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Terrorist Target Mexican Nanotechnology Professors
An anonymous reader writes "A Mexican terrorist organization sent an explosive device to an ITESM professor due to his research in nanotechnology. ITS or Individuals with Wild Tendencies in english, is a group that claims to be against the 'nanotechnology revolution' in fear of a nanomachine take over that will mean the end of civilization. The group has published on their website that they plan to target individuals in this research field to ensure the survival of mankind. Mexican authorities are investigating the case."
The Nanobomber.
I reject the notion that "anything man does is unnatural".
Even if nanotechnology led to a significant change in our species and others, it's just as natural as anything else that happens in the universe. I wish these Luddites would realize that we don't need to stop where we are.
Grey Goo is both an incredible difficult thing to make, and a very pointless thing to make. You'd be much better off with a very efficient nanodevice for performing a specific task paired with a very efficient nanodevice for making those nanodevices (but not itself). Easier and simpler.
You need a bunch of energy to make a bunch of grey goo. It's nontrivial. Actually making infinite grey goo would be difficult at best.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But the public needs to become aware of the very real danger that nanotechnology, biotechnology, and AI pose.
Bullshit. This is real life, not a movie. The tech will likely never be as capable or sophisticated as the magic masquerading as technology in Sci-Fi.
It is indeed very, very likely that humanity will not survive this century.
If nanotech is your biggest fear then you are so far out of reality that it's laughable. An eventual nuclear war between any of India/Pakistan, Iran/Israel, North Korea/Somebody is far more likely to be the biggest threat this century, and unlike nanotech, actually behaves the way it appears on video.
They say that every century. And if that's how you conduct your "civilization", losing it really wouldn't be a very big loss to the universe.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think that bombing people is horrible. But the public needs to become aware of the very real danger that nanotechnology, biotechnology, and AI pose. It is indeed very, very likely that humanity will not survive this century.
Your statement is both pathetic and sad. It's pathetic in that such profound ignorance actually exists and promotes itself. It's sad in that there are probably many ignorant victims who will actually swallow its fearful and intrinsically defeatist message.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
And the belief that it is a very real threat is an incredibly overactive imagination. People are well aware of the POSSIBLE risks, even as small as they are. Stop reading a bunch of science fiction and start looking at science facts. You may as well bomb the LHC because it could collapse the universe or create time travel possibilities.
Nanotechnology is no more a risk than any other technology. Seriously, look at some of the things that are classified as nanotech. If you make a powder fine enough it can be classified as nanotech.
There's two reasons people are so irrationally afraid. First, nanotech is, by definition, invisible to the human eye. Since they can't see how it works, they're afraid.
Second comes all the media, both news and entertainment, that uses nanotech the same way the 60s used radiation or the same way the 1800s used electricity. Quoth TVTropes: "Nanotechnology has become an all-purpose magic substitute for soft science fiction and sci-fi-flavored fantasy. Nano is the latest sci-fi name buzzword".
Anyone with a modicum of education in the matter can tell you that nanotechnology, as it now stands, is completely unable to destroy the world. That famous "grey goo" scenario? Yeah, that's not only extremely unlikely to ever happen (comparable to a virus taking over every machine on the Internet and turning it against us), but completely impossible with current engineering. We don't have nano-scale robots. That's probably further away than fusion power, honestly. The most advanced nanotech we have now is the processor in your computer - the actual transistors and wires and such are made at 100nm, possibly as small as 32nm. That qualifies it as nanotechnology. And it's as likely to destroy the world as the chair you're sitting in.
The inability to see this is only a lack of imagination.
I wouldn't call it a lack of imagination. The fixation on doomsday scenarios, though, is simply a lack of sanity.
I see someone has played Deus Ex :) (IIRC the nanites in that game were not generally self-replicating. Rather, they were created by the Universal Constructor.) That seems like a much more reasonable proposition.
For instance, the problem that never gets mentioned is where the nanites would get the energy. Very few elementary particles would be suitable to become nanites, and reordering them on that scale would take vast amounts of energy. Not to mention memory if they try to act intelligently (hell, on the nano-molecular scale even storing a self-blueprint would be difficult. Not impossible: see DNA).
Actually, I think Stargate's Replicators had it right. Macro scale blocks that together were able to self-replicate, and tiny-scale nanites had to be created out of specific material and were not (completely) self-replicating. I think to really have any efficiency at all, you need a certain threshold size for replication to take place. Bacteria sized, at least, probably larger for artificial machines. It would be possible, though, at least in theory. At least 100 years beyond us, in any case.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
It's the equivalent of saying a nuclear bomb will ignite the whole atmosphere. Turns out that was wrong too.
If a trivial sequence of proteins allowed for the kind of replication you're talking about, the world would already have ended. There's been living things fucking around with differing types of biochemistry for the past few billion years; if the self-replicating apocalypse could be achieved trivially, it would have. Some would say that's exactly what did happen.
