Nano-Tech vs. Bio-Tech

[AcolyteOfDeath]

My best friend and I had a small debate during lunch one day. It was over the superiority and possibility of different future technologies. He said that bio-technology is where the most potential lies. I disagreed. My stand was that biotechnology can only go so far, because it merely involves the manipulation of living things, not the creation of powerful new machines.

What do you think?

I believe that nanotechnology holds the greatest promise for the world. Unlike bio-tech nanotechnology can be used to engineer something along mechanical lines, not biological ones. Thus nanotechnology must be more efficient, just like digital computers compute faster than the human brain does. Machines are simply more efficient than living things. Nano-technology can be made according to our rules, whereas biotech can only change the genetic code of living things, and hope for the best.

[iwanthw2]

Why not a combination of both?

[SquidDNA]

Bio-engineering isn't fundamentally different from any other kind of engineering. It's hypothetically possible to create biological systems that could do almost anything nanotech could. Besides, biological systems are really good at self-replication, and nanotech is still on paper as far as that goes.

Edit: although yes, a combination of both would be superior. It's just that doesn't make a very interesting discussion. ;)

[Harmanoff]

Machines are simply more efficient than living things.

Sorry to just pick something out of context and off topic like this, but in what ways are machines more efficient than living things?

[Edric O]

Maybe like this. :)

Humans = inferior
Directive = exterminate all inferior lifeforms

Actually, I think both technologies have immense potential. Including the potential of getting out of our control. I think both of them will be used, each for a different purpose.

But anything that can play around with things at the molecular level can be used as a weapon of mass destruction.

[AcolyteOfDeath]

but in what ways are machines more efficient than living things?

They do things faster, and have far more streamlined systems. Living things are made of water and protein. Machines are far more resilient. Neural networks take fractions of seconds to respond, purely electrical and mechanical systems take far less. Machines are much powerful, but not as adaptive. A car can keep going for thousands of miles at a fast speed, whereas animals can only go for so long before they must rest. Machines do not suffer pain, or need to go through the painfully slow process of digestion.

[SvK]

Bah, i'll take a 20-ton walking tank with missile, guns, nerve gas, and the ability to put 20,00 volts across its armored skin.

Macro-tech!

[AcolyteOfDeath]

Well.. sure, nano tech can be used for warfare, but so can nuclear weapons and biological weapons. It's just too powerful. Someone will release their nano-machines and decompose your soldiers, turn cities to dust, and wipe out civilian populations, but then you will release your nano-machines to completely blight their land, demolecularise their militaries and ravage their population, but then we all know what that will lead to. Global nanotech war.

I meant which would be more useful in peaceful purposes, such as industry, infrastructure, science and environmental uses. This would most definitely be nano-tech. Nano-technology is far superior to biotech in that it has so much more potential. Someday we might build houses from diamond, explore space with clouds of remote nano-probes, mine the moon for geological research and the development of human society, colonise and explore the surface or bottom of the seas, and many other things.

Plus nano-technology would greatly ease the chore of brushing teeth. Just pour in some greyish mouthwash, swish it around, let the nano-machines clean your teeth, and spit (or even swallow. I doubt anyone would want to swallow a mouthfull of nanomachines, but there's no great reason why it would be dangerous. It'd probably be like swallowing a mouthful of sawdust...).

[trebmal_ca]

nanotech already exsits, bell labs ,IBM someone cant remember, have made microscopic electric motors.
have a look at this page
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/6dof.html

[Zeenith]

Nano tech,Bio tech, Cybernegics anyone??? *cough*borg*cough*

[Liberator]

Here's an example of either Tech taken to an extreme:

Biological Technology
Good Extreme - Organic Techology(i.e. Vorlon stuff or Voidhawks:D )

Bad Extreme - Superflu(The Stand) or Species 8472

Nano-Tech
Good Extreme - "Healing Factor" where you have a small factory module and control center implanted and the little buggers float through your bloodstream and repair damage. Would require special programming for non-standard jobs(cancer)

Bad Extreme - Umm, The Borg:cylon:

[Higaran]

Ok, lets take a look at our own brain, it theoretically has 1000 times the processing power, but unfortunately we only use 8% at a maximum of it in our life time. Yea you guys are correct, but with nano tech, we could cure cancer, an alot of diseases like AIDS, and who knows what else. We could make alloys that are 1000 times stronger and lighter than anything we have right now. The posibilities are really limitless.

