Nano bots

[OpenMind5]

Does anyone think that Nano bots could someday replace our immune system?

Imagine billions of nanobots flowing through your blood stream killing all the bad stuff in your body...would be pretty cool. And maybe even one day replace blood! Its could carry Oxygen for us! AND THEN WE WOULDN"T EVEN NEED A HEART TO PUMP! The nano-bots would do the rest! HOLY #@!*!



Op5

[Dark Mind]

Originally Posted by OpenMind5

Does anyone think that Nano bots could someday replace our immune system?

Imagine billions of nanobots flowing through your blood stream killing all the bad stuff in your body...would be pretty cool. And maybe even one day replace blood! Its could carry Oxygen for us! AND THEN WE WOULDN"T EVEN NEED A HEART TO PUMP! The nano-bots would do the rest! HOLY #@!*!



Op5

What would be the point . It sounds cool, but in all practicality... our blood does a fine job. Nano bots built to destroy foreign diseases and viruses may some day become practical though .

[OpenMind5]

If you think about it...the self defense ones could seek and destroy...and if we can replace out blood with O2 carrying bots and have no need for hearts and maybe not even lungs...thats less organs we have to worry about becoming sick and diseased.

Matter of fact I wasn't the first to think of this. There is an author who is publishing a book on the matter. I ordered the book from Barns & Nobles. It talks about Humans Transending Biology. Turning mostly machine...wow...Can't wait to get it in september...LOL

Op5

[C1ay]

Originally Posted by OpenMind5

Does anyone think that Nano bots could someday replace our immune system?

Ray Kurzweil does. He's probably the author of that bookj you ordered. From an interview he gave LiveScience:

The famed inventor and computer scientist is serious about his health because if it fails him he might not live long enough to see humanity achieve immortality, a seismic development he predicts in his new book is no more than 20 years away.

It's a blink of an eye in history, but long enough for the 56-year-old Kurzweil to pay close heed to his fitness. He urges others to do the same in "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever.''

The book is partly a health guide so people can live to benefit from a coming explosion in technology he predicts will make infinite life spans possible.

Kurzweil writes of millions of blood cell-sized robots, which he calls "nanobots,'' that will keep us forever young by swarming through the body, repairing bones, muscles, arteries and brain cells. Improvements to our genetic coding will be downloaded via the Internet. We won't even need a heart....

[OpenMind5]

YES THATS HIM! I had a heck of a time trying to spell his name with the lady at the desk...LOL!
Its titled somthing somthing: when humans transend biology...LOL

Op5

[CraigD]

(Title should be sung as a running cadence)

Originally Posted by OpenMind5

Does anyone think that Nano bots could someday replace our immune system?

I think that, by most current definitions, immune cells are considered wet nanobots.

I suspect that, someday, medicine will engineer direct improvement to many types of cells. I expect these engineered cells will more closely resemble our natural cells than anything we usually think of a “robot”.

In the immediate future, I’d rather have a practical replacement for my centimeter-scale heart than for anything smaller. Immune system senility isn’t so bad – it’s heart failure that’ll get you!

[alxian]

life just isn't worth living if one can't look forward to having billions of tiny robots invade my circulatory system and perhaps every cell to replace such systems as white blood cells platelettes and even intra cellular mechniasms like atp generating mitochondria..

it would be a good test of distributed networking since each little bugger couldn't have too much processing power on its own, even several million may not have enough mental juice to control your entire immune system and sensory augmentation duties... central processing unit like a lymph node and the base of the skull, interfacing with the spinal cord..?

