perry@WIND.BELLCORE.COM (Perry E Metzger) (06/14/89)
This is a two part message. 1. Money vs. Nanotech Someone pointed out that in a nanotech society, money becomes easy to counterfeit. My question is, why should we care? The existance of nanotechnology will so thoroughly disrupt our society that it isn't even clear that money will be NEEDED any more. I mean, in a world where anyone can simply grow anything that they could possibly need, why would they need to buy anything? I mean, in our current world, you can counterfeit money and then go out and buy a stereo. But in a nanotech endowed world, you could simply copy your friend's stereo and save time. I think that people will stop competing for resources for a long time. Need more room? Move to another planet. Need more raw materials? Ship them from whereever you need them from, and who cares about the cost when the robot you send to retrieve them can make its own fuel and as many copies of itself as needed to complete the job. Need an object? Just grow it. This makes the whole concept of a monetary economy silly. 2. Gray Goo vs Blue Goo Lets face it: thanks to nanotech, we will be able to destroy anything on the scale of a single planet without much trouble. Why bother with gray goo per se, when you could send out nanomachines to construct a 100 teraton nuclear bomb in a remote part of the ocean bed and blast the whole planet to smithereens? Forget having "Blue Goo" defend against that; a nuclear detonation is too fast to stop. On the other hand, there is the very real possibility that, freed of most resource considerations, we will no longer live on just the one planet, and will no longer have the space and other considerations that drive so many people to psychosis. I guess the real question is, will we survive the transition period? Perry [A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that it would take 2.76 billion 100 teraton bombs to blast the planet to smithereens... --JoSH]