Well, one should not go the other way, the world will be fine, we are f*****.
I do think humans will learn to live in the changed environment, and I’m cautiously optimistic in seeing humanity survive the bottleneck, but when I see the huge amount of xenophobia in the world I then realize that a lot of the destruction during the change will be caused by our lack of planning and the ideology of many that will refuse to acknowledge that the masses of people moving around will be caused by us not changing sooner.
BTW the reason to still control our emissions even if some changes will still come in the future (as we did not control the issue sooner) is because we have to make that bottleneck to be less restrictive for us in the future, to make it less of a problem for our living descendants and the next generations.
To answer Habeed -
I think that nanotech, as envisioned by people like Drexler, is almost laughably absurd. It’s just like Victorian thinking. They thought that the future would be HUGE gears and monster machines, while the (current) future is tiny electronic devices. Thinking that our future will be little teeny machines with eensy-weensy gears is just ridiculous.Why make a machine when you have a bacterium, which already does 90% of what you need - just engineer it to do what you want!
BrainGlutton : Smalley’s counterargument is objectively wrong and has been rebutted in many places. In short, he was a conventional chemist and most of what he says wasn’t even true at the time. He also had a fundamental misunderstanding of even how the proposed machinery would even work.
Beowolff : no. The reason you’re wrong, something Drexler explains in great and exacting detail, and his critic Smalley also explains, is the problem is that bacterium can’t (1) Precisely position in an exact location a subcomponent of a larger machine (2) work with fundamentally stiff and predictable materials like diamond (3) are limited to a small set of amino acids (4) ribosomes are slow, floppy, and inefficient. An artificial, machine phase system would be thousands of times faster because it would have stiffness except along the axes of required movement. It wouldn’t flop around, and the chemical reactions would happen the first time every time instead of having to wait for the 2 reacting molecules to bump randomly into the correct orientation.
The gears are for the mechanical portion of the machine. Every mechanical assembly system ever built, anywhere in the world, uses gears. Drexler used them as a model for the control circuits because the math he had access to could handle it and there is a fear that quantum tunneling will make electron based control circuits unfeasible at the nanoscale. Instead, you use whole atoms as the logic elements, resulting in a mechanical computer. This probably won’t be necessary but it might actually be the solution used.
I’ll put real money on me being right!
You sound like a smart guy, but I’ve been an engineer for 30+ years, and I have a degree in Physics, and I know what horse to back in this race.
I think if science finds a way to kill us it’s going to be through some unintended or unanticipated result of some new technology much in the same way that fast-paced climate change occurred, although pollution has obviously been known of for a long time I think even just a few decades ago most people didn’t understand just the scale of the true impact of pollution or maybe more importantly how fast we can screw up the environment even when not attempting to do so.
Ridiculous Example:
Like if the end of times comes from some lab-created bug that makes everyone immune to the common cold we find out a while later it makes us sterile or increases cancer or aging, after a problem has been creeping up on us for years, science has to try and play catch up and come up with a solution after opening the Pandora’s Box and then even solutions can have further unanticipated side effects. I don’t know it might be worth the trade off if I never get a cold again.
The world?! The world is but a disposable Petri dish for our experiments! Science is science! Science can never go too far! BWAAHH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAAAA!!!
What’s you’re reasoning? Explain to me, using your knowledge of physics, why you cannot build a set of small pieces of equipment that handle incoming feedstock. The feedstock is put into nanoscale molds and forced to interact with other feedstock, bonding it. A long series of these bonding steps occurs. Eventually, bigger, heavier feedstock results. This is fed into further assembly steps, leading to another long series of combinations.
This is exactly what we do right now in chemical plants, except the difference is, there are these nanoscale molds and conveyer systems that force to interactions you want. Kind of…like a catalyst. In fact, exactly like a set of custom catalysts for each and every bonding step.
