Communist china and ultimate nanotech secret weapon

[phantom59]

Compared with a U.S. soldier, a Chinese soldier costs next to nothing. Yet the dictators of China have been reducing the number of soldiers in order to channel the resources into superweapons research - for the modern war is a war of laboratories, employing the world's best scientists and technologists in the respective fields, and not a war of soldiers, braving enemy bullets and terror bombs in Iraq, a tiny backward country, dominated by the fundamentalist Islamic Shia majority as against the better educated and more worldly Sunni minority.

Today's shashou jian will decide the destiny of the world, while the Pentagon's weapons (as have been used in Iraq) are fit only to be exhibits in a future museum of military history, to demonstrate the debacle of the democratic West - unless these Pentagon's weapons are reduced to atoms by the nano-superweapons.Speaking of nano superweapons, Eric Drexler, the founder of nanotechnology, discussed them in the chapter "Engines of Destruction" of his book of 1986. Several years ago Drexler stopped discussing the destructive uses of nanotechnology since the U.S. Congress would not give any allocations to him and his Foresight Institute because of such discussions.

However, on Oct. 10 I received an e-mail from my reader Paul Clark, who e-mailed to me an article by Bill Joy, Chief Scientist for Sun Microsystems. The title is "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," and under the title we read: Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species.

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/art ... 2811.shtml

[phantom59]

Four factors regarding nanoweaponry stability/instability:

1. "The most obvious is the massive destructiveness of all-out nuclear war . . Nuclear weapons cause indiscriminate destruction; nanotech weapons could be targeted."
2. "Nuclear weapons require massive research effort and industrial development, which can be tracked far more easily than nanotech weapons development;"
3. "nanotech weapons can be developed much more rapidly due to faster, cheaper prototyping."
4. "Finally, nuclear weapons cannot easily be delivered in advance of being used; the
opposite is true of nanotech."

Let us not, however, go and put the cart before the horse. Nanotechnology is still in the infancy stage of development. Weapons are still a thing of science fiction? Do not put yourself in an excessive fret fearing the micro [nano] - - at least not yet! "Materials" can be made using nanotechnology, but as for "processes, functions, devices, 'factories'" - - you are going to have to wait a while?"August 21, 2008, the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies estimates that over 800 manufacturer-identified nanotech products are publicly available, with new ones hitting the market at a pace of 3-4 per week."

http://militaryanalysis.blogspot.com/20 ... ponry.html

[Nemo]

You forget about all the bioweapons various powers have been stockpiling for the last 60 years. There are some crazy little beasts in a few freezers around the globe. Give me weaponized XXXXX. Kills in 3 to 4 hours. Highly contagious and no known cures except the vaccines stored in the adjoining freezer. You can send vaccinated troops in with simultaneous bioweapon release.

Nanotech is primitive by comparison.

[kirtu]

... who e-mailed to me an article by Bill Joy, Chief Scientist for Sun Microsystems. The title is "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," and under the title we read: Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species.

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/art ... 2811.shtml

Bill Joy can't just be dismissed but he isn't exactly right or wrong on the issues. He is correct that the technologies pose a definite threat to human survival. In other words, we have been wildly successful with technology and will continue to be successful. That alone poses a danger since technology has historically been weaponized (this may be a secondary reason why Hawking wants a Mars colony yesterday).

Note that Joy and Kurzweil have been in a nearly continuous "discussion" on these topics since Joy published his article in April 2000.

Here is a tepid response by Lucas Graves on the 15th anniversary of Joy's essay.

A more reasonable fear is that unemployed trained technologists who are caught outside of a project, perhaps due to age discrimination, will leave the US and travel to other countries and build out their capability. This could come back to bite the US and UK and other nations (however this [b]DID NOT]/b\ happen in the 70's when the same thin g was warned about when we had the demise of the aerospace industry and PhD's were driving cabs in NYC).

Kirt