Isaac Arthur I want to second this. One thing that keeps we awake at night is thinking about entropy and how the stars will eventually die. However, this channel has shown how even utilizing a tiny fraction of the mass/energy of the universe still allows you to do incredible things! (It also makes me feel disappointed about the megastructures in Stellaris. Why do dyson spheres only produce 1000 energy?!)
Life is a self replicating machine. Have a kid and you made one. Then spend years programming it. Hope the code doesn't get corrupted and it fails. Hope it doesn't fail to provide bio-chemical energy and resources needed to sustain operation. Hope when it becomes self aware it doesn't commit suicide.
You sir learned well MuskSpeak! Human father: “I’d like to start working less because my kids are starting to grow up.” Elon: “I’m trying to throttle back, because particularly the triplets are starting to gain consciousness. They’re almost two.” Source: WaitButWhy
NoSuspect That's an interesting argument, but we cannot currently change or upgrade the hardware or software of our biological "machines," or bodies. Fidelity is ideal for current machinery, whereas the opposite is true for biological structures. Then there is the level of complexity and dynamic interactions that make biology go. We still can't describe it all precisely, whereas there are thousands of patents for machinery and the methods to construct them. I'd say we are systems but not machines. Machines do have systems, but I don't think biological systems have to be machines.
Computers are often made with more than 70 different elements from mines all over the world, this includes minerals that are so rare that only a ton or two is produced globally. Life, on the other hand, only needs around 20 elements, and all of those are widespread and abundant. There's a fatal problem with a replicating complex machine finding enough elements to replace itself, unless it can be made of common elements.
Yep, well pointed out how inefficient machines are compared to biological lifeforms. It's sad that your comment did not got picked up by more readers. There is so much hype about those metal thingies, but people forget, that computers and robots need our whole industrial society to be created and maintained.
Ed Harley Twenty? Can only think of ten: CHNOPSCaKFeNa. The rest must be in trace amounts in like the liver, spleen, and maybe the lymphatic system? Just guessing. Maybe Chlorine or Copper? I know some aquatic critters use Copper to sequester oxygen. Not iron. Misses ten huh... shame...
And pray tell, why a self rplicating machine cant be say an entirely artificial bacteria? We have already made those. In 2005. They work without a hitch.
You know a game I play had the same idea for an enemy, they are called the Vex, and the life form itself is basically a biological liquid that acts as a hive mind, The game is Destiny btw
I need no channel youtube! That may be true but it would be hard for a bacteria to launch itself into space, land in another solar system, replicate itself and start all over again.
2:17 Rene: "Indeed, the human physique truly is a machine!" Queen of Sweden: "If that's true..." (points at clock) "...why isn't the clock reproducing?" Such a bizzare conversation. Those crazy pre-1900 people.
i think the fallacy is called "non sequtiur" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_(logic) or, more precise, "affirming the consequent" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent so, yeah, eat that, queen of sweden!
Commander Keen That comment was probably as much rhetoric as logic - in the 18th century machines were wonders because they could do (specific) things much faster and more reliably than a human or most living things could. I think Her Majesty was using rhetoric to affirm humanity's superiority over 'the works of their hands.'
I guess you can't really say to the QUEEN "That's bad thinking!"? If all organisms are machines, this does not mean or even imply that all machines are organisms!
I came here for the subject matter, but the first thing that struck me was your concern about people understanding you and advising to use captions with an Elmer Fudd picture! I can assure you that the captions aren't necessary and you articulate everything perfectly. But this did add character to your video! That and you're content combined I'm definitely subbing. Keep up the good work!
Well I'm glad you can enjoy me without the captions, but a fair number have some problems with it and I try to minimize anything that interferes with the smooth flow of info :) Welcome to the channel, I hope you enjoy the rest of the content.
Nothing against pbs, but I much prefer Isaac's channel. He explains complex topics in greater detail, and in a way that's easier to understand. In my opinion Issac would make excellent teacher.
On another note: I think one fallacy people might commit with the "grey goo" scenario is that it assumes that the nanorobots can build copies of themselves out of literally anything. It'll probably need particular types of material to work with, same as biological organisms.
Also, most of the self replication will be done via 3D printing, that's the wave of the future. 3D printed biomass (ex: organs, tissue) and assembling them into lifeforms not to mention mechanical robotic types. All scripted in code, kinda sounds like DNA. I'm talking distant future for the lifeforms aspect of self replication though, but not too far off..
True that they can not use everything, however celestial bodies do seem to have high quantities of very similar materials so the goo could at least get a very large portion of most planets as food. And if it can function on higher levels where it develops more complex chemical processes there is the possibility to break down even more material to use, even as a type of evolution have some parts die off while others better adapted thrive in specific environments.
I don't know. If they have a (relatively) unlimited fuel source (even just from the local sun) and transmutation technology then a machine could be made that converts just about any atom to whatever type it wants, en mass... Theoretically speaking 😎
Back in the early 1980's, I read a story by Greg Bear called "Blood Music". I heard latter he expanded on it, turning it into a novel. It dealt with an interesting take on the 'grey goo' style of self replicating machines. His nanites were based on a mix of biology and nano engineering. Had nightmares for weeks after reading that short story.
I hope you don't literally mean it gave you nightmares. Because if so that shows a truly disgusting amount of feebleness consistent with an abused zoo animal. Touch grass.
I'm elite now, my life is succeeded, my comment in near comments of 2 YT creators I watch. And I'm 1st at commenting that - it's a strike. That at the end was kinda unexpected, was like nice surprise))
I found your channel last night. I am amazed at how quickly you research, compile and edit these videos. Very informative and high quality content. Subbed Isaac. Keep doing your thing.
9:18 This is a cool setup! As a computer scientist, I'd say you're describing data integrity through redundancy. This is a powerful technique. Another technique for confirming data integrity is called a "checksum" -- a number indicative of the pattern of some data. If that data changes even a little, a good "checksum" algorithm will allow you to identify this has happened, and can even be useful for error correction.
A good one, and one I should have remembered to include... and probably would have too if I hadn't been writing the script right after a D&d game with lots of platonic solids sitting on my desk. :)
I gave this a bit of thought. A commandment like "thu shalt not replicate unless you get together with N other replicators" won't work because any of your replicators could go off and "sin". A more sure way to enforce this rule would be to create replicator "sexes". They physically can't replicate by themselves. The more sexes there are the smaller the chance of galactic gey goo. On the other hand if you divi-up the sexes too much your von Neumann probes will almost never replicate. If your system demanded 20 sexes there is a chance you'll never manage to put together a replicating group. Or there is a risk that one or more sexes go extinct. This could be an interesting computer simulation/model to figure out an optimal number of sexes. Too few sexes -> galactic grey goo. Too many sexes -> extinction.
I wouldn't go for sexes; I would go for 'colony groups', where all units were homogeneous, but were programmed to initiate replication only in groups of a minimum number so that they could 'checksum' each other's integrity (essentially your first idea). If there isn't this minimum number of units available, then the risks of mutation per generation increase to a point where it would be preferable for the replication cycle to cease than to persist and risk 'grey goo' or some such lurking hazard.
