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Comment by ilostmykeys | Hacker News Reader

There is so much fear in pop culture of human-sized robots (I, Robot), giant ones (Transformers) and ones in charge of nukes (WarGames) but the 500 Years War is going to be with nano-molecular-bots that infiltrate our blood stream and spread like wild viruses. How do we combat human engineered nano invaders? No, seriously. How? Any ideas? ...

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Don't worry classic nano-tech robots were pretty much a scifi pipe dream. And if it does work we just have a friendly immune system of bots inside us fighting back. See Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. The nano-bots there are a pretty reasonable end point for if nano-tech ever actually works (and we don't immediately die to grey goo, though parts sound like there were times in the book where it almost happened but the good bots won).

Friendly nanobots to fight them? The same way we fight normal viruses, I guess.

See The Diamond Age, where the poor areas were covered in "toner", the remains of nanobots killed in an endless self-perpetuating war.

we fight normal viruses mostly one at a time like Ebola, Zika etc. Imagine a million variants invade the human and live stock species at once. How would we deal with that? It's terrifying.

That just doesn't feel very realistic to me. Weapons like that don't just appear out of nowhere. I imagine countermeasures could be developed at roughly the same pace as nanobot threats. And if not, we'll deal with it the same way we dealt with nukes. Hopefully it would go a little better this time, since we have a little apocalyptic experience to learn from.

And why is this limited to nanobots? Wouldn't it be easier to develop a million variations of existing biological viruses, rather than creating a million "species" of nanobots from scratch?

Grey goo has frightened me since I was a child. Now this. Thanks!

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