Nanobots & Molecular AI | Engineering Life at the Cellular Level

What if nanobots could heal you cell by cell—or consume the planet? Nanotechnology and artificial intelligence converge in this episode of Entropy Rising, where we break down the real science behind molecular machines, from FDA-approved cancer treatments to the speculative fiction nightmare of self-replicating nanobots. Discover how the future might blur the line between medicine and existential risk.

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The biggest fear of nanotechnology- Mm-hmm especially self-replicating nanotechnology, is a potential gray goo situation. Ah, yes. The all-consuming. Yes. There's always this fear that if you make these self-replicating nanobots, what happens if they just break down everything in your environment to make more self-replicating nanobots, and you just end up with this planet that's just nothing but nanobots anymore? All organic material or anything that can be consumed is consumed. it really is the worst case of mission was unclear- … consumed everything meme, Yes. Yes, exactly. please produce paperclips. Uh, yes, sir. Produces paperclips out of literally everything in the observable universe. Hello, and welcome to Entropy Rising, a podcast all about the possible futures that we may see and, and some we may not. I'm your host Jacob, and joining me is my wonderful co-host, Lucas. Lucas, how are you doing today? I'm wonderful. How are you, Jake? I'm doing well. I really can't complain. We're recording, uh, weather's good and- Yeah… what else is there to complain about? Nothing, man. Life is good. Life is good, especially when you're talking about such an interesting topic, which is what we're covering today, nanotechnologies. Ooh. So we're gonna talk about the futures of nanotechnologies, where nanotechnology stands today, what might be possible, what might not, and how that might affect our society, and what we can actually do in the future. it's a, Crazy vast topic. I think that the best place to start would probably be, , where we are right now with it. I think that's a good starting point because It has been this futuristic concept in science fiction, ah, for ages now, right? We've always dreamed of conquering the nano scale. Sometimes it can feel like, like I said, the future, something unachievable, and it's easy to overlook what we've already accomplished and what we already do with nanomaterials in today's world. One of the ones that I'm the most familiar with, 'cause I've worked with it professionally to a certain extent, is actually nanotechnologies in pharmaceuticals. Hm. We have already patented and released FDA-approved drugs that use nanotechnologies. If you got your COVID vaccine, that used liposomes, which are effectively nano-sized particles made up of, uh, effectively lipid bilayers, kind of similar to how cells are made. And that's just one example. We also have things like iron nanoparticles. So iron nanoparticles are used a lot effectively with cancer imaging and also cancer treatment. Uh, because of the actual nature of their size, they accumulate sometimes in tumors. And the reason for that is if you can imagine a tumor, right, it's, an abnormal piece of tissue- Mm-hmm if you wanna think about it that way. So tumors, cause a lot of blood vessels to grow. Right. but those blood vessels don't have normal anatomy, so they tend to be, quote-unquote, leaky, and the tumors also typically don't grow proper lymphatic systems. And so lymphatic systems are important'cause that's what causes fluids to drain. Right. So you've got this inpour of fluid through leaky blood vessels and fluid not properly draining, so now if you introduce nanoparticles into the system, , they tend to make their way into the tumor, but then they're not able to get out. They build up, and then if those nanoparticles are, , magnetic, for example, iron nanoparticles, they light up on an MRI. Mm-hmm. And so these can be used for cancer imaging- One of the other interesting things you can do is if you then aggregate the nanoparticles, for example, you put them in a quickly oscillating magnetic field, they'll heat up and destroy the tissue around them. And if they're accumulating in your tumor, they'll kill the tumor. Wow. Those are, those are two examples of how nanomaterials already exist. There are many more, and there's more things we can do. We can take these liposomes, functionalize them with ligands that specifically bind to certain areas like tumor cells, disease cells, yada, yada, yada, and they'll, accumulate and deliver drug that way as well absolutely insane. like being able to use nanotechnology, especially in the healthcare field, I feel like that's where we see it the most. it's the most prominent. It's what has been the most invested into currently, and a lot of people I know think of nanobots, right? Yes, absolutely. When, when you're talking about it. Like, You see in the movies, somebody takes a pill, and then nanobots are flooding throughout their system, and it reports diseases and, uh, is able to target stuff and make them stronger, faster, better. You know, like that, and that's not too far-fetched. we can use micro robotics, in our system. I don't know if we'd want them running through our bloodstream, just because it would be s- probably seen as a foreign body