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Post by thorneel on May 8, 2017 23:49:36 GMT
The advantage of weaponised nanotech is that it can explain why everyone is staying the hell away from Earth. While it may have spread slowly enough for at least some people (and possibly vital industry) to escape, it may have been made smart and resistant enough that getting rid of it is a nightmare by itself.
Found a good counter-measure? They'll adapt to it in a few generations, then pass the world to the entire swarm, flu-like. Used a wide-scale brute-force counter-measure to burn them in an area? A few well-buried ones survived, waiting like spores. At random times, they will wake up. Want to get rid of the spores? You cannot be certain that you didn't miss some of it. And very few are needed to start the whole nightmare again. Want to build an outpost with simply hard-as-nail, short-range cleaning weapons and study them closer? They can organise for macro-scale emergent comportment i.e. they'll throw friggin' antitank rounds at you to pierce it. Want to just destroy them once and for all? Turning the entire surface into a lava field would do the trick. But then what would be the point? There would be no Earth left, only an useless lavaball. Also high-velocity impacts may throw some spores around. You don't want any of that to hit a habitat or another world do you? (You don't. You really, really don't.) And there would be the cost. Slagging an Earth-sized planet isn't cheap, you know!
Good thing they aren't set for interplanetary spread, being physical or informational - though just in case, we have a few guns in varied orbits to shoot at anything looking like a space program (or anything too complex, really), and a planet-wide signal scrambler to make sure they can't talk themselves to someone's software.
As a bonus, you can weave many conspiracy theories on its origins and/or goals. Was it a weapon? A terrorist plot? Industrial nanobots gone wrong because of malware? Because of faulty programming/procedure? Because of a paperclip maximiser case? A spontaneously emerging machine intelligence? An artificially created machine intelligence trying to set itself free? A transhumanist plot gone wrong? A transhumanist plot gone right? Aliens? Illuminati? KGB? Lizardmen? There never was nanobots to start with!?
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Post by The Astronomer on May 9, 2017 0:15:04 GMT
The advantage of weaponised nanotech is that it can explain why everyone is staying the hell away from Earth. While it may have spread slowly enough for at least some people (and possibly vital industry) to escape, it may have been made smart and resistant enough that getting rid of it is a nightmare by itself. Found a good counter-measure? They'll adapt to it in a few generations, then pass the world to the entire swarm, flu-like. Used a wide-scale brute-force counter-measure to burn them in an area? A few well-buried ones survived, waiting like spores. At random times, they will wake up. Want to get rid of the spores? You cannot be certain that you didn't miss some of it. And very few are needed to start the whole nightmare again. Want to build an outpost with simply hard-as-nail, short-range cleaning weapons and study them closer? They can organise for macro-scale emergent comportment i.e. they'll throw friggin' antitank rounds at you to pierce it. Want to just destroy them once and for all? Turning the entire surface into a lava field would do the trick. But then what would be the point? There would be no Earth left, only an useless lavaball. Also high-velocity impacts may throw some spores around. You don't want any of that to hit a habitat or another world do you? (You don't. You really, really don't.) And there would be the cost. Slagging an Earth-sized planet isn't cheap, you know! Good thing they aren't set for interplanetary spread, being physical or informational - though just in case, we have a few guns in varied orbits to shoot at anything looking like a space program (or anything too complex, really), and a planet-wide signal scrambler to make sure they can't talk themselves to someone's software. As a bonus, you can weave many conspiracy theories on its origins and/or goals. Was it a weapon? A terrorist plot? Industrial nanobots gone wrong because of malware? Because of faulty programming/procedure? Because of a paperclip maximiser case? A spontaneously emerging machine intelligence? An artificially created machine intelligence trying to set itself free? A transhumanist plot gone wrong? A transhumanist plot gone right? Aliens? Illuminati? KGB? Lizardmen? There never was nanobots to start with!? Counter: Blue Goo Enderminion Wrong button sorry ._.
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Post by Enderminion on May 9, 2017 0:50:34 GMT
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Post by nerd1000 on May 9, 2017 2:38:49 GMT
The advantage of weaponised nanotech is that it can explain why everyone is staying the hell away from Earth. While it may have spread slowly enough for at least some people (and possibly vital industry) to escape, it may have been made smart and resistant enough that getting rid of it is a nightmare by itself. Found a good counter-measure? They'll adapt to it in a few generations, then pass the world to the entire swarm, flu-like. Used a wide-scale brute-force counter-measure to burn them in an area? A few well-buried ones survived, waiting like spores. At random times, they will wake up. Want to get rid of the spores? You cannot be certain that you didn't miss some of it. And very few are needed to start the whole nightmare again. Want to build an outpost with simply hard-as-nail, short-range cleaning weapons and study them closer? They can organise for macro-scale emergent comportment i.e. they'll throw friggin' antitank rounds at you to pierce it. Want to just destroy them once and for all? Turning the entire surface into a lava field would do the trick. But then what would be the point? There would be no Earth left, only an useless lavaball. Also high-velocity impacts may throw some spores around. You don't want any of that to hit a habitat or another world do you? (You don't. You really, really don't.) And there would be the cost. Slagging an Earth-sized planet isn't cheap, you know! Good thing they aren't set for interplanetary spread, being physical or informational - though just in case, we have a few guns in varied orbits to shoot at anything looking like a space program (or anything too complex, really), and a planet-wide signal scrambler to make sure they can't talk themselves to someone's software. As a bonus, you can weave many conspiracy theories on its origins and/or goals. Was it a weapon? A terrorist plot? Industrial nanobots gone wrong because of malware? Because of faulty programming/procedure? Because of a paperclip maximiser case? A spontaneously emerging machine intelligence? An artificially created machine intelligence trying to set itself free? A transhumanist plot gone wrong? A transhumanist plot gone right? Aliens? Illuminati? KGB? Lizardmen? There never was nanobots to start with!? Nanobots are limited by the same physics as normal life (in fact you could argue that life itself is grey goo), so they cannot be too much faster than existing 'stripped down' bacteria. That's still really fast: E. coli doubles its numbers in 20 minutes, so we can probably assume that it's possible to make grey goo that does it in 1-2 minutes. That process, however, is limited by resource and energy supply. E.coli only manages its 20 minute doubling time in rich media with plenty of energy, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous available for replication. Once the bacteria eat up all the readily available sugars and amino acids they transition to 'stationary phase' where they hardly replicate at all, instead focusing on preserving their genetic information and surviving until more fuel and construction material becomes available. So when we imagine a nanobot plague, we must ask 2 questions: 1. What are the nanobots made from? 2. What do the nanobots use as an energy supply? Then we ask ourselves: Given 1 and 2, is it still possible for them to eat the world? I think that in almost every case you'll find the answer to be no. Remember that the smarter and more complex you make a nanobot, the more construction materials and energy will be needed to make one. Furthermore, complexity is needed for survival in a natural environment. Fast E.coli strains do fine in the lab (or your lower intestine), but on their own in the outside world they don't survive because they don't have the machinery needed to use difficult substrates, or to survive environmental conditions that are common outside those nice environments. Pretty much everything comes at a cost. If your nanobots want to be able to infect people they need countermeasures against immune detection and response: This costs energy and construction material, slowing them down. If they want to network and distribute patches to allow all nanobots to survive a new environment or countermeasure, the transmission system costs energy and mass and thus slows them down. Anything you can imagine us doing to stop them: well the nanites will need a countermeasure, and that will cost them mass and energy and slow them down. Furthermore, life isn't static. If the nanobots are made of stuff that natural life can use (i.e. sugars, amino acids, lipids, metals) or compete with natural life there's a good chance that a system will evolve that allows bacteria to attack and destroy them: We've been using antibiotics for only 80 years now, but there are already bacteria that are immune to all of the antibiotics we have. The more complex and capable you make the nanobots the more time life will have to evolve countermeasures: It's the war of the grey goos, natural and evolved vs. artificial and engineered. If the nanobots divide themselves up to handle different enviroments without excess complexity they'll soon start competing with each other, and then we get an ecosystem that will eventually move towards stable equilibrium. Long story short: self replicating machines are life. The laws that govern natural life apply to them. This makes a world-consuming nanoplague unlikely. An extremely destructive nano-plague that kills billions, however, is possible.
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Post by The Astronomer on May 9, 2017 2:56:38 GMT
The advantage of weaponised nanotech is that it can explain why everyone is staying the hell away from Earth. While it may have spread slowly enough for at least some people (and possibly vital industry) to escape, it may have been made smart and resistant enough that getting rid of it is a nightmare by itself. Found a good counter-measure? They'll adapt to it in a few generations, then pass the world to the entire swarm, flu-like. Used a wide-scale brute-force counter-measure to burn them in an area? A few well-buried ones survived, waiting like spores. At random times, they will wake up. Want to get rid of the spores? You cannot be certain that you didn't miss some of it. And very few are needed to start the whole nightmare again. Want to build an outpost with simply hard-as-nail, short-range cleaning weapons and study them closer? They can organise for macro-scale emergent comportment i.e. they'll throw friggin' antitank rounds at you to pierce it. Want to just destroy them once and for all? Turning the entire surface into a lava field would do the trick. But then what would be the point? There would be no Earth left, only an useless lavaball. Also high-velocity impacts may throw some spores around. You don't want any of that to hit a habitat or another world do you? (You don't. You really, really don't.) And there would be the cost. Slagging an Earth-sized planet isn't cheap, you know! Good thing they aren't set for interplanetary spread, being physical or informational - though just in case, we have a few guns in varied orbits to shoot at anything looking like a space program (or anything too complex, really), and a planet-wide signal scrambler to make sure they can't talk themselves to someone's software. As a bonus, you can weave many conspiracy theories on its origins and/or goals. Was it a weapon? A terrorist plot? Industrial nanobots gone wrong because of malware? Because of faulty programming/procedure? Because of a paperclip maximiser case? A spontaneously emerging machine intelligence? An artificially created machine intelligence trying to set itself free? A transhumanist plot gone wrong? A transhumanist plot gone right? Aliens? Illuminati? KGB? Lizardmen? There never was nanobots to start with!? Nanobots are limited by the same physics as normal life (in fact you could argue that life itself is grey goo), so they cannot be too much faster than existing 'stripped down' bacteria. That's still really fast: E. coli doubles its numbers in 20 minutes, so we can probably assume that it's possible to make grey goo that does it in 1-2 minutes. That process, however, is limited by resource and energy supply. E.coli only manages its 20 minute doubling time in rich media with plenty of energy, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous available for replication. Once the bacteria eat up all the readily available sugars and amino acids they transition to 'stationary phase' where they hardly replicate at all, instead focusing on preserving their genetic information and surviving until more fuel and construction material becomes available. So when we imagine a nanobot plague, we must ask 2 questions: 1. What are the nanobots made from? 2. What do the nanobots use as an energy supply? Then we ask ourselves: Given 1 and 2, is it still possible for them to eat the world? I think that in almost every case you'll find the answer to be no. Remember that the smarter and more complex you make a nanobot, the more construction materials and energy will be needed to make one. Furthermore, complexity is needed for survival in a natural environment. Fast E.coli strains do fine in the lab (or your lower intestine), but on their own in the outside world they don't survive because they don't have the machinery needed to use difficult substrates, or to survive environmental conditions that are common outside those nice environments. Pretty much everything comes at a cost. If your nanobots want to be able to infect people they need countermeasures against immune detection and response: This costs energy and construction material, slowing them down. If they want to network and distribute patches to allow all nanobots to survive a new environment or countermeasure, the transmission system costs energy and mass and thus slows them down. Anything you can imagine us doing to stop them: well the nanites will need a countermeasure, and that will cost them mass and energy and slow them down. Furthermore, life isn't static. If the nanobots are made of stuff that natural life can use (i.e. sugars, amino acids, lipids, metals) or compete with natural life there's a good chance that a system will evolve that allows bacteria to attack and destroy them: We've been using antibiotics for only 80 years now, but there are already bacteria that are immune to all of the antibiotics we have. The more complex and capable you make the nanobots the more time life will have to evolve countermeasures: It's the war of the grey goos, natural and evolved vs. artificial and engineered. If the nanobots divide themselves up to handle different enviroments without excess complexity they'll soon start competing with each other, and then we get an ecosystem that will eventually move towards stable equilibrium. Long story short: self replicating machines are life. The laws that govern natural life apply to them. This makes a world-consuming nanoplague unlikely. An extremely destructive nano-plague that kills billions, however, is possible. What are you expecting? I'm expecting a RC gray goo. It's so dumb it can't work on its own. Remotely disable it, and you're fine.
