This planet has had a million lifetimes for a grey goo to emerge. A grey goo would be the most successful organism on the planet. Why does it not exist?
Although Freitas' paper is oriented towards showing ways to detect and fight gray goo, a careful reading shows that it answers most of the superficial objections to the concept. There is plenty of energy to create diamondoid (rock-like) nanobots starting with energy-rich organic matter.
Hoo boy, time to put the brain back online and exercise some critical thinking.
Thankfully, it starts off by rejecting the most implausible forms of the grey goo by focusing just on the biosphere. But here is an alternative example for you.
If I were to say that we should be on our guard against the creation of a voratious biological life form that can devour the entire biosphere in a mere 20 days, would anyone buy the claim?
I don't think so. And yet, for some reason we are expected to believe that nanobots as machines that devour life in order to create more nanobots are more of a threat than microrganisms as machines that devour life in order to create more microrganisms.
So, a huge number of assumptions in that article. One, we can ignore the problem of trace elements because what is not availble in the body is available in the crust. Freitas just brushes off this problem.
There are also lots of assumptions about the efficiency of replication that are left hanging.
But the biggest problem is the deus et machina which is the nanobot its self. We are talking about something can perform hundreds of different chemical reactions, on radically different substrates with a wide variation of mechanical properties. In spite of Drexler's recent admission that nano-manipulation of chemical reactions will require controlled conditions.
All organic matter, any form, everwhere in the biosphere.
This would be an evolutionary slam dunk for any thing that could achieve such a feat. Imagine the superbug that could eat humans, humus and hostas!
Again, the devil is in the details. Glucose is not collagen, is not cellulose, is not chitin, is not triglyceride. The gut is not the skin, is not topsoil, is not tree bark, is not the bloodstream.
Certainly, there is no reason, expressed in the terms of energy averaged over the entire planet, why a super-nanobot could not devour the biosphere. There is no reason why a biological life form could not as well.
Except for the fact that we are not dealing with averages. We are dealing with hundreds of microscopic environments, and more than a dozen different classes of molecules to digest.
Can anybody think of any kind of new technology that has been abandoned, or even significantly delayed, through alleged (or real) risks ?
Well, two miracle technologies that bit us on the ass are PCBs and asbestos. Both of these became core parts of many other technologies, and both ended up costing lots of money both in remediation and redesign.
Sunlight, perhaps? It seems entirely likely that organic life started similarly, and spread rapidly once it reached a tipping point. Since we have compelling evidence that something like this already happened once, I find your claim that it is impossible to be rather unconvincing.
The claim about grey goo is that it will convert all mass on the surface of the earth to more grey goo. So by all means, sunlight is a viable energy source. But there are other limits beyond just thermodynamics that make a grey goo impossible.
Photosynthetic bacteria are limited not only by the fact that photosynthesis is a meagre existence, but by the fact that bacteria need a number of minerals that just are not found in large quantities in a usable form (the most important ones being N, P, K, Fe, S, Ca, Mg and Mn).
As a thought experiment, lets propose that our grey-goo nanobot is just made of silicon and iron. Lets place our grey-goo nanobot on a slab of iron. Well, our poor hapless grey-goo nanobot has all the iron it needs, but not nearly enough silicon. A much as it might like to, it can't make more copies of its self. Lets move our grey goo nanobot to a slab of silicon. There our poor hapless nanobot has the opposite problem.
Any self-replicating nanobot is likely to be more complex than just silicon and iron. Germanium is likely to be important, and one of the major limits to its rate of growth in aquatic environments.
The reason why we have not seen a biological "green goo" is due to very real constraints on energy and matter. Aquatic photosynthetic organisms are limited by a lack of iron, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Remove these limitations (with a sewage or feedlot spill) and you get something similar to a "grey goo" in which they reproduce unchecked and use up available resources.
The process does not need to be instantaneous. It can be done over time. Don't think of the "big picture" for now. It takes very little energy to power one of the molecule sized bots. It's just a question of time and scale.
In what way is this different from bacteria?
I'll believe grey goo when someone shows me an accounting of where the energy is coming from, and where it is going to. Until then, if you believe grey goo, well, I have some perpetual motion machines to sell you.
Give me a break. It is quite possible for microorganisms to live and grow on sunlight, water, and air. Those resources aren't going to become limiting anytime soon. So it should be possible, in principle for a nanotechnological simulated organism to do the same.
Um, not anywhere close. Photosynthetic bacteria need a host of other things as well, most critically potassium, nitrogen and phosphorus (the PNP of fertilizer), iron, and magnesium. In fact, a key problem of farm pollution is fertilizer run off into streams and lakes. The sudden influx of potassium, nitrogen and phosphorus triggers algal blooms which are toxic to other organisms. This is also why phosphates were removed from many cleaning agents in the 70s and 80s. But still, the high levels of nitrates and phoshpates in feed-lot run-off is still a major concern.
But still, photosynthesis does not support the level of metabolic activity necessary to run around and eat things like computer monitors, people, or coffee cups. Photosynthesis provides enough energy for a pretty sedintary existence, making a grey goo highly unlikely.
Come on here, basic ecology. All self-replicating entities are constrained by limited resources. On an abstract level, it does not matter if you are talking about bacteria, rabbits, computer programs or nanobots.
Well, yeah, that is a good example. Nitrogen and phosphorus are critical limiting nutrients for most biological organisms. If you don't have them, you can't make DNA.
Any self-replicating thingy needs three things to do its task. Materials, energy, and a welcome environment. Any one of these can be used to show that any kind of a goo would be quite limited in what it can grow on.
Because they are so small, they don't need very much energy.
Bacteria don't need much energy either.
Nanobots could possibly be able to get their energy from their environments. A little RF might be enough to power millions of nanobots.
It does not need to just be enough to power the nanobots. For the grey goo to work, you gotta have enough power to tear apart an object, molecule by molecule, and put it back together in a more complex configuration. Lets ignore the facts that radio waves are less energetic than visibile light, and huge compared to nanobots (which makes harnessing them physically difficult). Is there really enough energy out there in backgraund radio land to tear apart an object and reassemble it?
I'm not much of a bio guy, but i remember those experiments where you put some bacteria and watch them spread, or about how quickly fruit flys can reproduce and such. Getting the energy for exponential growth isn't such a hard thing. Developing nanotech that's as good at using sources of energy as bacteria would certainly be a technical challenge, but it may not be impossible.
Really. I've actually done those experiments to completion and here is a basic fact for you: exponential growth is only sustainable as long as there are available resources in the environment. They explode for 48 hours, peak, then die off. Basic ecology whether you are talking about E. coli, rabbits, or self-replicating machines.
The only reason bacteria haven't covered the world is because living creatures have defenses against it, but those defenses probably wouldn't work against nanotech.
No, the reason why bacteria have not covered the world is because there are limited resources for growth. Populations are self-limiting to resource constraints.
Sure, grey-goo is likely to happen. However, its as likely to happen as some random evil person in the world would get hold of a dirty bomb to wipe out half the world and hold us at ransom.
I think your comparison is a bit off. I think grey goo is about as likely to happen as a random evil person creating a bomb that causes everybody's clothing to disappear leaving us unharmed but naked. The dirty bomb is possible, but unfeasable. The naked bomb is impossible. Toxic nanotech is possible. Grey goo is impossible.
Basically, I have yet to see any convincing argument that grey goo is possible. Where is this grey goo going to get the energy for even self-assembly from raw substrate, much less unchecked exponential growth?
Well, there are enough studies to prove that exposure to Nuclear Radiation is harmful. And enough studies to prove that inhalation of particulate silicon or asbestos could kill you.
That does not mean we cannot have safe and effective use of Nuclear Energy or of other stuff. Likewise for nano-tech.
Well, I agree that we can have safe effective nano-technology. However, I do think that a "proven minimal harm" standard will cost less money in the long run. Finding out after the fact that aspestos and PCBs were toxic has cost billions of dollars not only for remediation and disposal, but also becuase entire industries became dependent on those technologies and were forced to switch.
One of the things that I appreciated about this article was how it only spent a small bit on the grey goo hypothesis. The folks who propose any kind of a goo should step back from the science fiction, and read some biochemestry and microbial ecology. Energy is probably the primary limited resource for replication and there just is not that much out there available to nano-scale machines or organisms.
The medical concerns should be taken seriously however. The Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology has a nice page that promises to be a clearinghouse for information on these issues.