no matter how you spin it. But it's a, it's a very cool idea of making these, essentially nano compounds, like you see in the pharmaceuticals, to be able to target certain diseases and actually make the human body healthier. Yeah, these are effectively nano-sized drug delivery systems, and they exist today, and they're in FDA-approved medications today. So it is interesting that we already have it, and it's not just in medicine that we have it, too, of course. If you've ever seen the marketing, I think there's, like quantum LED TVs, right? QLED- Mm-hmm TVs. That's not just a marketing gimmick. Those are actually made of quantum dots, which are also nano materials as well. And then we've also seen things like carbon nanotubes starting to catch on. Those, again, are not science fiction. We can't yet really make them at a useful scale and in a useful way, but we can make them. They do exist. We know their properties. And again, these are things that exist now. Graphene, I think, is another example of that as well. I think it, definitely is a much broader, field than a lot of people think of. specifying when we're talking about these nanotechnologies, it's just something that is really measured at a nanometer scale, to break that down, it's like the tip of a pen, is about a million nanometers across, right? So we're talking things much, much smaller than that, and it doesn't just have to be, robotic products. It, it can be pretty much any technology that is advanced at that scale. Yeah, absolutely. And for me, being in the pharmaceutical side of the world, uh, I think it's most interesting 'cause that's basically the same size that our cellular, uh, mechanisms work on. And so when you're able to interact with matter at the nano scale, you're effectively able to interact with human bodies at the most basic fundamental level and cure diseases from a root cause And really achieve- if not what you said earlier, which is, you know, these nanobots that crawl through your system a- and fix everything., But really start to achieve that ideal or get closer to that with something like a magic bullet that comes in and just targets your disease, and only your disease, with no side effects, and cures you, right? That's always the goal of medicine, and that's, that's the field I'm in. So that's what intrigues me the most. Yeah. Medicine, like, we were saying before, its advancements are crazy. And with, The nanobots you were saying, they do have some that are able to target cancer at an 80% success rate. These aren't nanobots, though. I do wanna make that distinction. What we have now- No, nanodots … nanodots. Yes, yes. Sorry, I misunderstood. Yes, nanodots. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And these, and if, if they're nanodots, they're either targeting through functional ligands, or they're probably using something called the EPR effect, which are, again, those leaky vessels we were talking about earlier. Yes. And They're actually so small that they're able to penetrate,, Layers of, tissue with- without actually, destroying that tissue. They, they essentially go through, Your pores in the tissue- Yeah, absolutely to, to get to the other parts of the body. So they're, they're super interesting. And, and it is still an early technology, but as Jake was saying, he works in the pharmaceutical world. He's already introducing drugs that are being used today- Yeah right, to do things like the- Yeah, we have seen those being used. So the clear distinction between what we have today and what we want in the future with nanomaterials isn't necessarily just making the nanomaterials. Although that is a big part of it, is figuring out better production systems, being able to make them better at scale. But actually really the biggest difference between the nanotechnology we have today and the nanotechnology that we see in science fiction is how smart it is. Current nanotechnology is not smart at all. The nanomedications that we're talking about are effectively just nano carriers that work as an API protectant, and then you can stick chemical modifiers onto the outside of them so that they bind with cells that you want. But they are by no means smart. They still rely on just randomly bumping into the cell and then binding with it, and, and that's nice and that's handy, but that's a far cry from what we see in science fiction where you have actually intelligent nano-sized machines that can go through your body and act like hunter-seeker drones to find diseased tissue and eliminate it or monitor your body on a cellular scale and let you know immediately when something's going wrong or even start fixing it, immediately, right? Like I love the Culture series and I think that's something they have there, rapid healing, from traumatic injuries and things like that. that's super exciting because We see this in all technologies. You start off as kinda like a, rough, beginning and then as it advances it becomes like very rapidly, smarter If we can develop nanotechnologies that are able to, learn for themselves, fix, repair, create things even on their own, you're breaching into a world of manipulating, all the physical matter around you which is a Very exciting thought. I think that the ability for smart nano-medicines really could get us as close to immortality as is physically possible. These are