Book extract: Nano
By John Robert Marlow
Page 223
Jen examined their new surroundings. Before them, a fat steel cylinder rose out of the floor and disappeared into the ceiling, its shiny convex surface reflecting obese, distorted images. Steel walls rose close on all sides. There was, apparently, no way out of the small room save the closed door behind them.
“Where’s the door?”
John smiled. “You’re looking at it. ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’”
“Arthur C. Clarke,” replied Jen, correctly.
John nodded approvingly. “Watch this,” he said simply. Taking her left hand in his right, John placed his left palm flat against a steel plate beside the cylinder. Brows furrowing, Jen looked at him.
“DNA scan,” he explained, watching her face to see her reaction to what came next. He was not disappointed: Jen’s breath drew quickly inward and her mouth dropped open in astonishment as magically, or so it seemed – the convex wall before them disappeared into thin air …
“Disassemblers ….” she breathed, even as she saw that this was more than that – for the wall before them did not simply vanish. Rather, it flowed outward from a central point before them, as if a pebble had been cast into a metal pond. The steel shimmered and rippled like too-thick, metal-hued water. When the roughly oval “doorway” thus formed was completed, the ripples continued around its edges, conveying the impression of liquid in motion – standing waves which moved, yet remained still.
John stepped into the cylinder-shaped room this revealed, and tugged at her hand. Jen hesitated, the wonder on her features edging toward fear.
“Don’t worry,” said John. “The door won’t eat you. I promise.”
She followed him inside – then turned to watch the process repeat itself in reverse.
Page 228
“You should find this interesting,” John said.
“Oh?” she asked, drawing near.
John moved to work a control panel at the base of the empty, acrylic-shielded clear cylinder, which was perhaps four feet in diameter as well as height. A steel plate had been affixed to the bottom of the cylinder, and a small white circle drawn at its center. “This was a demo for Mitchell,” he said. “One-one-hundredth scale.”
As he spoke, he activated a control which opened a port in the top of the clear cylindrical vat. Activating another control loosed a torrent of viscous, clear liquid, which entered the vat through the open port.
“Disassemblers are easy,” he said. “Well, not easy – but easier than assemblers. Disassemblers are simple – molecular sledgehammers, or chain saws; choose your analogy. Assemblers are complicated. The tree wasn’t too difficult, because the program already existed.”
“In the seed,” said Jen.
“Right. The seed already knew what to do. Basically, all I did was accelerate the program.” He gestured with one hand, frowning. Assemblers … present other problems. Not only do we have to create the programs – bug-free programs, I might add – we also have to supply the raw materials. If you want to grow a city, you need to have at least the raw elements, there, ready for the assemblers to make use of. It can be a mountain of rock with veins of ore – but more likely we’ll use nanites to transport pure atoms to the surface without disturbing the ground. Those atoms will then be shipped to the construction site as pure, nanoassembled ingots.
“But that’s for large-scale projects. Creating smaller objects can be done like this.” He indicated the nearly full vat. “In the center of that white circle on the baseplate is a nanocomputer – think of it as a ‘product seed.’ The fluid is filled with assemblers from another vat, programmed specifically for this job from a menu I prepared earlier.”
As the vat filled, the fluid ceased flowing in, and the port closed.
“Now,” continued John, “each assembler has its own nanocomputer onboard – a simple nanocomputer, so heat dissipation doesn’t come up – and as soon as it grabs –” John reached out suddenly and grabbed Jen’s arm, startling her “– hold of the seed computer, the seed computer tells it exactly where it grabbed hold, so it has the spatial coordinates down.”
“It knows where it is.”
“Right. It then knows where to grab other assemblers – which are floating around in the fluid – and so on, all following a prearranged structural blueprint to form a fairly rigid lattice …”
Peering into the vat, Jen saw on a larger scale the result of the submicroscopic work of which John spoke. What she saw through the clear liquid was a skeletal pyramid whose cap formed as she watched. Hundreds of horizontal and vertical supports were visible within the body of the pyramid.
“Once the skeleton has been completed, the residual assemblers are washed out and recycled, or sent to another job.” As if on cue, a second port opened at the bottom of the vat, draining the clear fluid away. The second port then closed.
“Next ….” said John – and paused, looking into the vat with an expression of annoyance, as though it were holding up a lecture. In a moment, a third port opened in the vat’s ceiling, admitting a dirtylooking fluid which covered and partially obscured the skeletal pyramid.
