Re: Bill Joy on the CBS evening news

From: Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Sat Jan 06 2001 - 10:47:11 MST


"S.J. Van Sickle" wrote:

> You betcha...this scares me a *hell* of a lot more than gray goo nanotech.
> Biology by its very nature operates in the wild. Designing molecular

True, but pathogens are specialists. Rhinoviruses don't eat trees nor
plankton, only nasal epithel.

> nanotechnology that can forage for raw materials and replicate in the wild
> is a much harder problem than most people realize...and there is very

Sure, but it's not impossible. I can give you a blueprint outline.

> litte incentive to develope it unless you want to kill a lot of people.

Or the entire biosphere. Building weapons is a sufficient incentive, last
time I looked. Assuming, you think you can constrain military nanoweapons
to a certain geographic area?

> And I can think of easier ways to do *that*.

No, you can't. Because I don't know of any other artificial mechanism
to effectively sterilize this planet.

> Yes, MNT can be *extremely* dangerous. But I don't think the danger is in
> someone using Wal-Mart (tm) Goo-For-You to wipe out the biosphere. Much,
> much easier ways to do it.

Hmm, like dropping a few 100 km rocks on Earth surface? Or making the Sun
go nova? Easy, indeed.



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