machines that could actually go through and repair you cell by cell to keep you alive. Perhaps they go through and actually, help with cellular replication or, you can clone, new cells of yourself and actually have these nanobots bring them in And swap them out with older cells so that they can continue replicating forever., These are really interesting things. But actually, uh, Lucas, I would like to talk about The makeup of nanobots for a moment. Okay. Specifically with medicine, but we'll also talk about it with some other applications as well, because I feel like there is an idea of how nanobots are, right? If you, the viewer, will think for a moment and actually picture what you think a nanobot is, what are you thinking of? How about you, Lucas? I'm thinking of like a tube with a little antenna coming out of the back. Okay. And then like, you know, some legs. Yeah, yeah, like a, like a robot. Yeah. to me, this is so interesting 'cause I think when you get to the nano scale, in my opinion, I think that you're actually gonna start seeing technology mimicking biology in a lot of ways. Don't think you're necessarily gonna end up with these mechanistic robots that are crawling around in your body. I really think that in many ways, the future of nanobots and at least for biology are gonna resemble our own cellular machinery. We might utilize already existing structures. For example, our cells are protected by phospholipid bilayers, and I w- I could see that making up the outer skin of your nanobot. our body interactions are mediated through, signaling molecules and proteins, and, you know, for me, a biological nanobot would probably be just that. It would probably have some type of phospholipid bilayer 'cause that's compatible with our biology. It would have, antibodies that are, put on the surface of it so your immune system doesn't get targeted. its cellular machinery might even be closely derived from biology. I mean, maybe we use some slightly different chemical structures. maybe we use different informational carriers, right? Or maybe we don't. We might even, instead of inventing, uh, a new solution to a problem, we might basically use the brains of this nanobot, might be DNA. Maybe it's DNA we programmed, from the ground up, fully synthesized DNA in a lab that will instruct it on what to do. But DNA nonetheless, still taking advantage of things like transcript RNA to make signaling proteins to scan your body. Now, maybe it does have some smarter abilities. Maybe there's an antenna, contained within that phospholipid bilayer that's able to be detected or even transmit some information to a scanning computer so that it can report back on what it's found or accept new instructions or, something along those lines. But that's how I typically picture, uh, nanobots, at least inside of the body, is basically artificially created cells more than little robots that are crawling around. I think that's, for me, the more realistic, uh, idea. I would absolutely agree with you, o- only because, as we see, throughout organic structures, it's always better to try and mimic what it already has than to introduce essentially what is a small robot. So, like, the body's going to fight that. It's going to see it as, problem, and that's actually our biggest problem right now with, uh, nanotechnology because, We're producing things like, fake organs, things like that, prosthetics. You'll see even on the surface layer with prosthetics, the body starts rejecting it. If you're able to create, structures or, compounds that are able to mimic cells or, actually even adjust cells to become what you want them to, that's still a nanotechnology, but it's going to incorporate a lot better into the human body. and that's where I think the future of medicine is. But the future of medicine isn't o- the only use case for the future of nanobots. Even if I think it's one we see the most in science fiction- Mm-hmm I think because people wanna live longer and people want diseases to be treated, which me too. I, I think that's why there's this natural idea of nanobots in medicine. But that's not the only use case for them. not at all. In our last episode, we covered agriculture. That is another huge field where you can see nanobots introduced. mostly because of what Jake was saying, you can modify animal cells, but you can also modify plant cells on the nano level, allowing you to essentially completely reshape crops, create entirely different crops, remove disease, remove anything that you would be able to do with a human cell that we build up in our minds for the future. Yeah, I could absolutely see that. I mean, a lot of agriculture right now already relies on bacteria in many ways. You have nitrogen-fixing bacteria that has this, like, symbiotic relationship with the roots that are actually what fixes nitrogen from the air and turns it into something the plant can use. It's not hard to imagine that we would make nanobots on the size of a bacterium, if not smaller, that's designed to go through the soil and find nutrients and make them more bioavailable for the plant so the plants grow better, or go through soils and look for contaminants and remove them, or even go through the plants themselves and collect, things like heavy metals. That's a big issue. A lot of plants, like, I think soybeans are an example of