[SEQ RERUN] Raised in Technophilia

1. The bots are not able to self repair. Each one is constructed of diamondroid, and is in fact very similar to the bots described in this paper (just simpler) : http://www.foresight.org/Nanomedicine/Respirocytes.html

Except, instead of using their onboard oxygen supply to carry blood, they react it with whatever organic molecule they diffuse in to. Because I expect that synthetic catalysts will be much more efficient than nature (because they are rationally optimized and constructed of materials not found in nature, such as diamondroid and/or rare earth components) I expect that they will consume biomass at a rate limited only by diffusion. They do not need to consume all biomass on the planet - the heat generated by their activities will set forests on fire, cause land animals to "spontaneously" combust, set fires to buildings, vehicles, etc.

Some of the bots may be destroyed by the fires they themselves cause, I cannot model that.

1. I am assuming that the bots are produced using productive nanomachinery that IS able to self-replicate itself. (that is, the nanofactories that produce these bots can produce the parts for more nanofactories as well). So the attacker would have acres of warehouses stuffed with machinery mass producing these bots, and would release kilotons of them into the atmosphere. They would have internal clocks or respond to external signals so that they could be first sufficiently distributed around the planet before activation.

How to counter? The most straightforward way is probably that these devices would have weak points. You might be able to produce a synthetic molecule preferentially binds to the catalytic portion of these bots and jams them. I'm not real certain that would do any real good, however. It might let you save a human patient, but not the biosphere.

The way to survive in the short term in a bunker. These bots can't eat any material that cannot be combusted, and a broader rule is that no nanobot of any design can operate for long on material that can't be reacted to release free energy. So, ordinary concrete, thick walls of corrosion resistant metals, etc would provide a good defense against most or all nanobots.

On the bright side of things, the same technology used to make the robots could in principle allow survivors to live in self-contained bunkers, since a relatively small nano-factory could replace the many square miles of infrastructure we need in order to produce essential technologies today.

The problem with your example is that sterilization is a side effect that would take a very long time to actually cause armageddon, and if civilization can produce GMO foods they can PROBABLY reverse whatever leads to the sterility.

A nuclear exchange that wipes out the key parts of western civilization could happen in 1 hour, and the war could be over in 1 day. If someone were to release a huge swarm of killer nano-machines, it might take months to years to eat the biosphere (again, the machinery I am talking about is NOT self replicating) but developing a countermeasure could take decades.

Another factor to keep in mind is that human biotech advances are very slow and incremental, due to extremely heavy regulation. There is a reluctance to take risks, yet if the risks were taken, far more rapid advances are likely. If a significant proportion of the population were sterile, this reluctance to take risks would be enormously reduced, and rapid advances could happen.

One apocryphal story I heard from a professor at Texas Tech Medical School was that most chemotherapy agents in use today were developed during the postwar period, when regulation was almost nonexistent and a researcher could go straight from the laboratory to the bedside of a cancer patient.

Hearing stories like this, and realizing that in the United States, something like 1.6 million people die every year ANYWAY, I think that regulations should be greatly reduced, but that's for another discussion.