RE: A perfect nanodefence...

From: Zero Powers (zero_powers@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Mar 23 2000 - 14:35:23 MST


>From: "Billy Brown" <bbrown@transcient.com>
>
>Zero Powers wrote:
> > Maybe I'm dense, but it seems to me that if the attacker has
>*replicating*
> > bots, your shield would have to be so tight as to prevent even a single
>bot
> > from getting through your defenses. Because if just *one* gets through,
>it
> > can fairly quickly become billions. And then you are in trouble, no?
>
>That would only be true if you were trying to put a hollow shield around an
>undefended lump of resources. In reality your shield would not be hollow,
>so sneaking past the perimeter doesn't make an intruder safe. It has
>another chance at being detected every time a sensor bot happens by, which
>is likely to happen many times per second.

Hmmm. So my "shield" would actually be a head-to-toe distributed network of
nanobots coursing through every square millimeter of my body on the lookout
for attackers? And when I'm attacked, billions of nanobots fight to the
death in such fragile places as my neo-cortex? I admit that I may not have
a firm grasp on the magnitude of these things, but I don't think that having
my body serve as a huge battlefield for trillions of nano-soldiers calms my
fears much.

>Defending inert matter, or even appropriately designed macro-scale
>machinery, isn't a big deal. The hard problem is defending delicate,
>hard-to-upgrade territory like a human body.

And isn't that *the* problem? I'm not really concerned with protecting my
car from a nanobot attack.

-Zero

"I like dreams of the future better than the history of the past"
--Thomas Jefferson

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