Bio tech, has its advantages too, but the problem is anything biological needs to be feed, and the waste disposed of. Since I'm not a big fan of bio tech, I don't really know what you could really do with it.

[Liberator]

With sufficient eningeering a Bitek construct could metabolize solar energy which would leave no waste products. The Voidhawk from my example above,from the Night's Dawn trilogy, is born in the gravity well of a gas giant and lives off the abient cosmic and solar radation until it is able to leave the planet's gravity well and it then returns to the Habitat in orbit of the planet and has auxillary fusion generators installed to facilitate it's use as a super-fast courier ship and high speed interceptor.

[Paladin]

You can cure cancer with biotech, and AIDS too. The metal would be more difficult but theoretically, you could produce cells that would excrete it.

Anything mechanical or electronic must be fed as well, and its waste disposed of... So I don't see how that is a biotech only problem.

-Paladin

[ohaunlaim]

Nanites are support dependant:

1. They require a manufacturing system to produce (even if it is a nanite sized manufacturing bot).

2. They require outside direction (nanites by their nature cannot see the 'big picture' even if they could hold the processing power in their small frames, and *see next)

3. Nanites are non-adaptive (They can perform their designed function extremely well, but can't addapt to problems or new circumstances, and *see previous)

4. Nanites are leeches (they must recieve their energy from some outside source else their life-spans would be extremely limited by on-board power systems- maybe.)

4. Nanites cannot self-repair (they may be disposable, or they may recieve repairs from some sort of 'fixer nanite' though)

Over-all nanites would have to be single function machines. That is their strength and their weekness. They can do their function extremely well and efficiently, but are other wise useless when their function is complete.

Bio-engineering has greater potential:

It can create its own nanite type organisms (engineered viruses and such) simply by taking a working system and changing geneX to produce some desired effect. Such systems would be:

Self replicating, self repairing, self controlling, a leech (it would feed itself on its environment), and non-adaptive (you would hope, else you got mutated viruses running amok, and that could be bad)

As well bio-engineering could be used on the macro scale to create any kind of organic machine imaginable, or simply to create a 'natural' (ie. hereditary, passable to the next generation) improvement in current organisms.

Examples: It is known that our cells have a conception-determined number of times they will devide before stopping. The effect is that we age and our bodies just start to shut down.

Turning this gene off creates cancer. But bio-engineering could (sci-fi warning) alter said gene to double, triple, quadruple, or whatever the number of devisions while still maintaining its normal devision rate. Affectively making humans live double, triple, quadruple, orwhatever our current life-spans. A hundred year trip to alpha centari might not seem so bad when the average life-span is, um say, 760 years (10x current).

We could make us stronger, faster, smarter (make it so we start using the other 92% of our brains), immune to known deseases, immune to any number of environmental effects (recent radiation resistant virus comes to mind), live longer, have more efficient digestive systems, see better, smell better, hear better, feel better, etc. In essence, given time and knowledge, we could make the human species into gods.

Well, me at least, the rest of you will have to remain peons to do my bidding.

Muwahahahahahahahahahaha!

[Harmanoff]

Acolyte:

Sorry if i seem nitpicky here but what i actually wanted to focus on was your use of the word efficient. Sure machines are stronger and more enduring but when it comes to efficiency nature beats everything we've made so far.

And by efficient i mean how well you use the energy taken in by either machine or creature(or biological entity. whats the correct word?). Sure many machines are stronger but they do not use even half the energy there is in petrol while animals or plants convert basically all sunshine or sugar or whatever into energy. You see what i'm getting at?

I'm no expert though so please prove me wrong if i'm of track here.

