The Superswarm Option

Published in hardback in February 2004, John Robert Marlow’s techno-thriller Nano is a tale about humanity’s close brush with extinction at the hands of “the Final Technology.”

The book tells a seat-gripping story, describing one possible “advanced nanotechnology” scenario. And while society as a whole must start discussing the possibilities that Marlow raises, there are issues, such as the economic disruption (discussed to a lesser extent in Marlow’s book) that could accompany near-term limited nanotech, that have a more urgent need. To learn more about near-term issues, there is no better place to go than the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN).

In Nano’s appendix, Marlow postulates something he calls the “Superswarm,” a means by which we may find a measure of safety once we achieve advanced nanotechnology. The following interview was conducted to address this concept.

Read the entire interview here.

2 thoughts on “The Superswarm Option”

  1. I think “grey goo” is nanotech’s equivalent to fears that nuclear testing could knock the Earth off its orbit. It just doesn’t make sense.

    I’m not going to even go into why I don’t think generic Drexlerian mechanochemistry is viable, so let’s assume that it is possible and go from there. I’m just going to focus on a single class of problems with a weapon that “can consume a city in minutes” — travel limitations.

    First, the viscosity of air (or any other fluid) is at an inverse relation to the cross-section of the item passing through it. A machine the size of a cell has as much resistance on its motion as a human would trying to walk through a vat of molasses. Second, there’s scale velocities. To eat a city in minutes would require the wave of replication to travel that distance in that period of time. Let’s assume that you’re eating the metro Atlanta area. Radiating from the center to the edges of the perimeter highway would require moving ten miles outward in 30 mintues. That’s about 20 MPH. Can you imagine anything the size of a cell travelling 20 MPH without the assistance of very strong winds? This includes time to hit the ground and replicate. Oh, and it’s got to overpower Van der Waals forces to move as well!

Comments are closed.