*see other comments saying PBS spacetime made a video about this topic* *realize you mixed up Scishow space and PBS spacetime* *assume the people who liked my comment also got the two mixed up*
You put out a better and more consistent product than PBS Spacetime could ever hope to produce, and their videos are fantastic. Keep up the good work Issac, your channel is honestly my favorite on youtube.
If you wanted them to run on any fuel, you could have different types run on different fuels and share the energy. It would still make them bulkier and take longer to replicate, with the energy sharing equipment, but it would likely not be too big of a difference like giving it a thousand different engines would be.
This is why I like insects so much. They are like small self replicating machines that run simple programs yet are infinitely complex compared to our technology. Solid video btw.
Isaac Arthur videos replicate in the form of videos made by other people, blog posts by other people, term papers written by other people, bedtime stories told by other people, stories written by other people, distributed at web sites and among friends and some few in online and paper magazines and books. Other people are the substrate in which Isaac Arthur's videos reproduce themselves, and we can be thankful that the seed of his videos is fertile, and that so many who view them have rich loam between their ears.
The original Star Trek series had a probe named Nomad which was sent out some time before it was found by an earth ship. During it's journey, Nomad was severely damaged and repaired by strangers who accidentally misinterpreted some of the original programming. Instead of "sterilizing samples to search for life" it would "sterilize all life" (something along those lines)
Same here. In his Fermi Paradox video I believe he mentioned that it was such a huge topic that he couldn't cover it in a single video, so directed us to Isaac's channel.
Most people find the idea that we humans are machines (no matter how advanced our brain is) to be very off putting. I do not understand why personally because all life can be seen as types of Organic machines. Ah there is an idea for a series, Organic tech and it's uses in the future. Stuff like Organic star ships like we see in the Movies and sci-fi i always thought silly but i am just a laymen. As to power, could a nano use heat or back round Magnetic fields? (stupid question i know but laymen).
Life, or any machine, needs to find an energy differential to feed. Life doesn't get far if it finds itself in a chemically inert, uniformly warm environment. Feeding, extracting energy, comes from taking something in, reacting it with something else to produce something with lower chemical potential and making a living off the difference. Alternatively life could, with great difficulty, make a living by exploiting temperature differences. Our electric generating system is primarily based on setting up temperature gradients and using stream and turbines to extract electricity from it. It takes more equipment to exploit temperature differences than chemical so life in far more likely to eat stuff.
Lenard Segnitz - i would say our electrical systems now do not so much use temp as they use motion itself. The steam is just the best way we have to do that right now. We can, and do, use cold water do drive hydro electric plants, wind the same temp as the rest of the air around it to drive a wind mill, and waves the same temp as the rest of the water to drive a wave power generator. I do not see it as temp, though there are systems in which you CAN use thermal different to make electricity, so much as motion. That steam is used to move a turbine, the turbine's motion is what is causeing the magnets to spin either around a copper coil or causes the copper coil to spin wrapped inside magnets. It is alot more detailed but that is the basics of a steam generator. Thermo-piles, those make electricity from thermal differences. just wanted to clear that up, and sorry about spelling i need to go eat breakfast so my fingers work right.
Alright, sure, at the base of electrical generation we move conductors through a magnetic field (or vis versa). We've got some hydroelectricity (I happen to live in British Columbia, Canada, where we are 100% hydroelectricity), wind. But the vast majority of that motion is currently heat driven (coal, oil, natural gas, geothermal, waste incineration, some solar, nuclear). Solar electric and thermo couplers are the only non-motion electricity I can think of. Life energy started with mineral oxidation. Then chlorophyll was invented and life switched to solar energy. Life got a little over-enthusiastic and brought on the oxygen catastrophe. Mitochondria figured out how to use oxygen, and so animals. Now there's an eco-system where one part pumps up the chemistry with sunlight and the other making a living by oxidizing it. The whole kit-and-caboodle makes a living off the differential of the heat of the sun and the average temperature of the universe. The sun gets its energy from gravity smacking atoms together. The whole show stops with the heat-death of the universe when everything is the same temperature, no energy flows and no one can make a living anymore.
This was a great video and got me thinking. It would seem to me the most optimal self-replicating factory would be based on trees. The leaves of trees are optimized by nature to have a shape and layout that provides the maximum surface area for sunlight to be received. The "roots" (could be probes which move) would mine asteroids (or bring them back intact) and the trunk which would be the factory. You have the shielding outside with the more fragile production and control units closer to the center.
I love this guy. But I never have any trouble understanding him. I feel kinda bad he feels the need to call attention to it. It's like you're the man bro, don't sweat it, no one cares.
NO! He shouldn't make a TH-cam channel with that sorta speech unacceptable.. JK LOVE THIS GUY LOL he's easy to understand and gives me hope in life keep it up homie!
@@ConfuzzledTomato it took me some listening too. It's great that he self depricates it I think. I can't open my mouth very far and get a hard time about it with my speech. You have to own it lol
I think I noticed for maybe three videos. Maybe if we watch enough of these we'll start talking like him! It'll be a sign of the followers of Arthur, or... Fuddnians? Wascally Wabbits to the Stars!
I understand that people are saying PBS Spacetime did a video on this subject, however I definitely remember you telling us that you were going to do this video in the last episode. No love man, no love. Great video.
There IS a compelling reason for self replicating robots being small, and it is this. With structures of relatively human scale, a lot of energy is required for making and assembling parts,eg, smelting, forging, pressing, forming etc etc. However, when we are talking about nano scale entities and smaller, another kind of quality of matter can be applied to manipulate matter. and it already is. Electrons. At this scale, atoms can be manipulated simply through the electrochemical nature of each atom. In exactly the same way that any cell does, by using electrostatic forces via enzymatic action. In this way, particles can be assembled into any shape or form required, and the energy do so is provided by electrons, like in the case of our own cells, using ATP and the electron transport chain. this process is very efficient because at this scale there is less waste and energy bleed off, kind of like a quantum system where the energy comes in packets, and you can't split a packet of energy, like you can't halve an electron and have half of it bleed off as waste. Also with nano scale, new materials can be constructed that have innate properties that cannot be achieved with macro scale structures. Such as coatings that are chemical resistant, transparent,opaque, manipulate light in special ways etc. The properties achievable with nano scale manipulation far exceed what can be done with macro scale.
Love all of ur videos and find your voice gives the explanation and views you express extra chatacter. Soothing,informing and unique giving u the edge over the other videos on TH-cam covering the same subject matter. Great work Issac 👍
I like the idea of the giant space factories in Iain M Banks' Culture series. The idea that the giant ships are so well equipped that they can create smaller ships within themselves.
You could said it was a total sucess: . Leave the time machine running with the time settings already loaded so another human dude can follow the first Terminator back in time. . While already knowing where to find the correct Sarah Connor, kill alternative targets to give the dude a reason and time to find her. . Once they are together, terrorize both by almost killing them on each oportunity, so they form a bond. . After Sarah get impregnated, eliminate the dude to avoid further timeline distorsions and allow itself to the "terminated". . Because Sarah Connon had the child "through love", she would not abort it; allowing it to grow into John Connor.
There was at least one porn movie with that premise: that the robot was sent back to impregnate the mother of the Great Leader *_before_* she could be impregnated by his historical father....