Originally Posted by Dark Mind

What would be the point . It sounds cool, but in all practicality... our blood does a fine job

and this is why its still scifi

the body is incredibly inefficient as it has to feed several systems that have no function, some systems that are near useless and the digesstive system itself is ridiculously bad.

i'd much prefer what the original poster suggested having flowmetal blood that i can replenish rather than eating, and discharge for recycliing rather than, well you know the alternative.

people just don't understand how much simpler life would be if you didn't have to eat sleep get sick by drugs to cure really stupid diseases or wake up in a cold sweat fearing that you'll die someday maybe tomorrow from some obscure disease you can do nothing about. or even natural causes such as your cells having divided so much they run out of new material.

people shouldn't die, yet longevity and rejuvenation tech isn't a priorty for any of todays societies, people continue to die.

also if you had flowmetal blood you'd be able to fuel internal structures like wifi transceivers, instead of like opening a skin flap and popping in a AA. eek.

that no heart thing is also very appealing. maybe getting rid of it will make the shame of rejection easier to deal with.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by alxian

..it would be a good test of distributed networking since eahc little bugger couldn't have too much processing power on its own, even several million may not have enough mental juice to control your entire immune system and sensory augmentation duties...

You haven’t by any chance been reading Neil Stephenson’s

“The Diamond Age : Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated...
“The Diamond Age : Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated...

, have you?

That novel includes a human-hosted, nanorobotic distributed processing network that is transmitted sexually. It’s apparent purpose is not to enhance health, though, but something to do with factoring large integers.

[alxian]

if i had the skill i'd change my name and release a nano virus something like the one in cowbow bebop (sp?)


it would be mostly beneficial, riding man of most of the flesh that plagues our lives while making everyone immortal save for corporial disintegration, as well as fix everyones dna and then rebuild their bodies to perfectly express their new code.


where most readers of spinstate may see the syndicates as the "bad guys" i see them as a natural progression of mankind. execpt where they destroy imperfect people. imperfect people can be fixed. a socitey of perfect people living in perfect systems will have enough excess in resources to make everyone perfect. the problem is you have to limit procreation and certain personal freedoms. essentially everyone would be sterile, like the giver, i don't see a huge problem with that but most people want to fornicate for fun and have as many children as they can support. we thrive on conflict and one of the first is realizing you have to provide for yourself, somehow handing that power over to the state dehumanizes everyone. like most people have litte interest at all in furthering the betterment of society, that is what they leave in the hands of government they only focus on number one. removing distractions and forcing them to be a perfectly equal element in a perfect system where they will have no more and no less than anyone else is utterly repugnant.

this perhaps is that little rotteness at the core of every man in a free society. yet free societies works, go figure.

[Biochemist]

Originally Posted by OpenMind5

Does anyone think that Nano bots could someday replace our immune system?

Imagine billions of nanobots flowing through your blood stream killing all the bad stuff in your body...would be pretty cool. And maybe even one day replace blood! Its could carry Oxygen for us! AND THEN WE WOULDN"T EVEN NEED A HEART TO PUMP!

Sorry guys, but this seems a little naive. We have this tendency to massively underestimate biochemical complexity.

I have little doubt that we will be able to use nanobot technology to treat a specific pathogen. That objective is 5 or 10 orders of magnitude simpler than the notion of replacing your immune system with nanobots. The biochemical service that recognizes foreign substances, rapidly multiplies antobodies (for example), and then returns the antibodies to dormancy after pathogen eradication is very complex. The controls over the ramp-up, ramp-down and memory for future assaults is complex to the point of mysticism.

Further, providing an O2-carrying nanobot would do nothing to obviate our need for a heart or lungs. We run on O2 nanobots now (we call it hemoglobin) and we still need the heart and lungs to oxygenate the nanobots and push them around. Further, our existing nanobots (hemoglobin) are self-regulating in terms of oxygen capacity based on numerous environmental factors.

Kurzweil is indeed smart guy, but he sound like one of the many smart folks that believes biological systems are no more complicated than computers. Sorry, all. 'Taint so. The very smallest biological system has far more effective code (by many orders of magnitude) than the very largest computer applications, and the code is far tighter (in terms of delivered functionality per "line" of code).

Kurzweil will be long dead before we replace an immune systems, if we ever do.