatically be disastrous. I assume that, pound for pound (or nanite for nanite), gragu will be stronger than blueites. Gragu doesn't have to discriminate in what it attacks, and it can take raw materials from anything it lands on. And anything you can give to blueites (global communication, weapons, ...) you can also give to gragu. Can anyone calculate some reasonable values for lethality of blue and grey goo, and figure out what ratio of blue to grey goo will tip the scales and let the grey win? Then figure out how big a grey infestation might get before we discover it, and how much blue goo we're really willing to spread around to combat possible infestations. I suspect the results will be disturbing... Also, we might want to think about a "blob" scenario. If a grey nanite is caught and surrounded, I don't doubt it can be destroyed. But if we get a blob of them, the surface/volume ratio changes drastically. The layer on which they can be attacked is basically one-on-one, so they might be able to hold off the blueites with a "shell"--while on the macroscopic scale they move around, devouring new resources and energy, and growing the blob bigger. I suppose there's ways around this, such as building the blueites so that they can clump together to form a laser cannon (or something), but I haven't heard of any work done in this direction so far and it might be worth looking into. Chris Phoenix | A harp is a nude piano. cphoenix@csli.Stanford.EDU | "More input! More input!" First we got the Bomb, and that was good, cause we love peace and motherhood. Disclaimer: I want a kinder, gentler net with a thousand pints of lite. [I'm actually surprised my comments didn't arouse more discussion the first time around. Obviously this is an important subject that needs to be explored. Let me try to clarify my position a bit: (a) A completely general Grey Goo is hard to make. It won't happen by accident. It will happen late in the game if it does; it may never happen. (b) Limited "special purpose" goo is much easier. Particular habitats, species, materials may be at risk early on. (c) We live in a "grey goo" environment *right now*. Biological matter left unprotected is soon consumed by bacteria, ie, it rots. (d) Since the attackers of biomaterials are special-purpose, the defenses can be also; i.e., wood can be kept from rotting by painting, keeping dry, treating with copper chlorides, etc. (e) Active immune systems have several advantages over attacking microbes *on their own turf*, i.e., inside the organism. However, even there they largely act as backup to passive shields, i.e. skin. (f) Releases will occur, of increasing generality and dangerousness. Fighting them will be interesting but not impossible; we fight disease, forest fires, superstition, and other replicators. (g) Forest fires are harder to fight in *unpopulated areas*; goo will be harder to fight the less installed nanotechnology we have. May you live in interesting times... --JoSH]