“Next come the raw materials – in this case, carbon – as well as a glucose mixture to fuel the assemblers. I could have used any one of dozens of fuels; glucose was easy. For more complex projects, fuel flows in and waste products out while construction is under way.
“At any rate, the assemblers now grab carbon atoms from the fluid and bond them together in the desired configuration. The structural members you’re looking at are hollow; the work takes place inside them. Once the final carbon structures are in place, the assemblers release their hold and float away.”
“Leaving the real structure in place.”
John nodded. After another moment, Jen saw this happening. As the assemblers completed their job and floated away through the liquid – no longer visible because each was alone far too small to perceive, but perceivable en masse as a cloud within the liquid – the structure they had labored to build came into view through the murk; a more elegant and refined pyramid, which sparkled strangely through the dingy liquid.
When the structure had been revealed completely, another port opened to drain away the used assemblers and leftover carbon atoms. A clear spray from a nozzle revealed by yet another opening port served to clean any stragglers from the finished pyramidwhich now scintillated wondrously. The structural members, all thirty miniature floors of them – even the clear outer walls of the structure – either scintillated brilliantly or acted as prisms, depending upon the angle at which they were viewed. Jen recognized the building.
“Mitchell’s pyramid,” she said.
Page 318
The sharp, staccato report of an MP7 rent the air as bullets ripped through Jen’s body and into the wall behind her. Bright red blood spattered across the wall.
“NNNOOOOO!” John screamed, rising to his knees. The world seemed to slow down immensely, actions and sounds progressing in a horrifying slow motion as Jen fell back against the wall, touching a hand to her abdomen and bringing it away – gazing down in shock and disbelief at the blood that covered it.
She turned to gaze back at John – lips parting, blood running down from gaping mouth over quivering chin – as a second burst tore through her chest and pinned her to the wall. Her body jerked convulsively for what seemed an eternity – then slid to the floor as the bullets stopped, streaking the wall red behind her.
“One down!” yelled Brandt’s voice from around the corner. The sound snapped John back to full-speed reality. Ripping open the bag at his waist, he dumped the Colt’s magazine into it. “I have something special for you ….” he said coldly.
Ejecting the live round onto the floor, he withdrew a nanobullet from a loop marked CALCIUM and inserted it into the chamber. Dropping the slide and crouching low, he moved toward the corner.
“Spineless bastards,” he said to himself as, whipping one arm around the corner, he extended the gun before him and fired. The bullet took Brandt, whose gun was still smoking, in the upper right leg – which collapsed almost immediately. A crawling carpet of nanites spread outward from the fallen man as he tried to rise – only to fall again as his forearm collapsed into shapeless mush. The screams of the terrified men filled the hall as the calcium-eating nanites entered their bodies through their skin and dissolved their bones from the inside.
Bodies collapsed inward and lay on the floor like so many puddles of warm flesh, quivering as nerves sent impulses through muscles no longer attached to skeletal supports.
Jen’s fading eyes turned toward them.
John knelt beside her, blocking her view. She tried to raise her hand to him, but could not. Laying down the gun, he took her right hand with his left.
“I – I ….” she began, unable to speak through the blood filling her throat and lungs.
“It’s not over yet,” said John as, eyes glassing over – Jen died.
Reaching into the waistpack and unzipping an internal pocket, John withdrew a hypodermic needle. Uncapping it, he raised it before his eyes and pressed the plunger upward with his thumb until a thin stream of grayish liquid spurted from its tip. “You’re not going anywhere,” he said to Jen’s body.
Stabbing the needle meant for Mitchell into her gut, he pressed the plunger all the way down and withdrew the hypo, discarding it. It rolled into the wall and stopped, its computer-generated label facing upward:
MARREK’S BODY REPAIR ELIXIR
CURES ALL ILLS
Ripping open what was left of the bottom half of Jen’s shirt, John watched the ugly wounds expectantly.
Inside Jen’s body, nanites deployed outward from their insertion point, multiplying as they went. These nanites reproduced at a rate well below that of their destructive kin – for their mission was of a far different kind.
Programmed with internal representations of normal human cells, the first wave of “scout” assemblers bypassed these to seek out abnormal cells. Cells characterized as “abnormal” fell within certain preassigned parameters indicating injury, malignancy, or age-related deterioration. While this was being done, other first-wave “reader” nanites busied themselves examining the DNA structure of the body in which they found themselves.