this. They're bioaccumulators for things like heavy metals. Mm-hmm. I know if not soybeans, a lot of mushrooms are. And so having the ability to dump some nanobots on your field and have them go through and, collect all of these contaminants so that you know your field is safer for the people, that's a huge benefit. It is. And that benefit extends past just agriculture, too. I mean, this could be huge for environmental cleanup. imagine if we could go to Chernobyl right now, right? There's a lot of, radioactively contaminated material buried under the soil. What if you could drop a bunch of nanobots on that? They go through, identify what's radioactive and what's not on a, like, almost molecular scale, and then they, collect all the contaminated stuff, and once they're full, they maybe migrate to a, a certain collection point, and you just scoop them all up in a blob. They've concentrated all this contaminated material, uh, and then you can take them on to dispose of, whether that's through disposing of them or maybe the nanobots can excrete this material and, uh, go back and be used again. that would be massive for us, and it's a technology that's probably a little bit closer than you think because we're already using a technology like that as a film in a lot of smokestacks now that actually collect contaminants from said smokestacks. Not on nuclear facility because that's, steam, of course. But on these ones that are pumping out deadly chemicals, things like that into our atmosphere, these films on smokestacks are actually able to collect a lot of that contaminant, and then it's able to essentially scrape itself, and then you can reapply another film. really cool technology. Really cool technology, but the difference between that and what the next step is is actually adding some intelligence to it so you can release it on already contaminated areas. Mm-hmm. And it can basically go through and clean it up. how many industrial waste sites are gonna be unusable for centuries, that we have no way to clean that this could go through and do on, like, almost, like I said, that molecular scale? mean- I mean, it's amazing. it really is. Imagine you just dump it on a landfill and it reduces the footprint, both of the runoff and also just the amount of mass in that landfill, and it just breaks it down and pulls all of that that can be recycled out of it. That's another one, actually, I'm glad you talked about, too, because it's not just about cleaning up contaminated areas in terms of, chemical spill or something like that, but also disposing of our waste in a better way. Because, like you said, we have these landfills, and what do you do with them? A lot of them are made up of material that will never biodegrade. The key word there is biodegrade, because we do. We rely on bacteria to get rid of a lot of our waste, but of course, bacteria can't break down certain objects. Mm-hmm. And this is where nanotechnology comes in. You effectively can make, from the ground up, your own bacterium that can handle synthetic materials like plastics and can break them down into, potentially a more inert form or, at the bare minimum, a more useful form. Even if they don't turn it into something more useful, perhaps just turning all of the free chemicals into, Carbon, so you basically just end up with a more concentrated pit of things like coal, uh, could be super useful, as long as we don't burn it again. that would be amazing because at least… If even if we do burn it again, it's still a useful resource. Yeah, at the bare minimum, you know, if you were using the nanobots to turn, released CO2 back into coal to then re-burn it, which would probably be a net energy sink. You would probably lose more energy in that process, but whatever. Let's say you did do that. It actually, funny enough, still is carbon neutral because you harvested the carbon from your atmosphere to then re-release into the atmosphere. So it's a, it's a weird case where burning a, a hydrocarbon is carbon neutral. Those are rare, but they do happen. it might even be worth the energy if we have a Dyson sphere and we just wanna, energy storage perhaps. Yeah, you could. Yeah. And, um… it is a super cool idea, just being able to break down all those materials and just put them into a denser structure that can be stored and at least not, leak and contaminate like a lot of landfills do now. And it also would take up a lot less space, which is, going into the future, going to be something that's very, very important. speaking of space, of course, nanoparticles can help us, reach our goals of being an interstellar civilization. And I think this is a use case we see in science fiction a lot. This is the dream, right, of taking a, vial of nanobots and then turning them over on the surface of Mars and then coming back to a new Eden, right? Mm-hmm. I know that's been explored in science fiction many, many times. now, we're talking about essentially s- and super intelligent, well designated, almost conscious-driven nanobots at this point that have, A mission to create livable planet. And they would self-replicate, harvest resources, things like that, so that they could spread and do it faster. and that idea is very cool, especially for terraforming It is. I do think people still underestimate how long that's going to take, though, people imagine you