Eventually, there after hundreds or thousands of steps, you have the product molecules you wanted. These parts are now single subunits for molecular machines. There are some that are motors, some that are gears, some that are sensors, etc. Each product molecule is composed of thousands or millions of individual atoms, and is big enough to manipulate and stable. We can do all that I’m describing with conventional chemistry…except…in conventional organic synthesis, there are side reactions. No matter what you do, they are a significant portion of the output. So to get to something really complex like a molecular gear, you have to do thousands and thousands of steps, reducing your net yield of gears to almost zero after the losses at every single step. Ultimately, this is the key thing that “machine phase” does for you - you are reducing the losses to almost nothing by moving the atoms with machinery instead of letting it move by diffusion in a solvent.
These things are fed onto long “tape” feed systems into basically a microscale version of a pick and place machine, that places each of them into number of possible sockets. As such, you gradually assemble larger systems, some of which are the exact same section of machinery as a piece of the very nanoscale factory that is doing all this. (this is where you get to self replication. Basically, it’s a robotic factory composed of many separate assembly lines, but all of them share common components, so the factory can assemble new sections that are equivalent to the old sections in itself, and larger robots can install the new sections, creating a new copy of the factory. We can do all this at the macroscale right now today, so I’m not sure where your money betting objection is coming from)
I haven’t described anything that living cells don’t do right now. The key difference is these pieces of equipment are just a lot tighter. Less wiggle everywhere. Everything is in constrained, sealed regions of the factory. Each step is a lot faster and under greater control. Exotic conditions - the whole factory may be cooled down considerably below the temperatures that living things operate at, and it’s a clean vacuum. Evolution is not capable of discovering solutions that can work in a niche like I’m describing because in order for it to work, you have to have very exacting constraints for each and every component in the system. Any design that isn’t an exact match will fail.
Here, this video does describe most of what I’m talking about. The tightness constraint isn’t there - you can see that the factory can fail in that unconstrained contaminants can get loose - but a real design wouldn’t look like that.
That’s not the the problem at all - making nano-scale devices might be possible (although I suspect not, due to QM and thermal energy effects).
It’s the command-and-control issue that I think is insurmountable. There’s no way for a device that small to know where it is in space. So, the idea that one will make some micro-sized machine and tell it to go find and destroy a tumor is fantasy.
I recall reading in “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb” by Richard Rhodes that there’s no upper limit to how big a thermonuclear bomb can be.
The military was discussing deployment methods based on bomb size, like by plane, or train, or whatever. At certain size, the deployment method was “throw it in the backyard” because no matter where you detonate it, it would end all life on Earth.
Also, IIRC, after a certain size, you end up blowing a chuck of atmosphere into space the size of Pennsylvania into space, and anything more powerful just blows that same sized-chunk faster.
So if my recollection is true, they could make a single bomb to end all life on Earth since 1940s.
You mean there’s no way for an immune cell to locate and destroy a cancer cell? Or a virus to find and infect a specific cell type? Or for a cell to determine it’s location relative to other cells? In a very real sense, biology is nanotech. Everything you mention was solved by evolution billions of years ago.
As a biologist I tend to think tiny silicon gears are a little silly and crude compared to what nature has accomplished with proteins. However at this point biotech can manipulate and adapt biological systems, but is nowhere near designing comparable systems from scratch.
It’s inaccurate to say things like “nanotech is a dead end; biotech is the future”, because nanotech and biotech are the same thing. This helps to point out both the capabilities and the limitations of nanotech: You want some gray goo to build a bridge for you? Sure, that’s possible… but it’d take as long as it does to grow a tree. And while we will eventually get to a point where we can start from scratch, it’s a lot easier to build off of the self-replicating nanomachines we already have.
Did I say anything about that? No. I agree with you. Telling it to go find a tumor as you describe is fantasy. In fact, operating in the human body while it’s alive is also fantasy - the living human body is a sea of dirty liquid that is going to cause immediate equipment failure.
I’m talking, specifically, about a set of machines running in a vacuum chamber that can make tiny stiff things that include parts to this same machine. A big enough array of these machines can copy themselves if fed electricity, signals, and pre-digested chemical feedstock. The signals are sent down internal wiring meshes with the usual set of network switches and the rest, the wires are just really small.