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Post by nerd1000 on May 9, 2017 3:18:01 GMT
If it's too dumb to work by itself, why even bother with self-replication? You could build your nanobots more efficiently in a centralized factory, then ship them to where they're needed.
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Post by thorneel on May 9, 2017 16:45:31 GMT
For a smart nanoplague, I wouldn't go for the classical Grey Goo blob. As other have pointed out, they are limited in mobility, speed of reproduction, thermodynamics and are relatively fragile. The best you could do would be a sort of deadly machine plague. Which could actually be already terrifying, as it could pick from the arsenal of natural plagues: asymptomatic carriers, behavioural control, multiple forms of contagion, dormant spores, hidden viral reservoirs in cells, a wide range of symptoms... But if you really want a nightmare worthy of a Horseman of Apocalypse, you can go further.
Nanomachines can have specialised roles and coordinate, like the cells of an organism or the individuals of an insect colony. They may not be, or all be nanomachines. Small visible individuals (like the Replicators in Stargate) can also be used and still benefit from redundancy and swarm work (while still keeping some stupidly hard to destroy). Like cells or colony individuals, they don't necessarily need a swarm-level intelligence to guide them, sets of simple or complex individual instructions can have very interesting emergent effects. Ants can achieve surprisingly sophisticated behaviours from very simple sets of actions from the individuals. A highly mutable, adaptable swarm with complex behaviours purposefully designed could probably achieve terrifying effects. Now you can also add swarm-level intelligences capable of reacting to events, adapting and communicating between themselves on top of all that.
Basically, you don't simply devise a simple molecule-sized Grey Goo tide, you design (intelligently) a complex, highly adaptable and invasive machine ecosystem with one or more layers of intelligences on top of it.
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Post by The Astronomer on May 9, 2017 16:53:22 GMT
If it's too dumb to work by itself, why even bother with self-replication? You could build your nanobots more efficiently in a centralized factory, then ship them to where they're needed. So that you can have as much of them as you wish, but still controllable. I think individual disassembly nanobots (black goo) will not be able to replicate by themselves, but they will send the material to the nanofactory or some kind of that.
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Post by bigbombr on May 9, 2017 16:55:23 GMT
For a smart nanoplague, I wouldn't go for the classical Grey Goo blob. As other have pointed out, they are limited in mobility, speed of reproduction, thermodynamics and are relatively fragile. The best you could do would be a sort of deadly machine plague. Which could actually be already terrifying, as it could pick from the arsenal of natural plagues: asymptomatic carriers, behavioural control, multiple forms of contagion, dormant spores, hidden viral reservoirs in cells, a wide range of symptoms... But if you really want a nightmare worthy of a Horseman of Apocalypse, you can go further. Nanomachines can have specialised roles and coordinate, like the cells of an organism or the individuals of an insect colony. They may not be, or all be nanomachines. Small visible individuals (like the Replicators in Stargate) can also be used and still benefit from redundancy and swarm work (while still keeping some stupidly hard to destroy). Like cells or colony individuals, they don't necessarily need a swarm-level intelligence to guide them, sets of simple or complex individual instructions can have very interesting emergent effects. Ants can achieve surprisingly sophisticated behaviours from very simple sets of actions from the individuals. A highly mutable, adaptable swarm with complex behaviours purposefully designed could probably achieve terrifying effects. Now you can also add swarm-level intelligences capable of reacting to events, adapting and communicating between themselves on top of all that. Basically, you don't simply devise a simple molecule-sized Grey Goo tide, you design (intelligently) a complex, highly adaptable and invasive machine ecosystem with one or more layers of intelligences on top of it. As nerd1000 pointed out, wouldn't they eventually evolve to compete with each other? Some strains/specializations might evolve to their own benefit but the detriment of the swarm. Unless reproduction is 'centralized' in specific strains. But this means their is a specific reproductive system that must be protected from threats and mutation-inducing stress alike. If you have several of these reproductive units, they might come to compete against each other. And while specialization and swarm behaviour would make them considerably more efficient, thermodynamics still impose limits to their reproductive speed. Competition with natural life would slow them down massively, and human countermeasures (predatory nanobots, 'antibiotics', 'vaccination', sterilisation, ... up to thermobaric warheads and nukes) would still effectively counter them.
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Post by RiftandRend on May 9, 2017 20:52:24 GMT
Depending on the intelligence behind their creation, I don't see how organic life could ever compete with nanomachine swarms. If a particular organism is competing with the swarm then new nanomachines can be intelligently designed to counter it. I highly doubt that organic evolution can compete with this process.
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Post by nerd1000 on May 9, 2017 23:46:53 GMT
Depending on the intelligence behind their creation, I don't see how organic life could ever compete with nanomachine swarms. If a particular organism is competing with the swarm then new nanomachines can be intelligently designed to counter it. I highly doubt that organic evolution can compete with this process. The problem isn't any specific organism. The fundamental problem is that if you build a self-replicating nanomachine you've created a life form. It will therefore be subject to the same rules as organic life, and no amount of intelligent design will fix that. You'll inevitably run into the complexity vs. replication speed problem, the speciation/competition problem, and all the other things that hold natural life back from doing the same 'grey goo' conversion of every available substrate into themselves that we imagine the nanobot swarm doing. An intelligent designer may be incredibly smart. But evolution has had 4 billion years to refine organic life into the ideal grey-goo micromachine that can outcompete all others. It's created life so different from the norm that it's hard to imagine: There are Archea that thrive in boiling water, microbes that gain energy by oxidizing hydrogen gas from volcanic vents, bacteria that can rebuild their entire genome after it's been shredded by enough radiation to destroy hardened electronics. If a single all-consuming organism is feasible, why does earth not have a single, dominant bacterium that's eaten everything else and become the sole species? We've sure as hell had long enough, and selection pressure massively favours the appearance of an organism like that. The answer is that there's no single maxima for fitness. Every trait comes at a cost. Every optimisation for one environment is a disadvantage, possibly a fatal one, in another different environment. Every countermeasure has a counter-countermeasure and evolution is smarter than you: Those counter-countermeasures already exist, waiting in the population at low levels, waiting for a selection pressure... In other words, an intelligent designer can optimise his/her/its grey goo to resist competition from a particular organism, but doing so will almost certainly compromise on some other desirable trait, such as replication speed or even its ability to compete with another, different organism. Evolution won't stop either: you might deploy your countermeasure against Staphylococcus nanobotophaga, only to find that the bacterium already had a plasmid or mutation that acts as a counter-countermeasure present at low levels in the population, and you just made a very strong selection pressure that favours the bacteria carrying that plasmid- they promptly replicate at a slightly slower speed than the originals, eating up your nanomachines in the process.
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Post by thorneel on May 10, 2017 0:23:25 GMT
The thing is, the intelligent designer can study the result of said billions of years of evolution, and try to improve on it. They can also use vastly accelerated evolution cycles in whatever desired conditions to improve on them (as types of machine learning and design do already), be it through simulation or with fast manufacture. It can also use processes and designs that wouldn't have happened naturally through evolution due to the too great leap in complexity. For example, while there are a tiny handful of organisms actually using metal, none ever used anything resembling ball bearings as far as we know. Same for high-performance materials, most engines, radio communication...
So an intelligent designer standing both on the shoulders of giants, of the many many normal-sized people we tend to unfairly forget and of the aforementioned billions of years of evolution can create a vastly more competitive ecological system made to be hostile to humans and human machinery. As for existing life, it can use it, infect it, cohabit with it or exterminate it depending on cases. Some life may adapt well to it even - unless the designer also wanted it to destroy all life, then most (though probably not all) will be destroyed. It doesn't need to turn the entire surface into grey blob anymore than life as we know and love did to claim Earth.
About whether stains will fight each-other, this will have to be planned for, and would probably be set to accelerate mutation and adaptation.
It may be ultimately unstable and either waste away or become more benign down the road, but if down the road is in a smattering of millennia, it may be good enough anyway.