More fiction than science from what I've read. There are some basic energy constraints that limit what self-replicating molecules can and can't do. The people proposing this stuff should read up on microbial ecology.
To reiterate what was said earlier, the main advantage to zip is compression + random access. My own tests comparing the two found that tar|gz took nearly three times as long to find and unpack a single file within the archive as zip, even for moderately small files. A second advantage to zip is that it is relatively smart about what not to compress. This comes in handy with OpenOffice files which can include Zip files within Zip files.
So there is a real tradeoff that should be considered in comparing the two methods. Zip minimizes access times at the expense of compression. tar|gz maximizes compression at the expense of access times.
That contract was probably quite good in 1995 for an unproven company that was proposing to make a huge jump from making television commercials to feature-length films. Pixar needed a distributor at any cost.
It is now 2004, and the last movie required by the contract is in production and will be delivered to Disney next year. Pixar is now a free agent who can sell their next product to the highest bidder. They think they can do better than what Disney is offering.
And for those that need Sendmail/qmail/Postfix/whatever, how hard is it, really, to configure the MTA to send mail through the ISP server?
Re:What kind of crack are they smoking?
on
FreeBSD 5.2 Review
·
· Score: 1
While FreeBSD gets everything, my experience is that you might have to wait for a while before it gets ported. (The most annoying example was OpenOffice).
Re:FreeBSD not designed as a desktop
on
FreeBSD 5.2 Review
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually, the way I see it is that FreeBSD is designed to be a bare-bones unix. Pretty much all of the key server software and the desktop software is an optional install. I'm trying to remember what comes with FreeBSD-base these days, I think just ssh and sendmail.
Most people don't really nead the latest ATI or nVidia cards on a workstation either.
To make it blunt, the Columbia accident happend at 5 times the altitude as Challenger. At the time Columbia broke up it was already moving at mach 18 as opposed to Columbia which reached a free-fall ballistic trajectory within seconds. With Columbia, wind-shear forces shredded the crew compartment at an altitude of 19 miles. With Challenger, the crew compartment did not suffer major structual damage until impact. With Columbia more than %55 of the crew module has not been recovered, with Challenger, most of the crew module was recovered.
That last fact is the most chiling. We are not talking about a nice easy free-fall down to the ground. At 19 miles up, Columbia ran into the equivalent of an F5 tornado. At 19 miles up, the crew found themselves in the middle of a whirlwind of shrapnel.
I find the asessment of the author that modifications would have improved survivability to be naive. This is not only the a very bad situation, this is the worst possible situation. We are talking about forces that can break apart stony meteorites.
The crew was doomed from the moment they attempted re-entry. This is a known fact. If you don't hit the re-entry angle, you die.
Eh, I don't think so. The shuttle was traveling several times the speed of sound. Air pressure at that speed was enough to batter the shuttle into little pieces once it started tumbling. I don't think a parachute would have helped much.
I should add, it is only creeping featurism if the combination of features working together don't create new functionality. In this case, the advantage you gain is random access to your archive. What you loose is the ability to work with streams.
What should be done is to separate the operations:
- file browsing (WinRAR's interface trumps both)
- archiving (combining files)
- compression
- encryption
I can see two good cases where combining these funcions ala zip is preferred: random access and dealing with already compressed content. Tar+gzip/bzip sucks from a performance standpoint for random access. Also Zip is at least somewhat intelligent about recognizing and skipping over non-compressible content. If you want random access to encrypted content, then you need to encrypt before archiving as well (and then, encrypt the archive directory.)
90% of the time, I do tar+bzip2. But I can see why Zip is preferred for things like java, OpenOffice and Compressed Folders for Windows.
Sometimes, you need to send sensitive files among a small workgroup. For example, in the project I work for we have to share files that include confidential information. Asymetric encryption is designed for this kind of thing.
The Free Software Foundation lists the BSDL as a "GPL-Compatible, Free Software License". The BSDL grants all four of the software freedoms. To quote from the latter document:
In the GNU project, we use ``copyleft'' to protect these freedoms legally for everyone. But non-copylefted free software also exists. We believe there are important reasons why it is better to use copyleft, but if your program is non-copylefted free software, we can still use it.
And if you need for someone to draw you a picture, there is a very nice graphic showing the categories.
Slashdot Mirror
This planet has had a million lifetimes for a grey goo to emerge. A grey goo would be the most successful organism on the planet. Why does it not exist?
Although Freitas' paper is oriented towards showing ways to detect and fight gray goo, a careful reading shows that it answers most of the superficial objections to the concept. There is plenty of energy to create diamondoid (rock-like) nanobots starting with energy-rich organic matter.
Hoo boy, time to put the brain back online and exercise some critical thinking.
Thankfully, it starts off by rejecting the most implausible forms of the grey goo by focusing just on the biosphere. But here is an alternative example for you.
If I were to say that we should be on our guard against the creation of a voratious biological life form that can devour the entire biosphere in a mere 20 days, would anyone buy the claim?
I don't think so. And yet, for some reason we are expected to believe that nanobots as machines that devour life in order to create more nanobots are more of a threat than microrganisms as machines that devour life in order to create more microrganisms.
So, a huge number of assumptions in that article. One, we can ignore the problem of trace elements because what is not availble in the body is available in the crust. Freitas just brushes off this problem.
There are also lots of assumptions about the efficiency of replication that are left hanging.
But the biggest problem is the deus et machina which is the nanobot its self. We are talking about something can perform hundreds of different chemical reactions, on radically different substrates with a wide variation of mechanical properties. In spite of Drexler's recent admission that nano-manipulation of chemical reactions will require controlled conditions.
All organic matter, any form, everwhere in the biosphere.
This would be an evolutionary slam dunk for any thing that could achieve such a feat. Imagine the superbug that could eat humans, humus and hostas!
Again, the devil is in the details. Glucose is not collagen, is not cellulose, is not chitin, is not triglyceride. The gut is not the skin, is not topsoil, is not tree bark, is not the bloodstream.
Certainly, there is no reason, expressed in the terms of energy averaged over the entire planet, why a super-nanobot could not devour the biosphere. There is no reason why a biological life form could not as well.
Except for the fact that we are not dealing with averages. We are dealing with hundreds of microscopic environments, and more than a dozen different classes of molecules to digest.
Can anybody think of any kind of new technology that has been abandoned, or even significantly delayed, through alleged (or real) risks ?
Well, two miracle technologies that bit us on the ass are PCBs and asbestos. Both of these became core parts of many other technologies, and both ended up costing lots of money both in remediation and redesign.
Sunlight, perhaps? It seems entirely likely that organic life started similarly, and spread rapidly once it reached a tipping point. Since we have compelling evidence that something like this already happened once, I find your claim that it is impossible to be rather unconvincing.
The claim about grey goo is that it will convert all mass on the surface of the earth to more grey goo. So by all means, sunlight is a viable energy source. But there are other limits beyond just thermodynamics that make a grey goo impossible.
Photosynthetic bacteria are limited not only by the fact that photosynthesis is a meagre existence, but by the fact that bacteria need a number of minerals that just are not found in large quantities in a usable form (the most important ones being N, P, K, Fe, S, Ca, Mg and Mn).
As a thought experiment, lets propose that our grey-goo nanobot is just made of silicon and iron. Lets place our grey-goo nanobot on a slab of iron. Well, our poor hapless grey-goo nanobot has all the iron it needs, but not nearly enough silicon. A much as it might like to, it can't make more copies of its self. Lets move our grey goo nanobot to a slab of silicon. There our poor hapless nanobot has the opposite problem.
Any self-replicating nanobot is likely to be more complex than just silicon and iron. Germanium is likely to be important, and one of the major limits to its rate of growth in aquatic environments.
The reason why we have not seen a biological "green goo" is due to very real constraints on energy and matter. Aquatic photosynthetic organisms are limited by a lack of iron, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Remove these limitations (with a sewage or feedlot spill) and you get something similar to a "grey goo" in which they reproduce unchecked and use up available resources.
The process does not need to be instantaneous. It can be done over time. Don't think of the "big picture" for now. It takes very little energy to power one of the molecule sized bots. It's just a question of time and scale.
In what way is this different from bacteria?
I'll believe grey goo when someone shows me an accounting of where the energy is coming from, and where it is going to. Until then, if you believe grey goo, well, I have some perpetual motion machines to sell you.
