> The carbon based forms are not very durable (80 years ? c'mon), they break easily, and don't perform very well... Actually it's hard to build machines to las

> The carbon based forms are not very durable (80 years ? c'mon), they break easily, and don't perform very well... Actually it's hard to build machines to last that long (how many 1932 cars are still functional today?) The real advantage of the machines is that you can switch them off, open them up, replace parts, re-assemble them and switch them on again. You can replace parts of carbon-based lifeforms, but they don't always switch on again and opening them up often results in them being eaten by other carbon-based lifeforms. It's not cheap to do this to old machines, but its fairly reliable.