dump these nanobots, right? And then they just zoom off, and they completely cover the planet in a few, months to years, and then they start working. But the, the reality of the situation is it could still take centuries for them to actually out far enough and seed the whole planet, if not thousands of years. And that's just to, fully infect the planet, and then they have to start doing the work of fixing whatever issue you have., But once they do that, that's where it starts getting interesting 'cause they might start digesting that soil and making it useful for things like our plants, kind of working like a nitrogen-fixing bacteria, just being able to fix tons of other things like the Martian regolith, which right now is full of things like perchlorates and, and aren't very habitable. perhaps they're absorbing things from the atmosphere and, uh, breaking them down or sequestering them to make the atmosphere more friendly for humans. But it is definitely a fascinating concept to be able to, to manipulate a planet on such a, fundamental level. it definitely is. And even though that would take some time, that technology of being so versatile is something that we can apply to almost everything around us. And another concept that we see in science fiction a lot is n-using nanobots for the creation of other things. As aside from just rebuilding a planet, nanobots can be used to repair ships the same way that we talked about them, doing quick repairs on tissue. a ship that takes damage, A nano swarm can form into it and essentially, as a living metal, reform itself into whatever that ship needs at that moment. Now, imagine we use these self-replicating nanobots that are able to form structures to build cities, to build materials, and it's something that is being dived into slightly right now with self-repairing concrete, which is a really cool concept that- Is currently being, looked into. But it's essentially, These nanobots are laid within the concrete. Whenever it splits, they essentially, break off the oxygen that's going into the concrete, allow the concrete to break down, and then reform it into the cracks. this technology can be furthered into building whatever we would want in the future. And l- like I said before, it would essentially give us, the physical world around us. Could be mended to our will. Yeah, Alastair Reynolds covers the idea , in his Revelation Space series. But in both his sh- spaceships and the actual cities, Chasm City being the main example, they're made of smart material that can reorientate themselves depending on the needs of whomever. for the city it was interesting, because the actual buildings themselves could change as architectural styles changed, I mean, we all know you can tell a building was built in the '80s versus a building being built now, and it looks out of date, and it looks odd. So in, in his books, he explores the idea of these cities being made of smart materials, where you can change it to fit the designs of the current, people. Mm-hmm. did that go well? I'll let you read the books for yourself. But it is definitely an interesting thought and one fun to think about. And like you said, you could use it as a self-repairing mechanism. Something else that's interesting to think about too is how the nano scale can interact with the macro scale. Thinking about a, a future ship or robot or whatever made of nanobots can actually distribute its computation throughout all of the nanobots, so it doesn't have any one core computational center, Each one of the little nanobots are just pitching in just, just a slight amount of computation, but when you have millions and billions of them, you could end up with quite a smart material, maybe even well beyond human intelligence. And pairing that with something like AI could end up being, um, well, quite a, hard foe to encounter, right? This is, this is gonna be like the, what is it? The T-2 in Terminator, the one that's made of the liquid metal. Oh, yeah. it's just like the, alien that you see in The Expanse as well. Aren't they a broad, nano creature? I actually don't remember. Yeah, I don't… I, I can't remember. I do know they use a lot of nanotech once- Mm …you get through, um, spoilers for something that's been out for quite a while now. Oh, g- oh, God, I'm sorry. I, I'm, reading the new books actually, by the same author. he's got A new work going out, and the second, like, book in the series… Well, it's like a, a mini, like, book between the first and second one. It's the, the Captive's War series. They also use a lot of nanotech for, uh, suits. It's… There's a… It's… The book is called Live Suit. Mm-hmm. I don't wanna give any major spoilers, but this one's been out for a while, and it's not ke- keyly important for the main series. that's what they have is effectively a nanobot suit that completely entraps the soldier and enhances them in every way and offers a bunch of the abilities we were talking about before, like smart repair, wound addressing, and it can, uh, adapt reactively to a situation. Say, if you lose your leg, it can then expand out and give you a, a prosthetic leg on the spot so that you can escape a, a battle zone. I feel like that's something that it's, is explored a lot in science fiction as well. Absolutely. And something that I don't think I've seen explored in science fiction, but basically the same technology is instead of coding your soldiers in nanotechnology, imagine that you have a disaster relief area, right? Like, you just had a, a building collapse maybe due to a hurricane. If you could dump a bunch of, like, this nano material on it, it could work its way through the cracks, identify survivors, maybe start applying medical treatment sealing wounds, and then also lighting up a beacon so that rescue crews could find them faster. Just yet another example of how nanotechnology could be beneficial. the sky really is the limit, and, um- And beyond… and beyond. That's right. a book that really, Dives into this is The Forthcoming of Nanotechnology by Drexler. he goes into, like, something that we see a lot in- current sci-fi, which is like the 3D printer, using those nanotechnologies to essentially create Anything, but not just create it, but also break it down into its base materials to then reproduce it as whatever you could possibly want. And- Yeah, at that point you're really getting into, like, a post-scarcity society. Literally imagine you take an asteroid and you build one of these on a massive scale. You throw it into there, and then in, you know, moments you can then on the other side build a ship completely stocked with all the food that you would ever need because it's all just carbon. You know? All of organics are made out of carbon, so you just feed it a bunch of carbon, micro minerals, things like that, and it's able to pop out just insanely usable materials, organic materials, things like that. at that point you're in a, you're at a post-scarcity society. Mm-hmm. You have everything you could ever possibly need in an abundance if you can just turn any raw material into anything else. Yeah. Now, there are some interesting, uh, challenges of course with nanotechnology. For one, how do you power them? That's always very tricky. With cellular mechanisms it's maybe not that hard to imagine. They could utilize something like a mitochondria, especially if they're doing low energy stuff. But if you're really talking about some of these high energy, nanoparticles that are doing some pretty high level computation where does that power come from? is a difficult concept, right? Because of course it's not going to be able to produce more energy than it's consuming while it moves. Yeah. It, it would not be really possible. Maybe we think of it as it moves within itself. It doesn't actually break off. It would move more like a living magnetic metal, sort of moving as, like, a ferrofluid. And then at the end of it, it would be attached to a power source that could charge itself. that's certainly one interesting way to go about it. There are some others, right? I mean, they could potentially encapsulate really small radioactive materials and just harvest that energy. Mm. They could power themselves in many of the same ways that a lot of independent cells power themselves. Chemosynthesis, photosynthesis, you name it. could power them externally perhaps, uh, but that does get tricky, right? Because you are limited by the size of the actual nanoparticle. You can't shine it with energy that's bigger than it, right? Like, if you try to s- power your nanomaterials with things like radio waves, that's not gonna work 'cause the actual wavelength is bigger. So the smaller your, your material gets, the more high energy, photons you need to use so they can actually interact with it. that is certainly a prospect, is that you could have an external power display and it just shines energy through them through, the electromagnetic force, and you just need to tune them to absorb it. And you could even have the nanostructures perhaps make larger antennas, larger structures to harvest lower energy photons if needed. you could literally just have them form whatever is the most efficient way to receive that energy, and then they, they could do it, and then power each other- Yeah, it would be interesting. Imagine that you yourself have nanobots living in your body, and they actually form inside of you, an antenna to absorb microwaves from your environment to keep them powered, and then they, Absorb that and transmit it to the individual ones, and basically build like a recharging station inside of your body, it's interesting to think about all the different ways this could work. it definitely is, and it's why it's so cool to think about because when you're able to have something that's able to manipulate the physical world into whatever it wants, the possibilities become endless. Yeah, imagine if they can migrate to your skin and absorb the ultraviolet radiation that is coming from the sun, which kills two birds with one stone. Not only does it absorb it instead of your cells, so it acts as a, an anti-cancer agent, but then they fill up and then migrate back to you and go through your body and perform their tasks until they run low on energy, and they just rinse and repeat. Yeah. Protecting your body while, you know, feeding their energy. It's all a possibility. Yeah. It's just super cool to think about. It absolutely is. Um, I do think that we could probably sit here and just ruminate on all the possibilities of nanotechnology for God knows how long, but the only last one that I really wanted to talk about, and this is probably something that others have throughout the episode considered, which is The biggest fear of nanotechnology- Mm-hmm especially self-replicating nanotechnology, is a potential gray goo situation. Ah, yes. The all-consuming. Yes. There's always this fear that if you make these self-replicating nanobots, what happens if they just break down everything in your environment to make more self-replicating nanobots, and you just end up with this planet that's just nothing but nanobots anymore? All organic material or anything that can be consumed is consumed. it really is the worst case of mission was unclear- … consumed everything meme, Yes. Yes, exactly. please produce paperclips. Uh, yes, sir. Produces paperclips out of literally everything in the observable universe. It's a famous example, and, Not to diminish it because it is something you do need to be cognizant of with self-replicating machines. You need to find some way to implement stops. It's such an important thing. Biology does it too. I mean, we have oncogenes that are designed to keep our cells from replicating out of control, and when those fail, you get cancers. Mm-hmm. And, and that's definitely a fear with these self-replicating nanites is even if you program them well, what happens if they mutate over time, and then they lose control, and they start completely self-replicating out of control, and you get a cancer that can consume the entire world? And that is genuinely something to be concerned of. it really is just like with a cancer,, their prerogative would be to, fulfill that mission of self-replication, when the resources stop that they're naturally feeding on what comes next. It's, it's us. very possible, or even if not, they could destroy the entire planet. So that, that's one to be concerned of, really the only ways I can think to limit it are, one, you can limit it by introducing something that they're not able to replicate. This was kind of the same thing we explored in our von Neumann probe episode, where you give them a power source that… no ability to recreate that power source. So each time they replicate, for example, if they're powered off of a radioisotope, they then have to break that radioisotope in half, so each successive generation, has less and less energy until they're not able to replicate anymore. Or you could explore the idea we talked about before, which is you power them from an external source so that if they do get out of control, you can externally cut the power, much more of a fan of the second one because that way, They don't get to replicate 30 times- Yeah, And it gives us a fail-safe, on something that could be a universe-ending event. and this also might not be as big a- of a concern as you would think because there is this idea that cancers can only get so large because by the very nature of the cells are unstable. Mm. They're trying to out-replicate everything else. And so once the tumors get too large, uh, they basically start cannibalizing the tumor itself, and so you reach this, like, natural maximum size. And this is why things like blue whales never die of cancer, because it's very unlikely the tumor gets big enough to kill them. I see. and it's interesting to think that that could happen with nanobots too, right? Like, We're imagining these nanobots starting to replicate out of control and consume everything to make more nanobots, but as they continue to drift further and further, they might start to also consume themselves or previous generations to make new versions of the newest generation. And so you might reach this maximum size, where they just continue fighting amongst themselves. if their prerogative was simply consume the closest thing to produce more, then it would get to a point to where you would just end up with these blobs of self-consuming nanobots just continuously replicating. unless for some reason they had, like, a self-preservation in them to where they wouldn't eat each other, but I feel like that wouldn't be implicated. Yeah. the real concern is, blue whales don't die of cancer because that critical size is too small most of the time to cause them harm'cause they're such large creatures. Right. How big is that for nanobots? Is it a couple of miles? Is it a couple of thousand miles? Is it a solar system? we might be talking about, swarms of nanobots that consume several solar systems before they start competing amongst themselves in significant numbers to stop it. So it is, still not something I really wanna find out and it I'd rather theorize about it than to find out about it, in the world. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Absolutely. Nanobots are definitely going to be a part of our future., I don't think they're at any point where it's time for us to start fearing them yet, but they are always cool to think about- Yeah because of just their infinite possibility. Well, with that being said, thank you all so much for joining, And if you found this topic interesting, please consider subscribing on whatever your podcast platform of choice is, and also considering checking us out next week, where we're gonna be exploring how alien ecosystems could evolve without any photosynthesis and what that would do to the ecosystems and the life that comes from those planets. So if that sounds interesting, uh, I hope you tune in and enjoy. Thank you guys so much. Take care. Bye-bye.