Upon detecting the presence of abnormal cell structures, the scout assemblers contacted the reader nanites, which supplied them with the genetic blueprint of what the cells residing within the damaged or missing area of this specific body should look like at the approximate age the body was determined, by the general level of normal cellular deterioration and rate of cellular regeneration throughout.
Once the reconstruction blueprint had been transferred from the host body’s DNA and triple-checked for consistency, the scouts set about assembling vast quantities of cellular repair assemblers. These repair assemblers commenced immediately to repair the damaged cell structures as well as to restore missing structures, all the while following the DNA blueprint provided by the reader nanites.
The only area in which this activity did not take place was the brain, and that was because neither John nor anyone else understood the brain’s structure and functioning at a level sufficient to enable even the crudest of attempts at reconstruction absent a preexisting nanomap. It was even possible – if not likely – that attempts to reverse age-related changes within the brain itself would produce damage which, while theoretically reversible, no man, computer, or nanite could undo for lack of a sufficient understanding of the processes involved.
Even using the construction blueprint found within the body’s own DNA would not solve this problem – as the development of the brain over time was dependent upon experiential and not genetic factors. At best, reconstructing a damaged or obliterated brain in accordance with the pattern specified by the body’s DNA would yield the brain of an infant, devoid of later memories or wisdom.
And so John had instructed the cellular repair assemblers to refrain from altering the brain in any way, at least on their initial foray into any given body. Perhaps – with NANI’s assistance – this barrier could be overcome; time alone would tell. As a stopgap measure, the injected nanites carried instructions to map the brain thoroughly after repairing any life-threatening injuries. This would provide them with a blueprint to be used in the event of any future brain damage which might occur as a result of stroke, aneurysm, head trauma, etc. In such an event, the damaged portion only would be restored in accordance with the continually updated brainmapresulting in, at most, the loss of a few seconds’ memories.
In theory. John had no desire to put this to the test.
Massive blood loss was compensated for by the effective cloning-by-replication of what blood remained until freshly closed arteries and veins operated at acceptable pressures. Once repairs had been completed, damaged or displaced material was reduced to harmless elements or shunted into the digestive tract. The second wave of assemblers was then disassembled. The scouts and readers remained – the readers to update their blueprint, the scouts prowling their new domain in search of damaged cells to repair.
Even knowing the specifics of what was happening, and realizing that it was no miracle but pure applied science at work John could not help but be awed by the effects.
As he watched, Jen’s shredded organs and vessels mended themselves from the inside out, the entire process taking less than a minute to accomplish. When it was finished, smooth skin lay beneath incongruous puddles of blood. He touched a hand to the new skin.
“‘What man is he that liveth, and shall not see death?’” he mused aloud, quoting Psalms 89:48.
Chapter 16
Right hand and fingers manipulating the pressure sensors on a duplicate of the impossible-to-solve holographic puzzle she’d toyed with in the San Francisco lab, Jen watched as the slowly rotating diamonds aligned themselves into neat, concentric, diamondshaped formations arranged by color.
She smiled with satisfaction, subconsciously making the same little gesture of defiance and pride she’d hit when she and John had first met, and he’d recognized her name because of her work.
Schrodinger jumped up onto the counter beside her and began to purr. Stroking his fur, she watched John ready himself on “the set,” as they’d come to call it.
Situated deep inside a granite mountain, location known to none but NANI and themselves, excavated and guarded by nanites, watched over by NANI with the remaining Phoenix satellites at its command – their current residence was without doubt the only truly impenetrable facility on the face of the earth. The only weapons capable of penetrating this fortress had been disabled or commandeered by NANI; anything else which might approach could – and would – be quickly disassembled at John’s command.
Jen had at first argued against John’s plan, but in the end he had dissected and eviscerated each objection with the cold blade of reason. Beyond the inevitable human capacity for evil, and the untrustworthiness of intelligent machines, lay an unassailable fact which, once grasped – made it frighteningly clear that there was indeed, as John had said, no other way.
That fact was this: Complex technologies were by their very nature inherently totalitarian. The more complex the technology, the more totalitarian the institutions required to manage it. This was so because, as futurist Hazel Henderson had pointed out in Creating Alternative Futures: The End of Economics, neither the common man, legislators, nor national leaders understood the technologies – and were therefore incompetent to oversee their use.
As technologies became more complex, the people who understood them fully would inevitably control them and, through them, the societies which could not survive without those technologies. Thus, complex technologies created totalitarian technocracies.
