“Once we get nanotechnology down, we can use it to make tech devices, clothing, food, a variety of bio-related products — artificial blood cells, tiny virus or cancer-cell destroyers, muscle tissue, etc. — anything really. And in a world that uses nanotechnology, the cost of a material is no longer tied to its scarcity or the difficulty of its manufacturing process, but instead determined by how complicated its atomic structure is. In a nanotech world, a diamond might be cheaper than a pencil eraser.”⁷⁰

One of the proposed methods of nanotech assembly is to make “one that could self-replicate, and then let the reproduction process turn that one into two, those two then turn into four, four into eight, and in about a day, there’d be a few trillion of them ready to go.”⁷¹

But what if this process goes wrong or terrorists manage to get ahold of the technology? Let’s imagine a scenario that nanobots “would be designed to consume any carbon-based material in order to feed the replication process, and unpleasantly, all life is carbon-based. The Earth’s biomass contains about 10⁴⁵ carbon atoms. A nanobot would consist of about 10⁶ carbon atoms, so it would take 10³⁹ nanobots to consume all life on Earth, which would happen in 130 replications. ... Scientists think a nanobot could replicate in about 100 seconds, meaning this simple mistake would inconveniently end all life on Earth in 3.5 hours.”⁷²

We are not yet capable of harnessing nanotechnology — for good or for bad. “And it’s not clear if we’re underestimating, or overestimating, how hard it will be to get there. But we don’t seem to be that far away. Kurzweil [a computer scientist and AI expert] predicts that we’ll get there by the 2020s.⁷³ Governments know that nanotech could be an Earth-shaking development … The US, the EU, and Japan⁷⁴ have invested over a combined $5 billion so far”⁷⁵

Immortality

“Because everyone has always died, we live under the assumption … that death is inevitable. We think of aging like time — both keep moving and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”⁷⁶ For centuries, poets and philosophers have touched on the notion that the consciousness does not necessarily have to go the way of the body. W.B. Yeats describes us as “a soul fastened to a dying animal.”⁷⁷ Richard Feynman, Nobel awarded physicists, views death from a purely scientific standpoint:

“It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable, and that it is only a matter of time before the biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that that terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured.”⁷⁸

Theory of great species attractors

When we look at the history of biological life on earth, so far 99.9% of species have gone extinct. Nick Bostrom, Oxford professor and AI specialist, “calls extinction an attractor state — a place species are … falling into and from which no species ever returns.”⁷⁹