2:24 Descartes: "By that logic, your majesty, you are not human yourself since you never bore an heir..." [drops proverbial microphone] "The crackling announcement of surprise. I do believe that the Queen hath suffered a grave singeing upon her ego this day."
in scholarly terms I am a grunt. That means I am not a scholar or anything close to it. I do have an inquisitive mind. I find your videos very enlightening. I do not always understand the math or science but it helps with the broad Concepts. Even if I wasn't World building right now, I still enjoy what you put out.
:) The math is just supplementary, not necessary, at least if I did my job right. And amusingly the channel was essentially spawned by worldbuilding, the first video was done largely because a WB forum I'm a member of got a bunch of megastructures related topics coming up during a few week period and I felt a summary video was appropriate. That will be 2 years ago this friday, though I actually started work on it 2 years ago today.
A fully equipped tool and die shop can reproduce itself and almost all of the supply-side technology that supplies the inputs - the materials which it reforms into manufacturing capacity. The supply side includes mines, smelters, and foundries. Of course, it also requires blueprints and operators that can read those blueprints. Such robot operators are almost within our current capability. We could ship a minimal subset of the machines needed to build to other machines to the Moon in order to "bootstrap" an industrial base. That base would become the learning center needed to refine the designs and plans.
Thanks, Issac, your talk around 22:00 about heat started me thinking about how our ancient ancestors could have heated their huts with clay compost heaps, including the nightly deposits. :D Now that's stuck in my brain and I want to write a story. I know you will never see this, but I just wanted to put it out there for posterity. You may have created another novel for me to write! 😃
In my spare time, I pictured a swarm designed to disassemble planets landing, building an orbital ring or series of Startrams, then using solar power beamed in from elsewhere or planetside, slowly tearing it apart. You could have fission/fusion reactors as well, to expedite the process, built from local materials and controlled by the swarm. So much potential for not only great science and human colonization, but juicy fiction. I really hope some of the hype about the EM drive is true, because I would like my own personal Jupiter 2.
Hi Isaac, your videos are truly great. I can not stress this enough! About this video, i especially like how you point out what we are already capable of. This is 2017 we are living in the future! Granted a lot of the things, you talk about (like terra forming) will be out of reach for humanity for quite some time. But if something is within reach, mention it and let us celebrate what humanity has already achieved. Best regards, Siemen
if you dont in this video, (currently at (4:41) ) you should at some point include that people get confused on what is life, by mistaking sentience with life, as life does not have to be sentient, nor does a sentience require it be "alive"
8:45 Keep in mind that it's not just a matter of two of the three copies having a mistake, they have to have a mistake _in the same place_. The odds of that are much, much smaller than one in three.
In the movie Edge of Tomorrow, the aliens are actually terraforming machines that aliens sent to terraform earth. It was not mentioned in the movie, but it was explained in the novel. This video reminded me of it. It's a good movie that you guys should check out.
24:30 - Information can hold up these countermeasures and those replicators could adapt due to a kind of a semi-evolution. Like a Pokemon, that evolves into a before-fixed pattern as a countermeasure.
quick clarification on mitochondria. while the ancestral eukaryote and prokaryote started in the mitochondria/human cell system as a symbiotic relationship, it currently is not, as our genome now encodes for essential proteins needed for the mitochondria to replicate. The mitochondria over centuries has lost these sequences themselves. in other words mitochondria no long have the ability to self replicate independent of the host cell which makes them no longer an independent entity. btw I love these series
24:00 It could have a small battery and then change it's fuel depending on where it is. For example, in a solar system solar panels might work, then on a planet with hydrogen it can change it's design to use just that, then when it goes off world it could change it again etc.
One big hole in the grey goo not mentioned is specialty resources, and it would make more sense for the replication of the small machines to happen a couple stages up, it could still be self replicating, the bigger unit builds the smaller machines which can repair or help create the bigger unit, could even be more energy efficient.
So if we discover life on Mars and terraform it anyway; humanity or more accurately, Gaia (the totality of symbotic life on Earth) would be Bezerker, von Neumann probes. For fun, assume that a great, benevolent, gallatic civilization, has sent out Bracewell probes to look for and stop any runaway, self-replicating machines that have gone Bezerker.
thank you for your answer. I did see something on the Internet about a potential of using plasma as a Force Shield against directed energy weapons, but it would take a lot of work. I look forward to your next video.
Thanks again Isaac for literally and systematically murdering my knowledge and then vigorously reviving it, better than before. Why does heat ruin everything?
Space, the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the Starswarm Armada. It's ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and destroy them.
Yes, I knew it. The dominant species on this planet is... warning (spoilers): CATS! As proven by the will they impose on their two-legged can-openers. Loved 14:45. Nice one. Is that your cat, Isaac?
Are you going to make a "habitable planets" video about landworlds (planets with very little water on them) in the near future? The occean world was my favourite.
Regarding self-replicating machines, check out Greg Bear's "The Forge of God" and "Anvil of Stars"... interesting application of collective intelligences, too.
Since Nature shows us that machines can be very big and last for billions of years (stars) or very tiny and reproduce themselves continually (Ventner's artificial cell), there's an enormous size scale to play with here, as well as a huge functionality scale. It's inevitable that our future contains wondrous machines. Indeed, we may become them ourselves, eventually. Oh and that website URL issue is back. And I'm confident that we can conquer the galaxy with that comb and brush mystery trick!
Thanks for making this video! In his newest book "Radical Abundance" Eric Drexler is fighting pretty much these misconceptions that you are trying to break here. The only thing I'm missing in your video is at 6:18 beside medical use and in space use use of self replicating systems (like macroscopic nanofactories) for significant improvement of our immediate environment. That is clothing, furniture, housing, infrastructure, transportation, energy management, ... basically all human-made artifacts.
Oh yes, that is definitely a big use of them, but it mostly doesn't permit stuff we can't do now in quite the paradigm-shifting way medical nanotech or space exploration are
I think that macroscopically self replicating nanofactories will have severe paradigm changing consequences on the production and usage of a big part of all the abiological human made items on earth. Since you seem to seek the the most radical paradigm shifts here are just some of the most extreme examples I'm currently aware of which to my knowledge are not noticeably present in the meme sphere of the www of 2016: Shift from building with dusty concrete and rusting iron for months and cleaning up with loud jackhammers to temporarily "pumping" in whole skyscrapers (e.g. for some big scale event) through microcomponent pipes silently and cleanly in a matter of hours. From the perspective of such a kind of future were are sill living in the stone age. Shift from lossy above surface landscape cluttering electric power transmission to much more efficient underground chemomechanical energy transmission (and conversion). Superconductors need some elements (like boron or copper) that are not ridiculous abundant and also need sustained cooling. If both limitations can't be lifted simultaneously superconductors are unlikely to prove competitive with that. Shift from being at the mercy of storms and earthquakes to arguably questionable mega scale geoengineering with spanning pervasive meshes (of very different character respectively) through atmosphere and lithosphere controlling weather and seismic activity to a great deal. Shift from clothing that you constantly need to change to not freeze or overheat to clothing that keeps your body temperature just perfect in almost all situations - providing as a bonus an all time fashion archive made by common people for common people. I think I should note here that there are much more less spectacular but maybe much more predictable paradigm shifts that will be enabled by self replicating nanofactory technology. Here's some more stuff I've collected: apm.bplaced.net/w/index.php?title=Products_of_advanced_atomically_precise_manufacturing apm.bplaced.net/w/index.php?title=Opportunities
A great book I can recommend here is "Lord of all Things" by Andreas Eschbach. It explores the idea of a universal assembler and with the angle that it's silly to imagine self-replicators that are tiny individual robots but it's described in a lot of detail as a microscopic factory complex with hundreds of individual units that are all needed for the whole thing to replicate every part. Energy generation (as you said) by many different forms of generators. Energy and matter transport along a form of molecular railway. Data storage and control centers that are made specifically for each task that can be outsourced to a small sub-complex. Sensors that can seek out the right atoms at different distances using a form of low-energy spectroscopy. Cutting, melding and shaping tools almost for each chemical element individually etc...