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Post by nerd1000 on May 10, 2017 7:05:59 GMT
The thing is, the intelligent designer can study the result of said billions of years of evolution, and try to improve on it. They can also use vastly accelerated evolution cycles in whatever desired conditions to improve on them (as types of machine learning and design do already), be it through simulation or with fast manufacture. It can also use processes and designs that wouldn't have happened naturally through evolution due to the too great leap in complexity. For example, while there are a tiny handful of organisms actually using metal, none ever used anything resembling ball bearings as far as we know. Same for high-performance materials, most engines, radio communication... So an intelligent designer standing both on the shoulders of giants, of the many many normal-sized people we tend to unfairly forget and of the aforementioned billions of years of evolution can create a vastly more competitive ecological system made to be hostile to humans and human machinery. As for existing life, it can use it, infect it, cohabit with it or exterminate it depending on cases. Some life may adapt well to it even - unless the designer also wanted it to destroy all life, then most (though probably not all) will be destroyed. It doesn't need to turn the entire surface into grey blob anymore than life as we know and love did to claim Earth. About whether stains will fight each-other, this will have to be planned for, and would probably be set to accelerate mutation and adaptation. It may be ultimately unstable and either waste away or become more benign down the road, but if down the road is in a smattering of millennia, it may be good enough anyway. True up to a point. Remember however that by using an ecosystem based approach you're adding complexity (indeed probably more complexity than any individual organism conceivable). The complexity vs replication time dilemma will apply to an ecosystem based approach too: We no longer need to build a swiss-army knife nanobot (an aside: nanobot or nanomachine is probably a misnomer if it's complex enough to self-replicate. I'd expect sizes closer to a bacterium, on the order of one micrometer) but instead we now have to build many different kinds of simple ones at the same time as they cannot function without each other. Think of how long it takes for a rainforest to grow, compared to an algal bloom or other short-term phenomenon involving only a few species of simple organisms. It's still more efficient than trying to do everything with one life form, but the problems that apply to the simple case don't just go away. Another advantage of an ecosystem is that they're usually much harder to destroy than a single kind of organism, which is great for long-term survival of the system as a whole (not so much for species within it, as Homo erectus can attest). It doesn't really add up to taking over the world though, especially since each environment will favour a different ecosystem (an ecology of nanites that only work well above 0 degrees C won't be taking over Siberia). In addition, an ecosystem may be vulnerable to attacks that a simple swarm is not: attacks that disable certain 'keystone' species may compromise the entire system, even if the rest of species in it are largely unaffected by that kind of assault. We also need to go back to those first couple of questions I asked: What is the nanomachine made of, and what does it use for energy? Can it get those two things in sufficient supply to do what you're describing on a timescale that makes it unstoppable? Natural Life has a monopoly on the best raw materials and energy sources (carbon for materials, sunlight and carbon for energy), and while you can use organisms as food you shouldn't expect them to roll over and take it. Taking the 'it eats all life' route also presents us with a handy (if monstrous) way of stopping the plague from spreading: Burn everything bigger than a microbe in a large circle around its current location. No energy = no spread. One final point: The level of complex interaction you're describing basically rules out the idea of the nanobot plague being an accident. We must then ask: Who is smart enough and has the resources to make such a complex nanoweapon, yet crazy enough to want to destroy Earth's ecosystem and stupid enough not to use a more expedient method like programming a horde of simpler nanobots to refine U-235 from the ocean and using it to nuke the entire planet? And if design on this level of complexity is possible, what's to stop someone else who is equally smart designing the perfect countermeasure for the nanoplague, one it simply cannot adapt to overcome? None of this rules out the nanite apocalypse, of course. Instead it makes setting up a believable one much harder, and much more interesting. The aftermath will also be very interesting: Rather than a featureless ball of grey goo we'll have a living, breathing ecology, fighting and competing with both itself and natural organisms for resources. At that point it stops looking like Cthulhu and starts looking like something that, rather than being evil, is simply different: too different for us to live with, but not devoid of its own value. Could make for an interesting setting.
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Post by matterbeam on May 12, 2017 15:56:21 GMT
Hi! I'm fascinated by how this setting is turning out! How can I help? Ask me anything.
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Post by grigsbybrianne on Oct 25, 2023 10:58:21 GMT
I'm glad you decided to choose this particular topic. I like sci-fi very much, but I was hesitant to write my paper about it. And now it's a bit out of my hands, as I need help from a residency personal statement editor to competently write my personal statement. This turned out to be a challenging task for me too.
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