[Alliance]

olaunlaim( needed to check your name 5 times for mistakes)

you if we would smell better, i sugest we turn off the fart function... its smells bad nuf' as it is.

and nanotch, some one said it woul;d be good as tooth past, well, how about you swallow them, their maintain you boddy for 23 hours, and then you well, shit them into a special toilet that pulls them out of the shit, and cleans them, recharges them, repairs/creats new (if needed) nanobots, and next morning you do the same thing? wouldent that be cool? and you could even put some extra for lunch, in your drink and food, that would emideatly, go down your boddy, to the belly with some armor that is acid resistant, and salvage ent destroyed nanobots, and repair and reloads them, once their out of the acid, and get rid of eny thing that isnt right, aka young virus, germ, with the asistance of bio tech, giving them info about the germ, with low curent electrice beats, like thump thump would mean you can kill that virus in this way... and they would do that. and some nanoamplifier could move around the body, amplifing the pulse, and some nanogenerator colony, near the pulser biocell would creat the needed energy to send around...

whoa, didnt think about most of that, when i started typing...


whoa, thats like an entire closed system in 12 lines, i feel like i jest wrote an isignment, and for some reason, i feel good.

[SquidDNA]

Examples: It is known that our cells have a conception-determined number of times they will devide before stopping. The effect is that we age and our bodies just start to shut down.

Turning this gene off creates cancer. But bio-engineering could (sci-fi warning) alter said gene to double, triple, quadruple, or whatever the number of devisions while still maintaining its normal devision rate. Affectively making humans live double, triple, quadruple, orwhatever our current life-spans. A hundred year trip to alpha centari might not seem so bad when the average life-span is, um say, 760 years (10x current).

You've kind of got it backwards. The protein / gene combination you're thinking of is human TElomerase Reverse Transcriptase (hTERT). It's responsible for lengthening the ends of your chromosomes (telomeres,) and it does this in your gametes to renew them for the next generation, as well as a good while after conception, because the zygote needs to undergo many cell divisions that don't need any kind of environmental regulation, so it's advantageous to keep the telomeres fresh. When this gene turns off, it's because you've entered life as a developed individual. From that point, your days are (more or less) numbered by the theoretical limit of cell divisions, because each one wears away at your telomeres. It's when this gene turns back *on* that you worry.

Cancer is defined simply as a breakdown in the regulation of cell division, but it's a tremendous orchestra of a regulatory process. There are tons and tons of things working to prevent cancer, and the fact that hTERT is turned off is only one of them. Its activation is a necessay requirement for really nasty malignancies, though.

In 2000 (or so) researchers permanently turned on hTERT in an in vitro culture of human skin cells, and found that they would never stop dividing. Hooray and all, endless supplies of tissue for skin grafts and so on, but keep in mind that those cells are just that much closer to cancer.

From a science fiction perspective, sure, we could outweigh that with really fantastic anti-cancer therapies, and have absurdly long lifespans. Someday.

[Alliance]

hmmm...

thats was interesting, squidy, what do you think about my closed system nanolunch? eny thing ewy gonna happen to who every uses it?

[HWfreak11]

Sorry guys but machines ARENT better. Its simply that they are designed, so they can be. But there are over 20 billion amino acids, only 20 of which are actually used on Earth. Using combinations of these, you could make biotech creations superior to machine ones. But a combination would be best... i.e. beat THIS!!!

Biological creature powered by electricity from an annihilation drive (i.e. a modified stomach that annihilates the food into energy =D)

[Alliance]

uh, freak, thats kind awhat i said, exept that it was nanobots...
that got orders, info and help from "biolords", that sent electric pulses around the boddy, that where fe'd by nanogenerators, and your lunch...

[Higaran]

Ok, there are some advantages to bio-tech, but the big disadvantages is, say you create a perfect white blood cell, it can find and destroy any virus, such as aids and cancer, but what happens if its mutates and becomes the ultimate disease, and you can't stop it.

[Alliance]

well, then my borg like nanoprobes come in...

[Vaarok]

Biology versus machinery? Biology is machinery. If the artificially created nanotech reaches a certain level of complexity, it's no different than biotech.