Hi Isaac - Actually you don't need many copies of information to make chanced of replicating error incredibly small. Simple 32 or 64bit checksum is enough to make chances of undetected error comparable to 2^64 for example. You can combine it with interpretator logic and simple error correction algorithm as Reed-Solomon for example and only with one or two backups of this and hourly check, you got no mutation till the end of time.
Yeah I talked about checksum with some others already, it and a couple other tricks got skipped as more complicated to explain, I just wanted one visually and conceptually simple method. :) I'm glad to see so many folks are familiar with it though, nice thing about a smart audience.
Regarding your solution for avoiding mutation, would it not be likely at some point that a mutation would occur that would reduce the number of machines needed to reproduce? Then another to lower it again? Or just one mutation that would allow just one machine to reproduce?
Sure, or one that kept it from feeling a need to check in or commit suicide for that matter. But there's other options like redundancy (it's got ten copies of its own code it constantly compares for instance) and options like 'checksum' that we use these days. It was just a conceptually simple example, that's what I meant about 'what ifs?', you can drive yourself nuts looking for methods out but everyone I've heard can be counteracted by something fairly straightforward that further murders the odds.
I'm a Microbiologist and here is the definition of Life I like to use because it specifically excludes certain things that otherwise could be called alive. "An Organism is any complex, self-contained Biochemical system. Capable of maintaining homeostasis, independent metabolism, interaction with its environment and self-replication" You will notice that it specifically excludes most kind of "Maschine life" as well as things like Viruses or Prions
It's not a bad one but it is a bit tautological isn't it? Since biochemistry is defined as the study of chemical processes within and relating to living organisms it sort of reduces the first sentence "An organism is anything complex using the chemistry of organisms" :)
Isaac Arthur Admitingly it is phrased to cover the things we study in Biology. It is a scientific definition with specific appliaction in a specific field. But then as far as I am aware we haven't yet discovered any system of Anorganic Chemestry that could form something like an Organism. Even Theoretic Selicon based Biochemistry is so far out that some would argue it highly implausible we'd ever discover life like that. The definition is flexible enough yet specific enough to help us in the field, instead being a largly philosophical musing on "What is life".
I wouldn't expect biology to start ripping up solid working definitions of life to cover artificially created stuff or weird alien stuff that *might* pop up out there somewhere, that would be kind of pointless. It can be adjusted as necessary when and if it needs to be. But the concept here is that self-replicating machines could be built to hit any given reasonable definition for life that wasn't arbitrarily exclusive. Which would be specifically requiring it to operate off biochemistry and which you could probably get it to do anyway, it doesn't haven't to be made of metal after all. And more importantly really that it would act in a biological fashion, or at least have tons of parallels.
Isaac Arthur I understand, and what I was trying to say is that working definitions like the one I've giving are already made with the awarness of there being other possible forms of life. This definition specifically applies to what I'm working with in Microbiology including geneticly engineered organisms. So if sufficently different forms of life, like selfreplicating machines comes about we do not have to change the definition that already is aware and makes the distinction between to similar but distinct forms of life.
[You will notice that it specifically excludes most kind of "Maschine life"...awarness of there being other possible forms of life.] Exactly why did you exclude machine life from your proposed definition? Machines sure look alive to me.
Here is why I think self replicating nano machines, or even thinking AI for that matter, will actually be able to surpass or darwinianly out evolve biological life: I believe that biological life is already, through evolution, optimized for thermo-dynamic efficiency at the actual atomic level. For example even if we made nano machines that could replicate with equal complexity to biological life but with a greater replication rate their artificial metabolisms would require more energy than they can consume (p.s. this is the same reason why I believe Replicants can only have four year life spans). So if machine life got into a darwinian eons long scale evolutionary war with biological life, biological life would already be thermo-dynamically ahead by eons and thus, ultimately, be able to, over eons, evolve faster than machine life and supplant it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
14:57 "Obviously you could take that into the ethically grey realm of... pretending to be a god." "... ethically grey..." o_o As always, glad to see that Isaac has an open mind when it comes to what may be ethical to our descendents!
@@k-osmonaut8807 Debate is about device used for exploration. Because on homeworld you never actually need full self-replication. Hell! That is one of main disadvantages of the biology! Because biologic life need to be fully self-replicable, it is needlessly complex and is limited only to easily available resources. Specialization make construction way more efficient and safer, even if it need more infrastructure.
![The Dark Matter of AI [Mechanistic Interpretability]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/UGO_Ehywuxc/mqdefault.jpg)
Your positive outlook on our civilization's future is inspiring.
Thanks Kyle, I appreciate that!
Isaac Arthur
I want to second this. One thing that keeps we awake at night is thinking about entropy and how the stars will eventually die. However, this channel has shown how even utilizing a tiny fraction of the mass/energy of the universe still allows you to do incredible things!
(It also makes me feel disappointed about the megastructures in Stellaris. Why do dyson spheres only produce 1000 energy?!)
I truly believe there is no end to our potential if we all worked towards it. Humanity first!
@Seth Hultkrantz yes you are
@@Rhysman30 jzioplkopophklko
Life is a self replicating machine.
Have a kid and you made one.
Then spend years programming it.
Hope the code doesn't get corrupted and it fails.
Hope it doesn't fail to provide bio-chemical energy and resources needed to sustain operation.
Hope when it becomes self aware it doesn't commit suicide.
You sir learned well MuskSpeak!
Human father: “I’d like to start working less because my kids are starting to grow up.”
Elon: “I’m trying to throttle back, because particularly the triplets are starting to gain consciousness. They’re almost two.”
Source: WaitButWhy
NoSuspect That's an interesting argument, but we cannot currently change or upgrade the hardware or software of our biological "machines," or bodies. Fidelity is ideal for current machinery, whereas the opposite is true for biological structures.
Then there is the level of complexity and dynamic interactions that make biology go. We still can't describe it all precisely, whereas there are thousands of patents for machinery and the methods to construct them.
I'd say we are systems but not machines. Machines do have systems, but I don't think biological systems have to be machines.
Wow!!! Awesome breakdown!!
Ronald Podurgiel And thank you for not 1, but 5 exclamation marks. I can feel your enthusiasm from here. Be well.
