It’s true that bacteria aren’t a major issue for modern humans, but modern humans happen to be among the most hostile places imaginable for bacteria. Lacking complex adaptions to help, it makes more sense for a bacteria to survive the rigors of space than to survive on our skin; of course, they do have those complex adaptions, and those adaptions do cost a lot of energy. They’re just superior to the alternative, eg. death.
Part of the reason for making replicating nanotechnology fragile, as I see it, is that this way we’ll be much less likely to see the sort of runaway weapons race that has led to an environment where replicators must devote most of their resources simply to avoid being killed by other replicators. It’s a fresh start. Let’s make the most of it.
So far, the virus-host coevolution battle within machines has been going on for about 30 years now. It seems as though people mostly don’t care enough about viruses to bother with engineering them down to very low levels.
Tyler -
It’s true that bacteria aren’t a major issue for modern humans, but modern humans happen to be among the most hostile places imaginable for bacteria. Lacking complex adaptions to help, it makes more sense for a bacteria to survive the rigors of space than to survive on our skin; of course, they do have those complex adaptions, and those adaptions do cost a lot of energy. They’re just superior to the alternative, eg. death.
Part of the reason for making replicating nanotechnology fragile, as I see it, is that this way we’ll be much less likely to see the sort of runaway weapons race that has led to an environment where replicators must devote most of their resources simply to avoid being killed by other replicators. It’s a fresh start. Let’s make the most of it.
So far, the virus-host coevolution battle within machines has been going on for about 30 years now. It seems as though people mostly don’t care enough about viruses to bother with engineering them down to very low levels.