Conventionally, it’s thought the only way that life on earth in its microbial form can
go completely extinct is at the hands of the sun.
No human activity can do it.
As the sun’s luminosity continues to increase, it will eventually result in a runaway greenhouse
effect and the melting of the earth’s surface, which will in turn snuff out all life on earth.
No other disaster can do that.
Mass extinctions yes, they happen, but causing the extinction of even the microbes, there’s
only the sun that can do it.
Except one other, and it’s technological.
It’s molecular nanotechnology and it actually has several ways it could cause the extinction
of life on earth.
Molecular nanotechnology is a simple concept, you build tiny machines that can assemble
molecules and materials on the atomic level.
In reference to this, Richard Feyman once said that there’s plenty of room at the
bottom as to just how small we can go as far as manipulating materials.
Only the atom itself presents a hard wall, anything on its level or bigger can hypothetically
be done.
This holds great promise in just about every field.
If it can be made to work for example, it might provide something close to immortality.
Imagine being able to manage the human body and repair it from within using tiny machines
on a cellular level.
Such a technology, if it proves viable, might even function as a kind of second immune system
and fight disease in the bloodstream, or be used to augment the human body in many potential
ways, from superintelligence to increased endurance and so on.
It may even be able to preserve the brain after clinical death giving more time to revive
someone, or conceivably revive them on its own.
Nanotech also may provide manufacturing possibilities far beyond anything we can do today, allowing
for nanofactories and 3d printers on a level being able to approach something like a star
trek replicator, but nothing close to as fast.
The problem here is heat, you can’t have your nanotechnological machines operating
so fast that they melt themselves and whatever it is they’re trying to make.
So in this case, it will probably be very specialized manufacturing on atomic scales,
rather than a replicator that can print out a cup of earl gray.
But with that heat generation comes a rather spooky possibility.
Speculation about just what nanotechnology will eventually be capable of has already
identified one major potential pitfall.
It’s the concept of the Gray Goo, and at its most basic it essentially is where self-replicating
nanotechnology consumes all biomass on earth as it makes copies of itself.
There’s actually a term for this, ecophagy, where an entire biosphere gets consumed by
something.
The Grey Goo scenario is dependent on exponential growth and potentially consumption of the
planet, eventually, estimates that it could do it within days are thought to not be viable,
but over years, it could happen so long as you had no way to stop it.
Perhaps even more disconcerting is the idea of using nanotechnology to create custom species.
Say you created new plants that had no analogue in nature, and these artificial plants escaped
captivity and spread into the wild, outcompeting their natural counterparts resulting in a
mass extinction.
Or custom bacteria doing much the same.
Ultimately however, it’s unlikely that anything like this would ever be built, due to the
dangers inherent to it, rather less capable nanotechnology that won’t result in disaster
is more likely.
You don’t need to equip a bulldozer with jet engines just to level a field.
Even more spooky regarding molecular nanotechnology and its implications is the idea of a singleton.
At its most basic, it isn’t necessarily nanotechnological.
Rather it is the concept of an AI emerging or being purpose built to essentially rule
the world.
The idea being that a computer with absolute power globally could make better, more rational
decisions than any group of biological humans could.
Such an emperor computer would effectively be immortal, able to make copies of itself
and backups and if left unchecked could actively prevent any threat to its hegemony over humanity.
Anyway, the idea of a singleton can be taken a step further.
If one were to emerge intentionally or accidentally, it may choose to obliterate not just humanity
but all life on planet earth if it saw it as undesirable and a threat to its supremacy.
Or we could become the singleton.
If you were somehow able to get all humans in collective agreement on all ideas we could
form the singleton.
This is basically impossible in natural humans, disagreement is what we do, but through brain
augmentation and the development of human superintelligence this may become a concern.
We would effectively turn into the borg and bring about a very new reality to human existence,
if as a singleton we could even still be defined as human as opposed to a hive mind.
It’s an interesting future indeed when homo sapiens is no longer what we are, but rather
that we descended from, and would constitute a completely new technological species.
The benefits of a singleton could be enormous, in addition to the inherent risks.
Such a super brain would be inherently better at resource management, for example.
It could also mitigate risks such as nanotechnology by preventing its development wholesale, deeming
it too dangerous.
On the other hand however it may employ nanotechnology for control purposes, or even artificial extinction
purposes.
The singleton concept augmented with molecular nanotechnology can in principle have another
origin entirely.
An alien singleton imposed on the galaxy.
This is yet another scenario involving the zoo hypothesis.
This is where the galaxy is ruled by a silent immortal galactic dictator of some sort, perhaps
descending from the first instance of intelligent life in the Milky Way, being perhaps billions
of years older than us.
This ancient power would simply allow for worlds to develop naturally, itself living
in a kind of hibernation or virtual reality silently and undetectably in the universe
only waking up and intervening when necessary.
One such intervention might be the signal that a civilization is getting close to molecular
nanotechnology, and that could be seen as a threat to the entire galaxy.
The dictator then wakes up and imposes itself on that civilization, and either downshifting
them, or obliterating them.
It may even use nanotechnology itself for this purpose, in the way a nation state tries
to maintain secrecy and control over new advanced weaponry here on earth.
This also opens up the way for a solution to the Fermi Paradox where all alien technology
is invariably undetectable because it’s extraordinarily small and nanotechnological
in nature.
Even large amounts of nanotechnological self-replicating machines do not make much of a technosignature
because it may well simply appear as dust around a star.
The behavior of such dust might be detectable and strange, but as for the dust in itself
not so much.
But those scenarios aside, what happens if we develop molecular nanotechnology as a tool
and how could it go wrong.
Here, molecular nanotechnology offers some enormous benefits.
It can be used to clean up oil spills and environmental disasters, alter an atmosphere’s
chemical makeup for terraforming, generate artificial rain, inject increased water vapor
into the atmosphere and cause global cooling by raising earth’s albedo by increasing
cloud cover.
It could consume microplastics, alter oceanic acidification, and many many other uses if
we can get the technology to work.
But there’s one thing that molecular nanotechnology could do that might be a problem in and of
itself.
It can heat an atmosphere.
This would require self-replicating nano machines filling the atmosphere, which is a problem
in itself, very high numbers of heat producing machines filling the atmosphere could catastrophically
warm it, even to the point of killing all surface, and eventually subsurface life, resulting
in the wholesale extinction of all life on earth.
The natural precaution here would be a kill switch, where the nanotechnology could be
turned off or otherwise controlled and kept from exponential growth, unless someone were
looking to make a weapon.
There are similarities between certain nanotechnology concepts and a fuel-air bomb.
Likewise in human history whenever a technology was developed that could end civilization,
the nuclear weapons, multiple nations pursued them.
This is a serious danger stemming from the development of nanotechnology because the
weapons potential of it is enormous.
But there is another option for nanotechnology that could lead to some very strange future
possibilities.
It’s the technology’s use in space.
There are essentially two ways to use molecular nanotechnology in space, one inside habitats,
and one outside in space itself.
In space itself, it might be useful in construction, or asteroid mining.
This would be beyond odd looking, some vague cloud surrounding an asteroid spitting out
ingots every now and again of extremely pure metals.
.999 refinement of a metal has nothing on the potential absolute metal purity nano technological
mining could produce by manipulating individual atoms.
Inside a habitat, nanotechnology will prove useful in everything from growing food to
managing the internal atmosphere of habitats and even maintenancing the habitat itself
on a micro scale.
But here again, nanotechnology can go every bit as wrong on a habitat as it can on a planet,
and this leads to one last odd scenario.
If humans continue to alter themselves, and eventually begin to live entirely in space
habitats, leaving earth to largely return to nature, then you have the odd situation
of humans taking different evolutionary paths based on what technologies they pursue unique
to each habitat, say giant rotating o’neill cylinders.
This leads to many different divergent species of future augmented humans, which may not
end up to be that great of a situation.
If any of those species were to lose control of their nanotechnology in their habitat,
they might meet their end, in which case the concept of extinction takes on an entirely
new dimension.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently confident that AI
will never amount to anything ….
(Stellardrone: Ascent) Uh oh.
ANNA: John.
Why are all your passwords the same thing?
JMG: I only have so much memory.
And besides, the possum can’t speak English.
He’ll never figure them out.
Possum: (Cackles)
JMG: Wait, my bank balance just dropped … and it just did it again.
ANNA what is this charge from “Randy’s Superintelligent A.I. Circuit Company” and
there’s one from “Scratchy’s Opossum Neutron and Bone Food emporium”.
Yeah, I wonder who around here eats neutrons and bones.
ANNA, what’s going on here?
ANNA: I don’t know John.
I certainly don’t know your password.
Possum: (Cackles inquisitively)
ANNA: Oh yes, you’d love that…(possum says 2) wait what do you need two for?
Possum: (chirps)
JMG: Must be some kind of bank mistake, I’ll just call the bank some time and be sure to
check out my books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channels
for regular, in depth explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of
this amazing universe in which we live.
Possum: Gghgghhggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
(Cackles)