e89dh@rigel.efd.lth.se (12/21/90)
Is there anybody out there who has concidered the military (or even terrorist) applications of nanotech. The simplest (and probably the worst) weapon would be a small self-replicating nano unit (using material from everything nereby, (including humans)), this is a quite good "doomsday weapon" in my view (I think it is called "grey goo" apokalypse). It would be quite easy to construct (compared to brain interfaces, trash->food coverters and other "positive" applications), "basement hackers" might even be able to construct them! If you dont want to destroy the world, build in a timer or make the self-replication stop after a fixed number of times. More complicated weapons includes "nanovirus" keyed to attack only specific persons (choosen by racial type, food habits, time&light, and things like that), and nuclear weapons made by small radioactive nano units (combinding and detonating at a specified place and time). To combat this, the military might use special nano-units made to detect and destroy the invading units, however it seems quite slow and ineffectual against the "grey goo apocalypse" to me (the "enemy" doesnt have to worry about the time consuming job of detecting other nano units, just duplicating). The military MIGHT be able to controll the spreading of their units, but I think that the day the programmable nanofactories is made public is a nice day to move to orbit (with a nanofactory of course). [This subject has actually been discussed at some length here a year or two ago. It is quite complex; I would sum up by saying that there is cause for concern but not cause for alarm. In particular, general-purpose gray goo seems very difficult to design; goo attacking specific substances and using specific energy sources is much more likely. Military applications of goo seem unlikely; given nanotechnology, you can build macro-machines that destroy a lot more a lot faster. --JoSH]