Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody

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And as usual, it all starts very small, and with only the best of intentions: Researchers at the University of California have recently developed nanomites equipped with small doses of chemotherapy drugs. These simple nanobots actively target cancer that is attempting to spread, and then attach to a protein found on cancerous blood vessels that supplies tumors with their oxygen and other nutrients. They then inject their payload of drugs into the vessels, which causes them to deny the tumors sustenance, thus preventing the cancer from metastasizing and spreading to other organs, which is really what kills most cancer patients. The drugs don’t eliminate the tumor; they just contain the cancer and starve it until somebody can come along and kill it. To put it more succinctly: They function like a million tiny Auschwitzes… inside your blood.

This development is important because the cancer drug used—doxorubicin—is also a highly toxic poison, one that causes fatal heart attacks in a significant portion of the people it’s administered to. But the nanobots are able to administer the drug so precisely that the amount needed for treatment is drastically reduced, and the side effects are almost nonexistent. It’s a technology that could save your life one day, and a damn good reason to have these things inside your blood and be quite happy about it. Just try to avoid thinking about the submolecular genocide raging inside your veins. And I wouldn’t mention the fact that the poisonous robots living inside your blood are the only thing keeping you alive, if I were you. (There are nice, padded places the police tend to bring you to if you say things like that out loud.) Oh, and definitely don’t dwell on the somewhat worrying prospect that if too many of these poisonous-drug-administering nanomachines were introduced into your body, just waiting for the cue to activate, you’d be basically walking around pre-murdered, just waiting for somebody to take a whack at the robot- filled poison pinata that is your body. So that Auschwitz-in-the-blood analogy from earlier still holds true. It’s just that this time, you’re the one in the showers.

Historical Tradeoffs That May Not Have Been Worth It

• Indians swapping Manhattan for beads

• The Chinese allowing British occupation in exchange for opium trade

• Curing cancer by injecting poisonous robots

But hey, don’t start getting freaked out yet! This wasn’t even the part intended to scare you; it was just an example of some of the wonderful things that nanotechnology can do for you (in this case, injectable anticancer Nazi robots).

It’s very unlikely that the burgeoning field of nanobiotechnology will be reserved solely for medical uses. There’s a pretty standard, preestablished pattern of dissemination in place for new technology. At first, new tech is always reserved for serious uses, but before long it’s so commonplace that you have it everywhere. Take the internet, for example: It was exclusively a military network just over forty years ago, and now half the line at Starbucks is tapping into said former military network to check out grammatically impaired cats while waiting for their Grande Frappucino. So sure, nanobiotech is just for cancer treatment now, but maybe tomorrow it’s a flu vaccine and maybe a week from now it’s a pain reliever, or a subdermal sunblock, or maintenance-free contact lenses. But if it’s that commonplace, then why not go further? Why not a customizable, morphing tattoo? Or a permanent cell phone in your ear? How about a remote control installed in your brain? The potential uses are tempting, and the appeal is easy to see.

We’ve established that it will be inside everybody eventually. Then what? Even supposing that nobody abuses the technology, its very nature makes even the most benevolent intent potentially lethal. Take the respirocytes proposed by nanoexpert Robert Freita: They’re a harmless application, just a kind of artificial red blood cell that pumps oxygen more efficiently and more stably than the natural equivalent—236 times more efficiently, to be precise. Because of this dramatically heightened performance, they would be invaluable in treating disorders such as anemia and asthma, or simply to oxygenate the blood for better endurance and performance in sporting events. In other words, they’re blood-borne nerd fixers.

However, with higher doses of these nanobots, their hosts could also be able to do things like hold their breath for several hours and run at a dead sprint for nearly twenty minutes. And that’s great! How many of you would want to be able to do that? Now, how many of you want anybody else to be able to do that? Go ahead; raise your hand if you want sociopaths who breathe underwater, sprinting rapists, and serial killers who never tire.[2]

Not to mention the worrying fact that these machines are by no means human-specific. The respirocytes take a kind of frat-boy approach to blood: If it’s warm, it needs to be pumped. No further distinctions need to be made. Also of concern is the fact that their durable outer shell and self-sustaining programming make them seriously hardy devices, easily capable of surviving and functioning outside of their intended environment for long durations. And when you factor in how easily they could spread—their transferability by blood and other bodily fluids—you start to get a worrisome picture. One bad accident at the local zoo with somebody hosting these nanobots and next thing you know, you’ve got untiring, superspeed pythons racing through the streets and a terrifying new version of sea lion roaring at the bottom of your pool. In an instant, the food chain is drastically reordered. Though the chief concern for now is just the effect a modified species could have on its local ecosystem, any supercharge in the efficiency of predators is the last thing we need.

After all, humans are only at the top of our food chain because we’re smart enough to compensate for our insane physical incompetence as a species. So… maybe you should start studying. Because pretty soon, a billion tiny robots might be seriously hot-rodding up some grizzly bears, and you? Well, let’s just say you’re going to have to get a hell of a lot smarter in a big hurry if you plan on making it back from the store with both arms.

10. GRAY GOO

IF YOU’RE TALKING about nanotechnology at a party, two things are assured:

1. Nobody is going to have sex with you in the foreseeable future, and…

2. Somebody will bring up the Gray Goo Scenario.

The term “Gray Goo,” for those of you probably too busy boning right now to read this, describes the danger of self-replicating nanomachines running amok, forgoing any meaningful objectives in favor of just endlessly reproducing themselves like tiny little robotic Irish Catholics. The term was originally coined by a man named Eric Drexler in 1986, in his book Engines of Creation. He called it this partly because nanotech was just being recognized as the next industrial wave of the future, and also because the far more awesome title, “Engines of Destruction,” was already taken by three Swedish metal bands, two monster trucks, and one particularly shitty mechanic.

In his book, Drexler writes of Gray Goo as something akin to the Midas touch, the simple wish that everything you touch turns to gold, which leads to you dying of starvation, because you cannot eat gold. Here the simple wish is that you didn’t have to build every single goddamned microscopic robot by hand, which leads to your limbs being eaten by robots. Because if you encourage incredibly simple nanobots to build more of themselves, the danger is that they won’t know when to stop pulling apart matter for its raw building materials, then using those appropriated materials to build more robots, which, in turn, will do the same thing. If left unchecked, the nanobots would eventually break down everything into its core elements, effectively restructuring the entire planet into robots. While the idea of an entire planet turning into a robot may indeed make a sweet-ass plot for the next Transformers movie, the unfortunate consequence would be the end of all life as we know it. Not exactly worth the trade-off, in my opinion.

Hindsight Is 20/20

“I guess we shouldn’t have ‘encouraged’ those robots to eat people in order to build more people eating robots.”

—Early nanotech scientist