Give me a break. It is quite possible for microorganisms to live and grow on sunlight, water, and air. Those resources aren't going to become limiting anytime soon. So it should be possible, in principle for a nanotechnological simulated organism to do the same.
Um, not anywhere close. Photosynthetic bacteria need a host of other things as well, most critically potassium, nitrogen and phosphorus (the PNP of fertilizer), iron, and magnesium. In fact, a key problem of farm pollution is fertilizer run off into streams and lakes. The sudden influx of potassium, nitrogen and phosphorus triggers algal blooms which are toxic to other organisms. This is also why phosphates were removed from many cleaning agents in the 70s and 80s. But still, the high levels of nitrates and phoshpates in feed-lot run-off is still a major concern.
But still, photosynthesis does not support the level of metabolic activity necessary to run around and eat things like computer monitors, people, or coffee cups. Photosynthesis provides enough energy for a pretty sedintary existence, making a grey goo highly unlikely.
Come on here, basic ecology. All self-replicating entities are constrained by limited resources. On an abstract level, it does not matter if you are talking about bacteria, rabbits, computer programs or nanobots.
Well, yeah, that is a good example. Nitrogen and phosphorus are critical limiting nutrients for most biological organisms. If you don't have them, you can't make DNA.
Any self-replicating thingy needs three things to do its task. Materials, energy, and a welcome environment. Any one of these can be used to show that any kind of a goo would be quite limited in what it can grow on.
Because they are so small, they don't need very much energy.
Bacteria don't need much energy either.
Nanobots could possibly be able to get their energy from their environments. A little RF might be enough to power millions of nanobots.
It does not need to just be enough to power the nanobots. For the grey goo to work, you gotta have enough power to tear apart an object, molecule by molecule, and put it back together in a more complex configuration. Lets ignore the facts that radio waves are less energetic than visibile light, and huge compared to nanobots (which makes harnessing them physically difficult). Is there really enough energy out there in backgraund radio land to tear apart an object and reassemble it?
I'm not much of a bio guy, but i remember those experiments where you put some bacteria and watch them spread, or about how quickly fruit flys can reproduce and such. Getting the energy for exponential growth isn't such a hard thing. Developing nanotech that's as good at using sources of energy as bacteria would certainly be a technical challenge, but it may not be impossible.
Really. I've actually done those experiments to completion and here is a basic fact for you: exponential growth is only sustainable as long as there are available resources in the environment. They explode for 48 hours, peak, then die off. Basic ecology whether you are talking about E. coli, rabbits, or self-replicating machines.
The only reason bacteria haven't covered the world is because living creatures have defenses against it, but those defenses probably wouldn't work against nanotech.
No, the reason why bacteria have not covered the world is because there are limited resources for growth. Populations are self-limiting to resource constraints.
Sure, grey-goo is likely to happen. However, its as likely to happen as some random evil person in the world would get hold of a dirty bomb to wipe out half the world and hold us at ransom.
I think your comparison is a bit off. I think grey goo is about as likely to happen as a random evil person creating a bomb that causes everybody's clothing to disappear leaving us unharmed but naked. The dirty bomb is possible, but unfeasable. The naked bomb is impossible. Toxic nanotech is possible. Grey goo is impossible.
Basically, I have yet to see any convincing argument that grey goo is possible. Where is this grey goo going to get the energy for even self-assembly from raw substrate, much less unchecked exponential growth?
Well, there are enough studies to prove that exposure to Nuclear Radiation is harmful. And enough studies to prove that inhalation of particulate silicon or asbestos could kill you.
That does not mean we cannot have safe and effective use of Nuclear Energy or of other stuff. Likewise for nano-tech.
Well, I agree that we can have safe effective nano-technology. However, I do think that a "proven minimal harm" standard will cost less money in the long run. Finding out after the fact that aspestos and PCBs were toxic has cost billions of dollars not only for remediation and disposal, but also becuase entire industries became dependent on those technologies and were forced to switch.
One of the things that I appreciated about this article was how it only spent a small bit on the grey goo hypothesis. The folks who propose any kind of a goo should step back from the science fiction, and read some biochemestry and microbial ecology. Energy is probably the primary limited resource for replication and there just is not that much out there available to nano-scale machines or organisms.
