From: CurtAdams@aol.com
Date: Tue Sep 02 1997 - 14:24:05 MDT
In a message dated 9/2/97 4:44:21 AM, sentience@pobox.com (Eliezer S.
Yudkowsky) wrote:
>Still, let's dwell on the tactics for a few moments. The goo can send a
>shaped explosion aimed at the city, so that the no-man's-land is composed of
>formerly city material, rather than equal amounts of city and goo. Can the
>city send shaped charges back at the goo? Yes. Can the city "grab" the
>no-man's-land thus created? Locally, yes - although there is one *minor*
>tactical advantage, which is that the goo is independent and the city is
>structured, so that the city has to expend more effort to build into a given
>amount of volume. But I'm claiming a lot of battle intelligence for the
black
>goo, while the city's first line of defense, rather than being diamondoid,
may
>be independent 'munes. I think that, tactically, there's a match.
Nuclear weapons - or anything that produces ionizing radiation - will, in
general, greatly favor the city, provided it makes use of aqueous phase
thermodynamic nanotechnology (i.e., biology-style) and provided the nukes
lack the physical power to just obliterate the city. The proposals for
machine-phase nanotech so far are all hypersensitive to ionizing radiation as
they have no way to put stray atoms back in to place or to replace arbitrary
damaged parts. Biology-style nanotech benefits greatly from extreme
redundancy and positional independance. If even one element in a rod-logic
computer malfunctions the whole thing is in a very bad situation. Current
living things can survive extensive hits on anything other than DNA, and with
redundant genetic systems could take even that.
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