In a way, John had explained, that was how Mitchell Swain had come to be the richest – some said most powerful – man on earth. It was no secret that he had been largely if not entirely responsible for the elections of the past two presidents – and a man able to choose presidents by definition wields more power than the chosen.
Swain, however, had been a force for good. What he had called “the ultimate technology,” however, was in fact the most complex technology ever developed. As such, it was by nature ultimately – and completely – totalitarian.
And there was but one way to deal with this dilemma.
“The set” where John readied himself was a small, unmanned television studio with robotic cameras, uplinked via NANI, which would eliminate all traces of the signal’s point of origin prior to broadcast. The news-desk-style counter at which John seated himself, as well as the angled walls behind him, were of polished black stone shot through with veins of gold. It was from this room that John would address the peoples of the world.
Power, phone systems, and the Internet had been restored following a brief negotiation with President Miller, who would serve as a consultant – as would those to hold that office after him. John had pledged to change the world – not to rule it – together. And change it they would.
Seated behind the desk of his new set, garbed in white with gold trim to stand out against the black stone background, John watched the countdown and prepared to address his audience – which consisted of every television and radio broadcast channel on Earth, as well as all hardline communications routes including telephone lines and the Internet, among others.
NANI hijacked them all, routing the broadcast live save for the small delay required for translation and rendering into the appropriate language for each outlet. By prior arrangement, the president would speak first from the White House, followed by John, from his new abode. John and Jen watched the screen as President Miller appeared, and began to speak.
“I greet you all at the dawn of a new world,” said the president. “A world, as my friend Mitchell Swain said, which will forever alter the destiny of Mankind …
“Mitchell Swain gave his life to bring this new world into being, and I am here to tell you that the United States of America is going to lead the world into this new age.
“The man who began this work, and who will finish it – will speak with you in a moment. He saved my life, and he saved yours. Listen to him.”
The on-air countdown in John’s studio reached zero, the red ON AM light coming to life across the room. Gazing into the center camera, John began to speak. Thanks to NANI, regardless of language, all listeners would hear John’s voice, so that it would seem to all that he spoke their language with fluency. Which, thanks to his recent nanoenhancements, he was well on the way to doing.
“My name,” he said, “is John Marrek. I was a friend of Mitchell Swain’s, and I am here now to carry on his greatest work.
“As of this moment, all nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons on this planet are inactive. In twenty-four hours, they will be gone. A more terrible weapon by far has been created – you saw it abused in San Francisco by rogue elements of the United States government, of which President Miller had no knowledge. Governments cannot be trusted, even when benign. Therefore this weapon, and this technology, will remain under my control. This is fact, and cannot be avoided.
“I will use the power this gives me to enforce the distribution of the technology Mitchell Swain died to give the world. No government will keep it from you, and no one will take it away.”
Pausing, drawing a deep breath, John summarized what he would explain shortly in more detail. “War is over,” he began. “Poverty is over. Hunger, disease, and pollution are at an end. The old shall be made young. The world shall be made new.
“Mankind will gain the stars …
“And the power of governments over their people, is a thing of the past.
“From this day forward – ” said John, raising his right arm and reaching out to one side. Jen – also dressed in white – moved to join him, taking his hand in front of the world.
“ – two people shall rule the earth as guardians of what is right,” John continued, and paused again. His features assumed the severe and implacable cast of the invincible god-emperor he had become as he stared frighteningly into the camera.
“And evil, shall be exterminated without mercy ….”
Author’s Afterword
… if we survive …
– Qualifying phrase employed with annoying frequency by K. Eric Drexler when writing of the impending development of nanotechnology
Nothing portrayed in this novel is impossible. Nanotechnology is real. The United States Army, Air Force, and Navy are currently working to develop nanocapability for use as a weapon. More on this in a moment.
ECHELON is also real, as is research into chromomorphic materials with military applications. ECHELON’s capabilities are – so far as is determinable – roughly as stated. Research into the development of Phoenix-like satellites is a reality. Whether such instruments have already been deployed is anyone’s guess, though the technical problems relating to beam coherence under atmospheric conditions make it likely that such weapons, if deployed, would be tasked primarily with the destruction of space-based objects and of objects – such as strategic nuclear missiles – which exit the atmosphere and then reenter it. Such weapons platforms might reasonably be expected to achieve some success in targeting objects – such as spy planes – which travel through the upper reaches of earth’s atmosphere as well.