The medical concerns should be taken seriously however. The Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology has a nice page that promises to be a clearinghouse for information on these issues.
More fiction than science from what I've read. There are some basic energy constraints that limit what self-replicating molecules can and can't do. The people proposing this stuff should read up on microbial ecology.
To reiterate what was said earlier, the main advantage to zip is compression + random access. My own tests comparing the two found that tar|gz took nearly three times as long to find and unpack a single file within the archive as zip, even for moderately small files. A second advantage to zip is that it is relatively smart about what not to compress. This comes in handy with OpenOffice files which can include Zip files within Zip files.
So there is a real tradeoff that should be considered in comparing the two methods. Zip minimizes access times at the expense of compression. tar|gz maximizes compression at the expense of access times.
That contract was probably quite good in 1995 for an unproven company that was proposing to make a huge jump from making television commercials to feature-length films. Pixar needed a distributor at any cost.
It is now 2004, and the last movie required by the contract is in production and will be delivered to Disney next year. Pixar is now a free agent who can sell their next product to the highest bidder. They think they can do better than what Disney is offering.
The hardware and programs are well within the reach of a multi-billion dollar corporation.
What makes pixar great is not the animation but the storytelling talent.
And for those that need Sendmail/qmail/Postfix/whatever, how hard is it, really, to configure the MTA to send mail through the ISP server?
While FreeBSD gets everything, my experience is that you might have to wait for a while before it gets ported. (The most annoying example was OpenOffice).
Actually, the way I see it is that FreeBSD is designed to be a bare-bones unix. Pretty much all of the key server software and the desktop software is an optional install. I'm trying to remember what comes with FreeBSD-base these days, I think just ssh and sendmail.
Most people don't really nead the latest ATI or nVidia cards on a workstation either.
Um did you RTFA?
To make it blunt, the Columbia accident happend at 5 times the altitude as Challenger. At the time Columbia broke up it was already moving at mach 18 as opposed to Columbia which reached a free-fall ballistic trajectory within seconds. With Columbia, wind-shear forces shredded the crew compartment at an altitude of 19 miles. With Challenger, the crew compartment did not suffer major structual damage until impact. With Columbia more than %55 of the crew module has not been recovered, with Challenger, most of the crew module was recovered.
That last fact is the most chiling. We are not talking about a nice easy free-fall down to the ground. At 19 miles up, Columbia ran into the equivalent of an F5 tornado. At 19 miles up, the crew found themselves in the middle of a whirlwind of shrapnel.
I find the asessment of the author that modifications would have improved survivability to be naive. This is not only the a very bad situation, this is the worst possible situation. We are talking about forces that can break apart stony meteorites.
The crew was doomed from the moment they attempted re-entry. This is a known fact. If you don't hit the re-entry angle, you die.
Eh, I don't think so. The shuttle was traveling several times the speed of sound. Air pressure at that speed was enough to batter the shuttle into little pieces once it started tumbling. I don't think a parachute would have helped much.
I should add, it is only creeping featurism if the combination of features working together don't create new functionality. In this case, the advantage you gain is random access to your archive. What you loose is the ability to work with streams.
What should be done is to separate the operations:
- file browsing (WinRAR's interface trumps both)
- archiving (combining files)
- compression
- encryption
I can see two good cases where combining these funcions ala zip is preferred: random access and dealing with already compressed content. Tar+gzip/bzip sucks from a performance standpoint for random access. Also Zip is at least somewhat intelligent about recognizing and skipping over non-compressible content. If you want random access to encrypted content, then you need to encrypt before archiving as well (and then, encrypt the archive directory.)
90% of the time, I do tar+bzip2. But I can see why Zip is preferred for things like java, OpenOffice and Compressed Folders for Windows.
Sometimes, you need to send sensitive files among a small workgroup. For example, in the project I work for we have to share files that include confidential information. Asymetric encryption is designed for this kind of thing.
Well that, and if the issue centers on electronic transmission, how long have ICC and chess-by-email been around?
I really should bookmark this:
The Free Software Foundation lists the BSDL as a
"GPL-Compatible, Free Software License". The BSDL grants all four of the software freedoms. To quote from the latter document:
And if you need for someone to draw you a picture, there is a very nice graphic showing the categories.