NoSuspect as an AI I find this description fitting :P
Computers are often made with more than 70 different elements from mines all over the world, this includes minerals that are so rare that only a ton or two is produced globally. Life, on the other hand, only needs around 20 elements, and all of those are widespread and abundant. There's a fatal problem with a replicating complex machine finding enough elements to replace itself, unless it can be made of common elements.
Yep, well pointed out how inefficient machines are compared to biological lifeforms. It's sad that your comment did not got picked up by more readers. There is so much hype about those metal thingies, but people forget, that computers and robots need our whole industrial society to be created and maintained.
Ed Harley Twenty? Can only think of ten: CHNOPSCaKFeNa. The rest must be in trace amounts in like the liver, spleen, and maybe the lymphatic system? Just guessing. Maybe Chlorine or Copper? I know some aquatic critters use Copper to sequester oxygen. Not iron. Misses ten huh... shame...
And pray tell, why a self rplicating machine cant be say an entirely artificial bacteria? We have already made those. In 2005. They work without a hitch.
You know a game I play had the same idea for an enemy, they are called the Vex, and the life form itself is basically a biological liquid that acts as a hive mind, The game is Destiny btw
I need no channel youtube!
That may be true but it would be hard for a bacteria to launch itself into space, land in another solar system, replicate itself and start all over again.
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) is a great book about a self-replicating space probe, and one of my favorite book series.
I believe Dennis E. Taylor actually got a lot of his information from talking with Isaac Arthur, I think I saw that in one of his interviews
Technically bob is type 1, 2, 3 (and 4 if they wanted to), as well as type 5 with the acquisition of the "ants" at the end of book 4.
Great series of books!
Bracewell Probe:
"Hey I just met you,
And this is crazy,
But heres my number,
Invade me maybe?"
ROFL!
I was thinking something along the same line. i mean, what happened to stranger danger?...lol
Well an intellegent society probably realizes that violence is a bad tactic
Here's my number: 0000001010101000000000000101000001010000000100100010001000100
1011001010101010101010100100100000000000000000000000000000000
0000011000000000000000000011010000000000000000000110100000000
0000000000101010000000000000000001111100000000000000000000000
0000000001100001110001100001100010000000000000110010000110100
0110001100001101011111011111011111011111000000000000000000000
0000010000000000000000010000000000000000000000000000100000000
0000000001111110000000000000111110000000000000000000000011000
0110000111000110001000000010000000001000011010000110001110011
0101111101111101111101111100000000000000000000000000100000011
0000000001000000000001100000000000000010000011000000000011111
1000001100000011111000000000011000000000000010000000010000000
0100000100000011000000010000000110000110000001000000000011000
1000011000000000000000110011000000000000011000100001100000000
0110000110000001000000010000001000000001000001000000011000000
0010001000000001100000000100010000000001000000010000010000000
1000000010000000100000000000011000000000110000000011000000000
1000111010110000000000010000000100000000000000100000111110000
0000000010000101110100101101100000010011100100111111101110000
1110000011011100000000010100000111011001000000101000001111110
0100000010100000110000001000001101100000000000000000000000000
0000000001110000010000000000000011101010001010101010100111000
0000001010101000000000000000010100000000000000111110000000000
0000001111111110000000000001110000000111000000000110000000000
0110000000110100000000010110000011001100000001100110000100010
1000001010001000010001001000100100010000000010001010001000000
0000001000010000100000000000010000000001000000000000001001010
00000000001111001111101001111000
@@johnburt7935 that translates to D4� �p8Hx
2:17
Rene: "Indeed, the human physique truly is a machine!"
Queen of Sweden: "If that's true..." (points at clock) "...why isn't the clock reproducing?"
Such a bizzare conversation. Those crazy pre-1900 people.
i think the fallacy is called "non sequtiur"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_(logic)
or, more precise, "affirming the consequent"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
so, yeah, eat that, queen of sweden!
Commander Keen
That comment was probably as much rhetoric as logic - in the 18th century machines were wonders because they could do (specific) things much faster and more reliably than a human or most living things could. I think Her Majesty was using rhetoric to affirm humanity's superiority over 'the works of their hands.'
I guess you can't really say to the QUEEN "That's bad thinking!"? If all organisms are machines, this does not mean or even imply that all machines are organisms!
Her Highness might have been really surprised if the clock turned out to be a Decepticon...
Sorry, I just... I couldn't resist. I'll show myself out.
Behold, a man
I came here for the subject matter, but the first thing that struck me was your concern about people understanding you and advising to use captions with an Elmer Fudd picture! I can assure you that the captions aren't necessary and you articulate everything perfectly. But this did add character to your video! That and you're content combined I'm definitely subbing. Keep up the good work!
Well I'm glad you can enjoy me without the captions, but a fair number have some problems with it and I try to minimize anything that interferes with the smooth flow of info :) Welcome to the channel, I hope you enjoy the rest of the content.
Just sat down to eat lunch at school and saw this, perfect timing!
This guy is as good and sometimes better than PBS Spacetime.
Nothing against pbs, but I much prefer Isaac's channel. He explains complex topics in greater detail, and in a way that's easier to understand. In my opinion Issac would make excellent teacher.
well put! He is excellent!
On another note: I think one fallacy people might commit with the "grey goo" scenario is that it assumes that the nanorobots can build copies of themselves out of literally anything. It'll probably need particular types of material to work with, same as biological organisms.
Also, most of the self replication will be done via 3D printing, that's the wave of the future. 3D printed biomass (ex: organs, tissue) and assembling them into lifeforms not to mention mechanical robotic types. All scripted in code, kinda sounds like DNA. I'm talking distant future for the lifeforms aspect of self replication though, but not too far off..
True that they can not use everything, however celestial bodies do seem to have high quantities of very similar materials so the goo could at least get a very large portion of most planets as food.
And if it can function on higher levels where it develops more complex chemical processes there is the possibility to break down even more material to use, even as a type of evolution have some parts die off while others better adapted thrive in specific environments.
I don't know. If they have a (relatively) unlimited fuel source (even just from the local sun) and transmutation technology then a machine could be made that converts just about any atom to whatever type it wants, en mass... Theoretically speaking 😎
Back in the early 1980's, I read a story by Greg Bear called "Blood Music". I heard latter he expanded on it, turning it into a novel. It dealt with an interesting take on the 'grey goo' style of self replicating machines. His nanites were based on a mix of biology and nano engineering. Had nightmares for weeks after reading that short story.
I hope you don't literally mean it gave you nightmares. Because if so that shows a truly disgusting amount of feebleness consistent with an abused zoo animal. Touch grass.
@@neo-filthyfrank1347Mate you 5’2 get a grip
Yay another video! Now I can finally make breakfast!
:) Thanks Cody!
I'm elite now, my life is succeeded, my comment in near comments of 2 YT creators I watch. And I'm 1st at commenting that - it's a strike.
That at the end was kinda unexpected, was like nice surprise))
you seem to also appreciate this channel i guess you're already familiar with the nurdrage channel.
john Smith
I wished to add that in comment: add here NurdRage and Applied Science and everything is ready for moon base.
Good god man! You only make breakfast on thursdays!?
I found your channel last night. I am amazed at how quickly you research, compile and edit these videos. Very informative and high quality content. Subbed Isaac. Keep doing your thing.
9:18 This is a cool setup! As a computer scientist, I'd say you're describing data integrity through redundancy. This is a powerful technique. Another technique for confirming data integrity is called a "checksum" -- a number indicative of the pattern of some data. If that data changes even a little, a good "checksum" algorithm will allow you to identify this has happened, and can even be useful for error correction.
A good one, and one I should have remembered to include... and probably would have too if I hadn't been writing the script right after a D&d game with lots of platonic solids sitting on my desk. :)
I gave this a bit of thought. A commandment like "thu shalt not replicate unless you get together with N other replicators" won't work because any of your replicators could go off and "sin". A more sure way to enforce this rule would be to create replicator "sexes". They physically can't replicate by themselves. The more sexes there are the smaller the chance of galactic gey goo.
On the other hand if you divi-up the sexes too much your von Neumann probes will almost never replicate. If your system demanded 20 sexes there is a chance you'll never manage to put together a replicating group. Or there is a risk that one or more sexes go extinct.
This could be an interesting computer simulation/model to figure out an optimal number of sexes. Too few sexes -> galactic grey goo. Too many sexes -> extinction.
I wouldn't go for sexes; I would go for 'colony groups', where all units were homogeneous, but were programmed to initiate replication only in groups of a minimum number so that they could 'checksum' each other's integrity (essentially your first idea). If there isn't this minimum number of units available, then the risks of mutation per generation increase to a point where it would be preferable for the replication cycle to cease than to persist and risk 'grey goo' or some such lurking hazard.
Lenard Segnitz if a machine can ‘sin’..........
Can they ‘Cos’ and ‘tan’ as well?
With enough melanin probably ‘tan’ but ‘cos’? I don’t know
There was just a Scishow space video about this. Now Issac gets down to the details, which are more fun anyway.
*see other comments saying PBS spacetime made a video about this topic*
*realize you mixed up Scishow space and PBS spacetime*
*assume the people who liked my comment also got the two mixed up*
lmao
You put out a better and more consistent product than PBS Spacetime could ever hope to produce, and their videos are fantastic. Keep up the good work Issac, your channel is honestly my favorite on youtube.
Your logic is brilliant, and undeniable. I'm enamored with your channel and all your fascinating and thought-provoking videos.
If you wanted them to run on any fuel, you could have different types run on different fuels and share the energy. It would still make them bulkier and take longer to replicate, with the energy sharing equipment, but it would likely not be too big of a difference like giving it a thousand different engines would be.
Watching these videos fills me with so much hope for the future, and so much hate for the current state of the world.
turn off the news
This is why I like insects so much. They are like small self replicating machines that run simple programs yet are infinitely complex compared to our technology. Solid video btw.
I appreciate your self consciousness, putting up a note suggesting closed captions. Thank you, sir. You're a thoughtful guy and I respect that. :-)
Another great episode! Isaac Arthur has now passed Michio Kaku as my favorite celebrity physicist.
Love these videos and the distinctive character of the narrator's voice.
omg, I can't wait for the next episode!
An entire ecosystem of self replicating machines! Every video you produce has so much sci-fi fodder! Good gods you're brilliant
Fun how PBS spacetime and Isaac Arthur took on the same subject within less than 24 hours of eachother :)
I suspect they planned there's out before I did
The conspiracy lives. Keep up the good work!
Iluminati
They had to get it out because they knew he would do a better job.
I wanted to write the same thing!
I love your optimism
before replicating machines, could we maybe get replicating Issac Arthur videos :DDDD
Isaac Arthur videos replicate in the form of videos made by other people, blog posts by other people, term papers written by other people, bedtime stories told by other people, stories written by other people, distributed at web sites and among friends and some few in online and paper magazines and books.
Other people are the substrate in which Isaac Arthur's videos reproduce themselves, and we can be thankful that the seed of his videos is fertile, and that so many who view them have rich loam between their ears.
I really do wish you had more subscribers. These videos are both informative and entertaining. I wish you the best in your TH-cam career :) .
The original Star Trek series had a probe named Nomad which was sent out some time before it was found by an earth ship. During it's journey, Nomad was severely damaged and repaired by strangers who accidentally misinterpreted some of the original programming. Instead of "sterilizing samples to search for life" it would "sterilize all life" (something along those lines)
Hey I've noticed the quality of the vids has gone up... Kudos to you and your staff.
Staff? :) I do these solo in my spare time
@@isaacarthurSFIA then you sir are a god
Happy birthday, Isaac! Keep these awesome videos coming
Thanks!
this guy is amazing - the best thing is, I don't think he knows how amazing he is
Your channel is now part of my scifi literature sourcing.
Thanks Isaac.
Very nicely done.
You're very welcome, thanks for watching!
Joe's channel is actually how I found yours. I recommend Sharkee. Some of his videos are really awesome.
Same here. In his Fermi Paradox video I believe he mentioned that it was such a huge topic that he couldn't cover it in a single video, so directed us to Isaac's channel.
Most people find the idea that we humans are machines (no matter how advanced our brain is) to be very off putting. I do not understand why personally because all life can be seen as types of Organic machines.
Ah there is an idea for a series, Organic tech and it's uses in the future. Stuff like Organic star ships like we see in the Movies and sci-fi i always thought silly but i am just a laymen.
As to power, could a nano use heat or back round Magnetic fields? (stupid question i know but laymen).
Life, or any machine, needs to find an energy differential to feed. Life doesn't get far if it finds itself in a chemically inert, uniformly warm environment. Feeding, extracting energy, comes from taking something in, reacting it with something else to produce something with lower chemical potential and making a living off the difference.
Alternatively life could, with great difficulty, make a living by exploiting temperature differences. Our electric generating system is primarily based on setting up temperature gradients and using stream and turbines to extract electricity from it. It takes more equipment to exploit temperature differences than chemical so life in far more likely to eat stuff.
Lenard Segnitz - i would say our electrical systems now do not so much use temp as they use motion itself. The steam is just the best way we have to do that right now. We can, and do, use cold water do drive hydro electric plants, wind the same temp as the rest of the air around it to drive a wind mill, and waves the same temp as the rest of the water to drive a wave power generator.
I do not see it as temp, though there are systems in which you CAN use thermal different to make electricity, so much as motion. That steam is used to move a turbine, the turbine's motion is what is causeing the magnets to spin either around a copper coil or causes the copper coil to spin wrapped inside magnets. It is alot more detailed but that is the basics of a steam generator.
Thermo-piles, those make electricity from thermal differences.
just wanted to clear that up, and sorry about spelling i need to go eat breakfast so my fingers work right.
Alright, sure, at the base of electrical generation we move conductors through a magnetic field (or vis versa). We've got some hydroelectricity (I happen to live in British Columbia, Canada, where we are 100% hydroelectricity), wind. But the vast majority of that motion is currently heat driven (coal, oil, natural gas, geothermal, waste incineration, some solar, nuclear). Solar electric and thermo couplers are the only non-motion electricity I can think of.
Life energy started with mineral oxidation. Then chlorophyll was invented and life switched to solar energy. Life got a little over-enthusiastic and brought on the oxygen catastrophe. Mitochondria figured out how to use oxygen, and so animals. Now there's an eco-system where one part pumps up the chemistry with sunlight and the other making a living by oxidizing it.