The Aurora Project – despite the usual flurry of official denials (which began after a government censor slipped up and listed “Aurora” just below “U-2” and “SR-71” on a 1985 Pentagon budget request) – is genuine, and is based at Groom Dry Lake, Nevada. This is where the U-2 was tested, the SR-71, the B-2, the F-117A, and so on – and this is where the next generation of radically advanced aircraft is being and will continue to be tested. The reason is simple: Groom Lake is perhaps the most highly classified and restricted-access site on the face of the earth. If there are indeed little gray men, this is where they are.
The application of a chromomorphic exterior coating to the present or next generation of Aurora-class aircraft is a logical enhancement even though, in truth, this particular technology is a complete fabrication on the part of the author. Or so it first seemed; later background research revealed that it is likely a very similar technology incorporating numerous plane-mounted cameras and “electrochromic panels” is currently being tested at Groom Lake. In addition, recent work at the University of Tokyo’s Tachi Lab employs a prototype system which works much like the chromogrid discussed in the novel.
The circuslike series of nuclear accidents referred to by John Marrek in Chapter 4 is, sadly, also genuine, and but the tip of the classified iceberg. As to what the government has to say about this state of affairs, consider a few excerpts from a recent paper of the Los Alamos Study Group:
… the stockpile today is safe, secure, reliable, and meets current military requirements […] no safety problems are expected to occur […] it is highly likely that efforts to produce “safer” weapons will degrade overall nuclear safety […] Are U.S. nuclear weapons, in fact, “Safe”? The unequivocal and unanimous conclusion of the nuclear weapons establishment is affirmative the disproportionate and irrational drive to maximize safety […] the central theme of this paper is that nuclear weapons safety, as a technical problem for weapons designers as opposed, one must assume, to the idiots who drop them out of airplanes – author’s comment, has been solved.
The title of this paper? “Nuclear Weapons Safety: No Design Changes Are Warranted.”
These are the people who will be in charge of nanoweapons development. Food for thought. See the author’s Web site at www.johnrobertmarlow.com for more on this and the other things mentioned in this afterword.
As to the plausibility of reverse engineering crashed alien spacecraft to gain or extend a military advantage over other earthbound powers, and perhaps uncover weaknesses in the machinery of potentially hostile extraterrestrial powers – recall that the commanding general of Roswell Army Airfield stated for the record that the object found at Roswell was in fact an alien spacecraft. His superiors in Washington – none of whom had seen the object, as he had – denied this the following day, and have continued to deny it for over fifty years. Make what you will of this, keeping in mind the long-standing intelligence community axiom: “The first thing is, never believe anything the government tells you.”
Assuming for a moment that one or more such craft do existwhat would you do with a crashed alien spacecraft …?
For more on these topics and others, visit the author’s Web site at www.johnrobertmarlow.com.
About Nanotech
Nanotech as portrayed in the novel is, thankfully, not here yetbut it is real. More than theory, the principles upon which a working nanotechnology will be based are well understood. Nano’s development is known to be not only possible, but attainable. Various research groups are pursuing the development of this technology to achieve specific ends. In the United States, this includes the following government agencies: The U.S. Air Force; U.S. Army; U.S. Navy; Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; Department of Energy; Department of Commerce; NASA; National Institutes of Health; National Institute of Standards and Technology; National Science Foundation, and the National Science and Technology Council.
On January 21, 2000, speaking at Caltech – the site of Richard Feynman’s historic 1959 nanotech speech – President Clinton announced the half-billion-dollar National Nanotechnology Initiative. “The Administration is making this major new initiative, called the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), a top priority,” said the White House press release issued on the same date. The release makes ominous and ambiguous mention of the government’s need to “intervene efficiently in the future on measures that may need to be taken.”
Alarmingly for Americans, the United States has no clear lead in the field of nanotechnology. Both the Japanese and the Europeans seem to take the development of nanotechnology more seriously than we do.
As with most if not all scientific progress, little thought is being given to the full implications or potential consequences of this technology. The smallest portion of the funds allocated by the National Nanotechnology Initiative, for instance, is earmarked for the study of “ethical, legal, and social implications.”
One notable exception to this general shortsightedness is the Foresight Institute, an organization founded by K. Eric Drexler and Chris Peterson with the stated aim of assisting the world in preparing for the advent of nanotechnology.
