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Because self-organization/self-reproduction is a hard problem that living things have been imperfectly trying to solve for millions of years without the creatio
by joe_the_user 8y ago
Because self-organization/self-reproduction is a hard problem that living things have been imperfectly trying to solve for millions of years without the creation "grey goo"?
I mean, for a self-reproducing entity, energy is still going to be a limit on motion and energy isn't easily available in the natural environment. All the potential sources of energy require a particular chemical path to be transformed into usable energy and just constructing an entity capable of reproducing itself given specific materials and energy doesn't give you this.
- ALittleLight 8y agoFlight is a hard problem that living organisms have been working on for millions of years, yet human engineered systems fly higher, faster, and further. How do you know that human engineered systems can't also be much better at self replication and hence create grey goo?
- joe_the_user 8y agoI don't necessarily think that human-engineered gray goo is impossible. But the context is whether gray goo is going to be created accidentally and that seems unlikely. Just self-reproduction is a different problem than breaking down X energy source and moreover, the breakdown of each given source of chemical energy is a different and hard problem (the breakdown of cellulose by bacteria took a long time to evolve, for example). So creating a "breaks down anything" micro-organism (or nanite or whatever) merely by doing a bit of haphazard DNA manipulation doesn't seem like a big danger. If you had human who grasped the broader principles behind micro-engineering and wanted gray-goo, well, then you'd have reason to worry. There's little evidence of this, however.
- MRD85 8y agoFlight by itself isn't something that nature has developed. It has developed self-replicating beings that can fly. Humans are still a long way off self-replicating aircraft.
- LifeLiverTransp 8y agoImagine a airborne spirondella version, designed to float by self-produced methan. The sky would turn dark-green with there clouds, and ocassionally burn.
- LifeLiverTransp 8y agoWe already have a chemical better version of photosynthesis in the labs - if i remember correctly about 3x as effective. A simple runaway assembler with snythetic photosynthesis like a lichen would overgrow natural organisms quite fast.