X-Message-Number: 18990 Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 09:52:43 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #18984 - #18989 Hi everyone! Mike Darwin expanded on my arguments about the impossibility of curing ALL diseases, and did well when he did that. As for what I take to be your arguments, they still do not consider the many many ways in which errors can happen ... not to mention those in which we go off into genuinely new settings and there meet with problems we did not foresee (as happened historically with radiation sickness). The point is that even if we make nanobots, we can commit errors when we do that; and if we made nanobots which in their turn made other nanobots (perhaps free of our own errors) then they too would commit errors. Not lots of errors, but enough to cause a problem. Nor would such errors necessarily be immediately fixable. Computer bugs differ a lot in how hard they are to find and fix. Bugs we make in designing or programming our nanobots will act the same way: some too hard to do immediately, others simple. Most would be in between. And sure, if we wanted to make a machine totally without bugs, we might well do so, but it would take an infinite time to catch all possible bugs. We end up once again the the region where errors are likely, even if we have tried our best to avoid them. Not only that, but if we work hard enough to eliminate known bugs we can easily introduce new UNknown bugs while doing that. I am actually optimistic, not because I believe that we'll ever create a perfect world, but because I believe that we can keep on improving the world (ie the universe) in which we now live. But that improvement will forever remain less than perfection. Best wishes and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=18990