On the other hand, we can thank the members of this same institute for the concept of “active shields” – which is perhaps (in the author’s opinion) the single most severely shortsighted proposal ever to come down the pike. The employment of automated active shields controlled by NHI (nonhuman intelligences), or even by more prosaic automated computer programs, seems as blatantly suicidal as the all-out nanoarms race such “Klaatu Solutions” might in theory prevent.
Klaatu was the name of the alien with the invincible peacekeeping robot Gort in Edmund H. North’s 1951 screenplay The Day The Earth Stood Still. In actuality, the active shield situation is worse: Klaatu had a secret override phrase for use in emergencies; a nanointelligence, even if instilled with such a convenient safety mechanism – might well decide, for reasons of its own, not to obey.
As Bill Joy, co-founder and, until recently, chief scientist of computer goliath Sun Microsystems and original cochairman of the Presidential Commission on the Future of Information Technology, put it in a widely quoted Wired article in March of 2000: “… the shield proposed would itself be extremely dangerous – nothing could prevent it from developing autoimmune problems and attacking the biosphere itself … These technologies are too powerful to be shielded against in the time frame of interest; even if it were possible to implement defensive shields, the side effects of their development would be at least as dangerous as the technologies we are trying to protect against.”
If active shields are implemented, it is extremely likely that bickering and distrust over who will control the establishing programs, or over who will create the intelligence which controls the shields, will render the whole thing unworkable as a cooperative venture. If this is so, and active shields are desired by one or more leading powers, they will be deployed unilaterally and will be little more than a new generation of space-based weapons under the direct control of the launching power or powers. If several shields are launched by opposing powers, the result will be an unprecedented arms race escalation. Even a single shield and its controlling intelligence will be subject to constant efforts at hostile takeover by nations and perhaps individuals developing and deploying competing nanointelligences in an effort to achieve primacy.
Unfortunately, owing to their enormous resources and coercive powers, it is governments and not foresighted men of reason who will almost certainly control the development of nanotechnology at least initially. Worse, it will be governments seeking nanoweapons.
The capabilities and operating mechanisms and principles of the nanites described in this novel conform to what is now known of actual nanocapabilities, operating mechanisms, and principles. Less than ideally, however – the ideal way to stop a single nonlimited disassembler which passes its no-limit program on to its exponentially multiplying descendants is to create and employ it only inside an impenetrable structure where it will itself be subject to attack and disassembly by antinanite disassemblers programmed to seek out and destroy defectively replicating disassemblers (as well as assemblers).
There are, alas, several problems with this approach. First, no known substance is impenetrable to an omnivorous disassembler – and a mutating disassembler may mutate into a form able to disassemble even a substance it has been specifically programmed not to disassemble. Secondly, a primary and obvious use of disassemblers is in warfare, and wars do not take place inside sealed laboratories. (This fact, incidentally, renders absurd the argument advanced by some military nanoadvocates that battlefield disassemblers will be limited in the scope of their self-deployment by a special “nanite food” they will be programmed to require or to target in order to replicate. The enemy, of course, will seek to destroy this “food” and render the nanites harmless, or to spray it all over the field – thus causing the disassemblers to attack the force which initially deployed them. For these reasons, battlefield nanites dependent upon special “foods” may well prove all but useless.)
Lastly and most discouragingly of all – the capability to contain nanites through the use of nanotechnology itself is inherently unreliable because it allows for no advance preparation of containment facilities; that is, the thing which requires containment will already exist before attempted containment is possible. The situation is analogous to loosing a hungry tiger in your living room while fiddling with the cage-assembly instructions; to say the least, your prospects for short-term survival are less than optimal.
Alternative containment strategies are grim: nuclear detonation and plasma attack. Both will reliably annihilate nanites by separating the constituent nuclei and electrons comprising the nanites’ “bodies.” This is only true, however, if the attack is executed immediately and before the nanites have spread over an area large enough to permit the survival of a single nanite – which might, for example, be carried from the outer fringes of the target area by a blast wave.
The generation of plasma with currently available technology rests on conditions too fickle to be relied upon for this purpose; therefore, the sole containment option will be nuclear annihilation in the form of an on-site nuclear weapon which detonates automatically in response to a containment breach – or erroneous notification of such breach.
Given such conditions, lab employees may be somewhat difficult to come by.
Nonlimited assemblers will be equally hazardous, as they will simply rip the planet apart one atom at a time for the raw materials with which to go on mindlessly constructing the widgets they’ve been programmed to make. Whether they will actually chitter happily as they do this is unknown.
The author prefers to think they will.
Aside from all of this, of course, nations and perhaps individuals without recourse to nuclear weapons or other high-tech accoutrements of power will inevitably seek to develop nanotechnology as a way of achieving an otherwise unattainable world dominance. Because of this, Bill Joy’s “only realistic alternative … relinquishment: to limit our development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge ….” is itself utterly unrealistic.
In what will likely become a headlong rush to attain nanoweapons at any cost, nations large and small – seeking to retain or attain such power – will likely pay little heed to pleas for elaborate safeguard mechanisms. It is perhaps instructive to reflect that, when the Trinity test (the first nuclear detonation, resulting from the Manhattan Project) was about to be carried out, one of the project’s leading physicists, Edward Teller, was taking side bets that the result would be a worldwide atmospheric chain reaction which would incinerate the surface of the globe and everything on it.
The Manhattan Project was carried out anyway, and that test conducted, because of the threat posed by the decimated Nazis and the (for all practical purposes) defeated Japanese, as well as because of the potential threat posed should other nations – namely the Soviet Union – develop the Bomb first. Some have argued convincingly that the real purpose of the two nukes dropped on Japan was to impress the Soviets and to gather real-world data on the residual effects of radiation on human beings.
Physicist Freeman Dyson proposed a more prosaic explanation: “The reason that it was dropped was just because no one had the courage or the foresight to say no.”
In the summer of 2000, a high-energy physics experiment was carried out inside the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratories in New York. The experiment entailed the acceleration of the stripped-away outer electrons of gold atoms to near light-speed, at which point the electrons – traveling in opposite directions – collided.
Well before the date of the experiment, it was pointed out by several physicists that one possible, if unlikely, result of such a particle collision would be the creation of “strangelet” quarks, which have the decidedly bizarre (and thankfully rare) attribute of spontaneously generating further strangelets – each one of which transforms every particle it touches into still more strangelets and so on, until the entire earth (and perhaps universe) is consumed by the things.
Another possible result, also pointed out in advance, would be the generation of a singularity, or black hole, at the site of the experiment. Other than sucking Brookhaven Labs into a black abyss, such an occurrence would be of little benefit to Mankind. As John Nelson, leader of the team which conducted the experiment, put it in speaking to The Sunday Times of London in July of 1999: “The big question is whether the planet will disappear in the twinkling of an eye. It is astonishingly unlikely that there is any risk – but I could not prove it.”
In spite of the admittedly unlikely scenarios cited above, the experiment was in fact carried out – simply because the experimenters wished to see what would happen.
Again, Freeman Dyson: “I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles – this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”
After leading the Manhattan Project which developed the first atom bomb (a fission weapon), J. Robert Oppenheimer resolved not to pursue the even more powerful hydrogen bomb (a fusion weapon for which a fission weapon is merely the trigger), and to convince his fellow scientists to do the same. He was promptly labeled a communist, removed from all classified projects, and replaced by Edward Teller, who then went on to develop the hydrogen bomb (and also, unbelievably, to propose – in the form of Project Chariot – the detonation of up to six hydrogen bombs to blast a new harbor into the coast of the Alaskan wilderness as a demonstration of the “peaceful” uses of nuclear weapons).
The pressure to develop nanotechnology as a weapon will be far more intense than that faced by wartime foes or curious experimenters, because the first to achieve that feat will have the ability to prevent all others from duplicating it, if only by annihilation of all competitors. Nations which choose, for reasons of caution or ethics, to proceed slowly or not at all, will guarantee their future subordination to the will of the first to breach the development threshold.
Therein lies Marlow’s Second Paradox: Nanotechnology must never be developed, because it is too dangerous a thing to exist; nanotechnology must be developed – because it is too dangerous a thing to exist in the hands of others. The second rationale will drive the race for nanosuperiority; the first will be ignored.
The first nanopower, if it plays its cards right, will be the only nanopower, and will remain unchallenged for the foreseeable future. (Assuming there remains a future to foresee.)
In the entire history of the human race, there has never been such a prize for the taking, and there likely never will be again.
We are embarked upon Mankind’s final arms race. Caution will not be a factor; because the losers in the nanorace will exist only at the whim of the winner, many will see themselves as having nothing to lose.
Given this situation, these facts, the occasional incompetence of government and of the military in particular, and human nature – the earth itself may well be doomed.
This is the way the world ends. Maybe.