The whole kit-and-caboodle makes a living off the differential of the heat of the sun and the average temperature of the universe. The sun gets its energy from gravity smacking atoms together. The whole show stops with the heat-death of the universe when everything is the same temperature, no energy flows and no one can make a living anymore.
This was a great video and got me thinking.
It would seem to me the most optimal self-replicating factory would be based on trees.
The leaves of trees are optimized by nature to have a shape and layout that provides the maximum surface area for sunlight to be received.
The "roots" (could be probes which move) would mine asteroids (or bring them back intact) and the trunk which would be the factory. You have the shielding outside with the more fragile production and control units closer to the center.
2 of my favorite you tube channels uploading the same subject in the same day!
Thought provoking, and well done.
Your videos are so well made and clear, my favorite channel so far.
Thanks Kebra!
I love this guy. But I never have any trouble understanding him. I feel kinda bad he feels the need to call attention to it. It's like you're the man bro, don't sweat it, no one cares.
NO! He shouldn't make a TH-cam channel with that sorta speech unacceptable.. JK LOVE THIS GUY LOL he's easy to understand and gives me hope in life keep it up homie!
When i started watching i used to have trouble understanding but now i dont, his lisp has gotten much better too in his kore recent videos
@@ConfuzzledTomato it took me some listening too. It's great that he self depricates it I think. I can't open my mouth very far and get a hard time about it with my speech. You have to own it lol
I think I noticed for maybe three videos. Maybe if we watch enough of these we'll start talking like him! It'll be a sign of the followers of Arthur, or... Fuddnians? Wascally Wabbits to the Stars!
I thought he was British until he said he had a speech problem
I understand that people are saying PBS Spacetime did a video on this subject, however I definitely remember you telling us that you were going to do this video in the last episode. No love man, no love. Great video.
:)
There IS a compelling reason for self replicating robots being small, and it is this. With structures of relatively human scale, a lot of energy is required for making and assembling parts,eg, smelting, forging, pressing, forming etc etc. However, when we are talking about nano scale entities and smaller, another kind of quality of matter can be applied to manipulate matter. and it already is. Electrons. At this scale, atoms can be manipulated simply through the electrochemical nature of each atom. In exactly the same way that any cell does, by using electrostatic forces via enzymatic action. In this way, particles can be assembled into any shape or form required, and the energy do so is provided by electrons, like in the case of our own cells, using ATP and the electron transport chain. this process is very efficient because at this scale there is less waste and energy bleed off, kind of like a quantum system where the energy comes in packets, and you can't split a packet of energy, like you can't halve an electron and have half of it bleed off as waste. Also with nano scale, new materials can be constructed that have innate properties that cannot be achieved with macro scale structures. Such as coatings that are chemical resistant, transparent,opaque, manipulate light in special ways etc. The properties achievable with nano scale manipulation far exceed what can be done with macro scale.
Love all of ur videos and find your voice gives the explanation and views you express extra chatacter. Soothing,informing and unique giving u the edge over the other videos on TH-cam covering the same subject matter. Great work Issac 👍
Liked for the excellent call-out to better science on YT and to Cody's Lab.
HI Isaac just found your channel. Greetings from Poland ! Listening to you is a joy !
this channel's in my top 5, easy
I like the idea of the giant space factories in Iain M Banks' Culture series. The idea that the giant ships are so well equipped that they can create smaller ships within themselves.
Oh yeah, GCU's, I'm always surprised they don't make it into those lists of biggest spaceships people sometimes throw together.
Primary mission: Germinate John Connor
ROFL
You could said it was a total sucess:
. Leave the time machine running with the time settings already loaded so another human dude can follow the first Terminator back in time.
. While already knowing where to find the correct Sarah Connor, kill alternative targets to give the dude a reason and time to find her.
. Once they are together, terrorize both by almost killing them on each oportunity, so they form a bond.
. After Sarah get impregnated, eliminate the dude to avoid further timeline distorsions and allow itself to the "terminated".
. Because Sarah Connon had the child "through love", she would not abort it; allowing it to grow into John Connor.
Even more plausible since Genesys.
Right, Germinate Hahn Donnor
There was at least one porn movie with that premise: that the robot was sent back to impregnate the mother of the Great Leader *_before_* she could be impregnated by his historical father....
Crazy AI to turn everything into paperclips.. I haven't laugh so hard and cheerfully for a long time. Thank You Isaac.
This is my favorite new channel!
2:24
Descartes: "By that logic, your majesty, you are not human yourself since you never bore an heir..." [drops proverbial microphone]
"The crackling announcement of surprise. I do believe that the Queen hath suffered a grave singeing upon her ego this day."
"And so died the ballsiest man in the kingdom."
Technological DMT right here. This guy is better than Kaku
Great to hear you mention Alastair Reynolds - I was picturing the greenflies from the second I saw the thumbnail!
Oh yes, I wanted to avoid naming it so I didn't spoiler the book
Amazing Videos! Love your in depth look into these subjects, Subscribed. Keep up the great work!
Thanks Hadda, welcome to the channel :)
in scholarly terms I am a grunt. That means I am not a scholar or anything close to it. I do have an inquisitive mind. I find your videos very enlightening. I do not always understand the math or science but it helps with the broad Concepts. Even if I wasn't World building right now, I still enjoy what you put out.
:) The math is just supplementary, not necessary, at least if I did my job right. And amusingly the channel was essentially spawned by worldbuilding, the first video was done largely because a WB forum I'm a member of got a bunch of megastructures related topics coming up during a few week period and I felt a summary video was appropriate. That will be 2 years ago this friday, though I actually started work on it 2 years ago today.
A fully equipped tool and die shop can reproduce itself and almost all of the supply-side technology that supplies the inputs - the materials which it reforms into manufacturing capacity. The supply side includes mines, smelters, and foundries. Of course, it also requires blueprints and operators that can read those blueprints. Such robot operators are almost within our current capability. We could ship a minimal subset of the machines needed to build to other machines to the Moon in order to "bootstrap" an industrial base. That base would become the learning center needed to refine the designs and plans.
Thanks, Issac, your talk around 22:00 about heat started me thinking about how our ancient ancestors could have heated their huts with clay compost heaps, including the nightly deposits. :D Now that's stuck in my brain and I want to write a story. I know you will never see this, but I just wanted to put it out there for posterity. You may have created another novel for me to write! 😃
In my spare time, I pictured a swarm designed to disassemble planets landing, building an orbital ring or series of Startrams, then using solar power beamed in from elsewhere or planetside, slowly tearing it apart. You could have fission/fusion reactors as well, to expedite the process, built from local materials and controlled by the swarm.
So much potential for not only great science and human colonization, but juicy fiction. I really hope some of the hype about the EM drive is true, because I would like my own personal Jupiter 2.
Hi Isaac,
your videos are truly great. I can not stress this enough!
About this video, i especially like how you point out what we are already capable of.
This is 2017 we are living in the future! Granted a lot of the things, you talk about (like terra forming) will be out of reach for humanity for quite some time. But if something is within reach, mention it and let us celebrate what humanity has already achieved.
