this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 91 points 8 months ago (2 children)

It's never safe to experiment with replicators. Just ask the asgard how that turns out.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Turns out they were after butt fat all along

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago

The Assgard.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Is that why the asgard were so emaciated? They modified their clones to have a complete absence of butt fat?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's hard to get fat on those little sustenance cubes

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

I like the yellow ones 🟨

[–] [email protected] 64 points 8 months ago (7 children)

Grey goo is a fun idea but doesn't really work.

Radiation would cause replication errors in the nanobots, eventually leading to speciation. Before you know it you just have an ecosystem again, with a whole food chain of butt eradicators and paperclip maximizers.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Butt Eradicators and Paperclip Maximisers

Sorry this will be my band name now

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

a fellow universal paperclip enjoyer, i see

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I don't think this is necessarily true. The reason DNA is so affected by radiation is because it's malleable. It's built out of chemical building blocks that fit like Lego. Gray goo would likely be similar to extremely complex proteins which replicate like a physical version of a quine.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Flipping an individual bit through radiation is extremely easy, which is why we need error corrections, but despite that, we still get errors... Even if the probability of an error bypassing the ECC is extremely low, over a long enough timescale it will happen often enough to evolve. Especially in space where there is no atmosphere or magnetic field to reduce it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I'm not talking about little tiny robots with batteries and computers, I'm talking about precisely formed, microscopic and deformable chunks of metal. That's why I brought up proteins- they do not carry any information themselves, and can sometimes form duplicates of themselves, such as in the case of prions.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Grey goo also doesn't work because it'd almost certainly use the same building blocks as life, and in a competition with life, life's probably going to be the winner. Even if it didn't, unless it's doing weird cold fusion subatomic interactions (probably impossible) to make more of whatever element it's composed of, it'll just run out of food in whatever local environment it's in.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

IIRC the bigger issue is that the nanobots would end up just melting themselves, to avoid this they'd have to work a lot slower, probably at about the rate of a particularly fast acting bacteria.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Whilst I agree that universal consuming nanobots are a bit far fetched, I’m not sure I’m sold on the replication problem.

Life has replication errors on purpose because we’re dependent on it for mid to long term survival.

It’s easy to write program code with arbitrarily high error protection. You could make a program that will produce 1 unhandled error for every 100000 consumed universes, and it wouldn’t be particularly hard, you just need enough spare space.

Mutation and cancer are potential problems for technology, but they’re decidedly solvable problems.

Life only makes it hard because life is chaotic and complex, there’s not an error correcting code ratio we can bump from 5 to 20 and call it a day.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 8 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 70 points 8 months ago

Always ass been.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago

Logic checks out. The whole universe is ass.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The term gray goo was coined by nanotechnology pioneer K. Eric Drexler in his 1986 book Engines of Creation. In 2004, he stated "I wish I had never used the term 'gray goo'."

Lmao

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

He accidentally created a self-sustaining technology and released it into the wild where it replicated beyond his ability to control it.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (2 children)

gray goo? more like gay goo amirite

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

When you right you right.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Fuckin gottem

[–] [email protected] 30 points 8 months ago

We will simply stop climate change by programming nano robots to absorb carbon atoms from everything they touch. - Elon Musk, probably.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago

I saw this one, Bender turns all the water into alcohol, right?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago

When you forget to put break conditions for a loop...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

Seems like it wouldn't really matter who he tested it on.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

Nanomachines decided the most effective way to remove butt fat is to replace it with the true vacuum

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Reminds me of Blood Music by Greg Bear, good book!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

What's it called... Kasakov cascade, or something like that?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago