From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Jan 11 2001 - 16:04:29 MST
How effective are neutrons against nanodevices anyway? Would the neutron
kill radius really be any larger than that of the heat kill radius? It's
not like you're trying to knock out a multicellular organism - one
rad-hardened survivor cell is one too many. Twenty almost-dead survivors
with the ability to swap modular components is one too many, if you see
what I'm getting at. Around the most you can hope for is that any
rad-hardened, self-reproducing khaki goo will be bulky and inefficient
relative to the preproduced cleanup goo that gets dumped on the blast site
ten minutes later. The cleanup goo still needs to withstand fallout and
molten lava, but the khaki goo actually needs to withstand the initial
blast.
Deep in my heart, I have the feeling that this isn't going to work.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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