[skywalker]

Actually, i think it would be possible to create replicating and adaptive nano-machines in the future, and the two would basically merge and become the same. However, bio-tech is more prone to mutation, so if you made something to destroy AIDS cells or something, and it mutated, poof there goes the world...

[RBA-Wintrow]

I think the defining difference between biotech and nano-tech is that biotech gets its instructions from DNA/RNA/AnyaminoacidstringA and does not use metals.

[Paladin]

Besides which, self replicating nanites could be a far greater threat to existence than bio-engineered bugs... I mean, they have to get raw materials from somewhere, so what happens when they start dismantling the earth at the molecular level in order to create new nanites? By the time they were done there would be a nanite cloud where the earth used to be...

-Paladin

[skywalker]

Paladin: Bio-creatures would also have to get their raw materials from somewhere. Would you rather have raw materials get eaten or the proteins and molecules that make up life, meaning all living things on earth?

I think the final machine will be a mix. Molecular structure is more adaptible to environments, while DNA/RNA isn't a very modular command structure on a small scale. So, I think it will end up being bio-material controlled my transistors...

[Sajuukar]

I have a theory... I belive that if nano-technology is alowed to progress for a long enough time, it will eventually get so complicated that it needs an ultra efficient way to organize data and instructions... sound familiar? DNA! So, thanks to Bio-tech, nano-tech will be able to supercede it by far. Next thing you know, impossible creatures will be a real thing...

I wonder what's closer... HW2 or IC...???

[Mr-e-Man]

Teh BEAST

[Daggerhawk]

Lets just snip some realated material out of the Neon Paladin
Thread shall we?

The JEN Final
The JEN Final is a cybernetic lifeform that Damien has made
so that he can have his mental image imprinted within it (Mind transfer) simply because he is so sickened by his human body.
BUT Jade Carren,his pyscolgist,as well as the only person on earth who really uderstands the way he thinks,appeals to the one last shred of christian belief left withing Damien and brings
up a little debate about the slim chance that his origional mind(Soul) could end up in hell.
SO she volunteers to be the first person transfered into it
after Damien decides not to take the risk.
SUPRISE!!! Jade reconized Damien's mental illness long ago,
and has been plotting to bring him down for years!
And now,she has the perfect body to do it with.

Ahhh,but its not that simple.
The JEN's awsome mental capibilities neary overwhelms the
woman at first.
Jade experiances the greatest chain of epiphanies in human
history.
For her,EVERYTHING in suddenly cast in a new light so to speak.
Every question a human has ever asked is answered.
She finds even the JEN confining,and takes control over
the billions of nanobots contained within the creature,
And begins to rebuild herself into a new form.
A giant colony of nanobots. Not with intetions of coating the world
or anything of course. But to help earth find peace.

[SquidDNA]

I think if you replace "nanobots" with "magic" it makes about as much sense.

[AcolyteOfDeath]

That's going a bit over the line, Squiddy. Nano-technology isn't magic, and there certainly won't be such a thing as a nano-"robot" anytime soon. Nano-technology is just machinery on a tiny scale, that is able to manipulate atoms and molecules with much greater efficiency and accuracy.

[SquidDNA]

My point is that everyone is treating nanotech like it is magic. That is, ascribing fantastic qualities to its potential without any steps in between to explain how or why it might be performing these functions. Sure, it has great potential, but nobody is examining the realization of that potential, and as such you can't hope to involve it in a comparison to see which is going to work.

[ohaunlaim]

bah! Yer no fun. Let the imaginative ramblings continue say I!

*pulls out spell book to summon nanite cloud in order to change dna structure of squiddy-poo into squiddy poo!

[SquidDNA]

Ah, fair enough. :)

*noisily devours nanite cloud, spellbook, and ohaunlaim*

[El Russo]

bugger, someone already mentioned species 8472.

[Alliance]

call for french cook.

owh squidy!!!

[Skushan]

actually it's 10%. And that doesn't mean you can't access that extra 90%. I mean, look at Eintstein.......

[El Russo]

no, he just had a big head... ;)