What you and all the other "grey goo" crowd are overlooking is that it isn't enough to build a machine capable of self-replication. Living things do that already. The "grey goo" scenario already happened around three billion years ago when photosynthesis first arose and organisms began harvesting solar energy. You, the person reading this right now, are a form of naturally occurring self-replicating carbon based machinery. And you've had a few billenia of evolution to optimize the "self-replicating" part.
We could build self-replicating nanotechnology tomorrow, deliberately release it into the environment and it would do... nothing. If it were carbon based, it'd probably become something's dinner.
No, to end the world in a goopocalypse, we'd need to build self-replicating machines that are vastly more rapid and efficient than living organisms. Our goo would have to be better at being grey goo than the existing green goo. The competition has a three and a half billion year head start and are very good at making more of themselves.
I'm going to bold this part for anyone skimming this (admittedly long) post: To end the world with nanotechnology requires self-replicating machines (which we don't have) that are better at reproducing themselves than existing organisms . I'm not going to say it's impossible, but I am going to say with absolute certainty that it won't happen in the twenty-first century. We'll be lucky to even have self-replicating machines in a hundred years. "Grey goo" today is about as likely as a renaissance inventor building a thermonuclear weapon.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
You misunderstand; if a "bad solution" as you call it, did arise, it would become the new normal.
Life exists to procreate. A life form that manages to cover the entire planet in it's own self-replicating mass is an evolutionary success. It won't die out; if its replication created an unfavourable environment for its own survival, it may die back, but it will persist.
I'm not talking hypotheticals here either. What I've just described is exactly what happened around three billion years ago.
Photosynthesis arose. Living things used sunlight to split CO2, and spewed toxic oxygen into the biosphere, killing the competition. This "green goo" was so successful, that it diversified, evolved into new niches and took over the world. We call them "plants".
This isn't a unique incident - there are whole eras of living organisms wiped out by competition from something better adapting at making more of itself. And it isn't a coincidence that what I've just described sounds an awful lot like "grey goo"; the people who proposed a grey goo scenario were familiar with the evolution of plant life.
I don't disagree with you that grey goo is possible; where I disagree is that you seem to think it's easy. Show me a self-replicating machine, and I'll be seriously impressed. Show me a self-replicating nanomachine, I'll be even more impressed. Nobody has that technology yet, and I'd be amazed to see it in my lifetime.
What I won't live to see, and neither will you, is a self-replicating nanomachine that can out-compete living things. Sorry, but your grey goo fears are a couple hundred years too early, and I'm not sure they'll ever be realized.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
I didn't make my point clear enough I guess. When they tested the first nuclear bombs people fear mongered about them igniting the whole atmosphere and how it was going to destroy the world. Same thing is going on with the grey goo scare.
Generalists in nature have a harder time of things than specialists. Else no organism would become specialized in the first place.
There's a good reason all that green goo is specialized; because if you took an non-specialized plant and dropped it in the soil of a specialist, it's going to get choked out by the native. There are successful invasive plant species, but even then what you've often got is an invasive specialist out competing the native specialists for the kind of environment they both thrive in.
So your non-discriminating grey goo has all the drawbacks of the non-discriminating green goo. Only it has the much larger handicap of not actually existing yet.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
I'm not talking philosophy.
I'm talking about evolution.
The basic unit of life isn't the organism, it's the gene. Genes proliferate if they confer reproductive success to the organism they're attached to. They, in a very real and literal way, exist to make more of themselves, because several billion years of evolution has selected in favour of reproductively successful genes.
Genes do not go extinct when the organism they are attached to dies; rather genes go extinct when there are no copies left in any organism. There are genes that have been lost forever, and genes that have been succeeded by their own mutant descendants (erroneous copies that happened to do better than the original), but at the same time there are genes kicking around today that existed in the time of the dinosaurs.
So yes, from a genetic evolutionary standpoint, it is entirely fair to say "life exists to procreate". Just don't mistake fact for philosophy or morality; trying to find moral meaning in evolution has proven to be a bad idea, historically.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Biology "tries" every possible solution in the vicinity of the current ones. That's because biology is not a sentient being inventing stuff, but a natural process driven by random mutations and genetic recombination.
And BTW, biology started by the "invention" of self-replicating nanostructures. Because that's what micro-organisms are.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I wouldn't call it "fear mongering", but the claim that the Manhattan project tests could "ignite the atmosphere" via a chain reaction involving nitrogen was raised by none other than Edward Teller. Another scientists (can't recall who) calculated that this was highly unlikely and Teller subsequently retracted his claim.
As for grey goo, it happened ~3.8 billion years ago, we call it the biosphere. Nothing short of vaporising the top few kilometers of the Earth's crust will totally destroy it, and even then it will probably come back when things cool down.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
True, entertainment's "mystery force" was nuclear from the '50s-'90s, then it was biotech in the 90s and 00s, and now in the '10s it's starting to shift to nanotech. See: GI Joe movie, Crysis (a nanotech Spider-Man...hey Spider-Man's generally kept up with the mystery force of the times, will the new movie have a nanotech Spider-Man?), all the dumb shit being advertised as "nanotech-enhanced."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel