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POPSHuman beings only have a 50-50 shot of making through the 21st century nanotech pioneer K. Eric Drexler. Drexler describes grey goo in Chapter 11 Engines Of Destruction: "...early assembler-based replicators could beat the most advanced modern organisms. 'Plants' with 'leaves' no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough, omnivorous 'bacteria' could out-compete real bacteria: they could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we made no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies."
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POPSMolecules & Skyscrapers The vat - made of shiny steel, with a glass window for the benefit of visitors - stands taller than a person, since it must hold the completed engine. Pipes and pumps link it to other equipment and to water-cooled heat exchangers. This arrangement lets the operator circulate various fluids through the vat. To begin the process, the operator swings back the top of the vat and lowers into it a base plate on which the engine will be built. The top is then resealed. At the touch of a button, pumps flood the chamber with a thick, milky fluid which submerges the plate and then obscures the window. This fluid flows from another vat in which replicating assemblers have been raised and then reprogrammed by making them copy and spread a new instruction tape (a bit like infecting bacteria with a virus). These new assembler systems, smaller than bacteria, scatter light and make the fluid look milky. Their sheer abundance makes it viscous.
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POPSTHE PRINCIPLES OF CHANGE Yet memes that seal the mind against new ideas protect themselves in a suspiciously self-serving way. While protecting valuable traditions from clumsy editing, they may also shield parasitic claptrap from the test of truth. In times of swift change they can make minds dangerously rigid.
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POPSRichard Dawkins Quotes "Leon Lederman, the physicist and Nobel laureate, once half-jokingly remarked that the real goal of physics was to come up with an equation that could explain the universe but still be small enough to fit on a T-shirt. In that spirit, Dawkins offered up his own T-shirt slogan for the ongoing evolution revolution: Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators."
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POPSMust-know terms for the 21st Century intellectual One author's mostly optimistic prediction of the ideas that will come to define our collective future. Nicely done. Open Source : This is a term that most people are familiar with, but it’s worth re-stating. The open source revolution, where information is freely distributed and editable, is already reshaping a number of industries and upsetting traditional economic and intellectual property models. Wikipedia has very quickly become the world’s largest repository of encyclopedic information. Linux and other open source software continue to rival the big players. And looking further down the line, there’s the potential for open source science, culture, and the disturbing potential for open source warfare.
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