As for how you could treat a human body…well, I did think of a way, but it would require radically advanced versions of the tech, stuff many many generations beyond anything foreseeable. TLDR, you solve the control problem by extending these pseudopods of machinery. The “pseudopods” are cube shaped robots that drive over each other and can fuse with each other. At the macroscale they appear to grow like tree branches, at the nanoscale, what is happening is robots are driving down a central core and then attaching themselves to the end of the growing branch. The control problem gets solved because every robot has a fixed attachment position with respect to other robots, and each robot is numbered with it’s own coordinates. So robots driving along can run their brush little feelers over other robots, sharing power and data, and can interrogate other robots for simple bits of information. So if a robot is ordered to go to X Y Z, it asks each robot it passes “hey where are you” and “which way does this go.”
Most network communication is robot to robot, and most messages are just internal, but there would be a way to route a message through millions of robots out to a control computer attached to this machine. So some of the robots on the end of the treebranch have special sensors, and these sensors are actually able to detect things about real biological systems in the real world.
This is why I say “radically advanced” - the structure I’m describing would fail immediately the moment it touches the dirty mess of human body blood plasma. Making the surfaces of the robots not get stuck or interfered with would be an extreme engineering challenge.
Anyways, TLDR, you might be able to remove a tumor this way…but a more useful treatment would be to eat a living person’s brain, a little piece at a time, analyzing the state of each synapse as you do so. The person would be awake and functional and the robots would act like artificial nodes that emulate the synapse they just ate each time, with the rest of the person’s brain being emulated inside a computer. In theory you could transition a little piece at a time from being a vulnerable mess of weak proteins to a digital being over a period of years. If it were slow and indistinguishable from your normal existence, you could maybe philosophically argue you didn’t die. Anyways, that’s the only practical medical treatment - if your brain isn’t attached to a vulnerable meat body that can age and get tumors in the first place, but is instead a digital file that can be copied and distributed across computer networks, that’s de facto immortality. You would live until the host civilization you are part of falls.
This is me being serious and not doing my Mad Scientist shtick.
Mega bomb? Yeah that would be bad. But seriously, who would pay for it?
A genetically engineered disease? I remember seeing on PBS that some Soviet lab had developed one that made the infected organism’s immune system attack the myelin sheaths of nerves. Agonizing death took about 72 hours. So, I agree that this is a valid fear.
A super intelligent computer system? Why would that be the end of humanity? Terminator jokes aside, I don’t see we have a lot to be worried about. I think a much likelier problem is that a super intelligent AI wouldn’t leave us alone. It would be much like my parents when I arrive at their condo. I just want to be left alone for a bit to rest. they keep bugging me with questions and attempting to cater to my every need.
Nanotechnology? I’ve had a lot of discussions about the ‘grey goo’ problem. I’ve become convinced that nanites will not go out control and eat the planet.
Finally, science is not an invention, or even a body of knowledge. Science is a way of looking at the world. I can’t remember who said this “Science is logic applied to stuff”
[QUOTE=Scientific American]
A new class of species may have been invented, and all in the name of safety. Colonies of Escherichia coli—the gut bug famous from food poisoning outbreaks—have had their genetics tweaked in a way that prods them to produce useful molecules, such as fuels or pharmaceuticals.
But such modified microbes might prove problematic if the microscopic bacteria escape the lab, especially if researchers’ goal of endowing them with resistance to viral infection via genetic manipulation is achieved. Such resistance is useful for keeping colonies alive for research but could turn a novel life-form from a microbe that can only survive in the lab or an industrial setting into a bacterium that could outcompete its wild brethren. So now researchers at both Yale and Harvard universities have demonstrated how to build in safety controls: They have made the microbes dependent on artificial amino acids to make the proteins necessary for life. Unless they are purposely fed with those amino acids, any escaped bacteria would die.
[/QUOTE]
IOW, fear of a takeover by custom-designed bacteria has already prompted special safeguards. A malicious (or frugal) lab might omit the safeguards.