For further information on nanotechnology and other topics mentioned in this book, and to help save the world – visit the author’s Web site at www.johnrobertmarlow.com.
Closing remarks
Nanotechnology is a development which I think cannot be avoided.
– Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate physicist
Richard P. Feynman: “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics,” address to the 1959 annual meeting of the American Physical Society, December 29, 1959, at the California Institute of Technology; first published in Caltech’s Engineering and Science, February 1960. (Text of speech linked from author’s Web site at http://www.johnrobertmarlow.com. Though the term did not exist at the time he spoke, what Feynman was describing has since become known as nanotechnology.)
Purpose in writing this book
Nano was written to demonstrate the promise – and the peril – of what appears for more reasons than one to be the Final Big Breakthrough: the imminent development of nanotechnology.
I am not opposed to the development of nanotech – indeed, no intelligent person could be. Opposition is irrelevant and, paradoxically, endangers only those doing the opposing because it ensures that others not so opposed will take the lead.
Meticulous planning, diligent protocols, and extreme caution are called for – and the sooner, the better. We have at present an opportunity we will later be denied – and that is to work out the safest way to quickly proceed before the technology is here. And as nanotechnology pioneer K. Eric Drexler has pointed out, the sooner we begin thinking about and developing safeguards, the more time we will have to refine and implement them before they are needed. If we fail to take advantage of this opportunity, we are doomed.
This book was written to increase awareness of nanotechnology, to spark debate and, hopefully, to encourage serious thought by citizens, scientists, and governments about what we as a species need to do in order to ensure that we survive the inevitable development of this technology.
The best way to do that, I thought, was to write the best damned novel I could – one which shows dramatically (as no work of nonfiction could) what nano can do for us, and to us.
Decisions vital to the development of nanotechnology are now being made by scientists working in fields most people have never heard of, by corporations pursuing their own ends, and by governments pursuing still others. Few, as yet, seem to be pursuing nanotechnology as an end in itself. Rather, researchers in different fields continue to make progress in disparate areas which must ultimately come together to create a comprehensive nanotechnology.
The situation is perhaps analogous to the dawn of the Atomic Age – a time when several powers realized that nuclear weapons were possible, but when none had yet bridged the gap between what was possible and what had been achieved. World War 2 accelerated the bridging of that gap. There is no global war today, but global economic competition is in its own way a kind of war, and the stakes are now immeasurably higher. Whereas the uses of atomic energy are quite limited, applications for nanotechnologymilitary as well as commercial – are infinite. The Atomic Age will pale in comparison with the Age of Digital Matter.
Those who would call for a moratorium on nanoresearch will, if their calls are heeded, succeed only in accomplishing what Nazi Germany and fascist Italy accomplished early in the Atomic Agean accomplishment which doomed both to destruction: the driving out of the best minds in the relevant sciences, and the righteous treason of those who remained.
The first men to grasp the possibility of nuclear weaponsEnrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Albert Einstein (who were in turn informed of the discovery of fission after one of the German physicists who discovered it smuggled news of the discovery to a Jewish colleague who had fled Germany) – were to a man refugees from nations which had made it clear that moral men of reason and intellect were not welcome.
Similarly, scientists interested in pursuing nanotech will flee any nation which bans it, or conduct their work in secret. As Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman noted some forty years ago, nanotechnology will not be prevented. It cannot be prevented.
The emergence of nanotech, when it comes, will exert a far greater influence upon the destiny of the human race as a whole, and each individual comprising that race, than any other single event in the history of the world save the creation of life itself – and yet the average man or woman on the street is barely aware of the technology, let alone its implications.
I’m here to change that.
It has been said that ignorance is bliss. In a simpler world, that may have been true. In the world to come, however, ignorance is no longer bliss.
It is death.
Consider this a cautionary tale.
Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man’s discovery of fire … For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. We scientists recognize our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of the simple facts of atomic energy and its implications for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope – we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not death.
– Albert Einstein
(Albert Einstein: Letter written on behalf of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, January 22, 1947 [Einstein Archive 70-918].) Photograph of letter linked from author’s Web site at http://www.johnrobertmarlow.com.
Author’s Note: most referenced quotes are linked from the author’s Web site (http://www.johnrobertmarlow.com), and the full text of many cited documents is available online. A wealth of information regarding nanotechnology and other topics dealt with in the novel may also be found on the author’s Web site.
– John Robert Marlow 2004, Earth
Appendix – the superswarm option
Linked from 19/10/2007 Journal