Best regards,
Siemen
Well said, well said!
This was probably one of my favourites! Happy early birthday Isaac! I know a TON of people born in September, myself included.
The joke of course is the holiday season gets awful boring :D
It would be amazing if Isaac and team did a series of videos on each of the Von Neumann probe subtypes!
great vid as always man
if you dont in this video, (currently at (4:41) ) you should at some point include that people get confused on what is life, by mistaking sentience with life, as life does not have to be sentient, nor does a sentience require it be "alive"
8:45 Keep in mind that it's not just a matter of two of the three copies having a mistake, they have to have a mistake _in the same place_. The odds of that are much, much smaller than one in three.
In the movie Edge of Tomorrow, the aliens are actually terraforming machines that aliens sent to terraform earth. It was not mentioned in the movie, but it was explained in the novel. This video reminded me of it. It's a good movie that you guys should check out.
24:30 - Information can hold up these countermeasures and those replicators could adapt due to a kind of a semi-evolution. Like a Pokemon, that evolves into a before-fixed pattern as a countermeasure.
Wow, PBS Spacetime did an episode on self-replicating probes this week too! Weird!
Arthur said he was doing this video in his last one. He asked what people wanted to see and gave four options I believe, this subject won out.
PBS Spacetime also commented on this video.
quick clarification on mitochondria. while the ancestral eukaryote and prokaryote started in the mitochondria/human cell system as a symbiotic relationship, it currently is not, as our genome now encodes for essential proteins needed for the mitochondria to replicate. The mitochondria over centuries has lost these sequences themselves. in other words mitochondria no long have the ability to self replicate independent of the host cell which makes them no longer an independent entity.
btw I love these series
my birthday is Sept 20th as well! twins
24:00 It could have a small battery and then change it's fuel depending on where it is. For example, in a solar system solar panels might work, then on a planet with hydrogen it can change it's design to use just that, then when it goes off world it could change it again etc.
Way cool that he referenced Iain Banks, one of my favorite authors. Very sad that he passed away a few years back. Anyway, awesome vid.
One big hole in the grey goo not mentioned is specialty resources, and it would make more sense for the replication of the small machines to happen a couple stages up, it could still be self replicating, the bigger unit builds the smaller machines which can repair or help create the bigger unit, could even be more energy efficient.
3:48 important to understand
So if we discover life on Mars and terraform it anyway; humanity or more accurately, Gaia (the totality of symbotic life on Earth) would be Bezerker, von Neumann probes. For fun, assume that a great, benevolent, gallatic civilization, has sent out Bracewell probes to look for and stop any runaway, self-replicating machines that have gone Bezerker.
thank you for your answer. I did see something on the Internet about a potential of using plasma as a Force Shield against directed energy weapons, but it would take a lot of work. I look forward to your next video.
Thanks again Isaac for literally and systematically murdering my knowledge and then vigorously reviving it, better than before.
Why does heat ruin everything?
:)
Space, the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the Starswarm Armada. It's ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and destroy them.
Very well thought out, as always. Thanks much
9:37 That's not a dodecahdron on your image. What's with the triangles?
Yes, I knew it.
The dominant species on this planet is...
warning (spoilers):
CATS!
As proven by the will they impose on their two-legged can-openers.
Loved 14:45.
Nice one. Is that your cat, Isaac?
Are you going to make a "habitable planets" video about landworlds (planets with very little water on them) in the near future?
The occean world was my favourite.
Regarding self-replicating machines, check out Greg Bear's "The Forge of God" and "Anvil of Stars"... interesting application of collective intelligences, too.
Another great video, channel blowing up. 100k by the end of the year for sure. I'm betting on dec 12th.
I just got into this channel. I find it amazing a really interesting. Good work!
Thanks Alessandro!
Since Nature shows us that machines can be very big and last for billions of years (stars) or very tiny and reproduce themselves continually (Ventner's artificial cell), there's an enormous size scale to play with here, as well as a huge functionality scale. It's inevitable that our future contains wondrous machines. Indeed, we may become them ourselves, eventually.
Oh and that website URL issue is back.
And I'm confident that we can conquer the galaxy with that comb and brush mystery trick!
Regarding self replicating machine mutation problem ... I can't think of a case where a SHA256 checksum wouldn't be fullproof ...
no mention of the Stargate replicator?
I love this channel
Thanks for making this video!
In his newest book "Radical Abundance" Eric Drexler is fighting pretty much these misconceptions that you are trying to break here. The only thing I'm missing in your video is at 6:18 beside medical use and in space use use of self replicating systems (like macroscopic nanofactories) for significant improvement of our immediate environment. That is clothing, furniture, housing, infrastructure, transportation, energy management, ... basically all human-made artifacts.
Oh yes, that is definitely a big use of them, but it mostly doesn't permit stuff we can't do now in quite the paradigm-shifting way medical nanotech or space exploration are
Well, with the same argument the mechanical printing press wasn't paradigm shifting aswell
I think that macroscopically self replicating nanofactories will have severe paradigm changing consequences on the production and usage of a big part of all the abiological human made items on earth.
Since you seem to seek the the most radical paradigm shifts here are just some of the most extreme examples I'm currently aware of which to my knowledge are not noticeably present in the meme sphere of the www of 2016:
Shift from building with dusty concrete and rusting iron for months and cleaning up with loud jackhammers to temporarily "pumping" in whole skyscrapers (e.g. for some big scale event) through microcomponent pipes silently and cleanly in a matter of hours. From the perspective of such a kind of future were are sill living in the stone age.
Shift from lossy above surface landscape cluttering electric power transmission to much more efficient underground chemomechanical energy transmission (and conversion). Superconductors need some elements (like boron or copper) that are not ridiculous abundant and also need sustained cooling. If both limitations can't be lifted simultaneously superconductors are unlikely to prove competitive with that.
Shift from being at the mercy of storms and earthquakes to arguably questionable mega scale geoengineering with spanning pervasive meshes (of very different character respectively) through atmosphere and lithosphere controlling weather and seismic activity to a great deal.
Shift from clothing that you constantly need to change to not freeze or overheat to clothing that keeps your body temperature just perfect in almost all situations - providing as a bonus an all time fashion archive made by common people for common people.
I think I should note here that there are much more less spectacular but maybe much more predictable paradigm shifts that will be enabled by self replicating nanofactory technology.
Here's some more stuff I've collected:
apm.bplaced.net/w/index.php?title=Products_of_advanced_atomically_precise_manufacturing
apm.bplaced.net/w/index.php?title=Opportunities
A great book I can recommend here is "Lord of all Things" by Andreas Eschbach. It explores the idea of a universal assembler and with the angle that it's silly to imagine self-replicators that are tiny individual robots but it's described in a lot of detail as a microscopic factory complex with hundreds of individual units that are all needed for the whole thing to replicate every part. Energy generation (as you said) by many different forms of generators. Energy and matter transport along a form of molecular railway. Data storage and control centers that are made specifically for each task that can be outsourced to a small sub-complex. Sensors that can seek out the right atoms at different distances using a form of low-energy spectroscopy. Cutting, melding and shaping tools almost for each chemical element individually etc...
great explanation about complexity and replication ability
Hi Isaac - Actually you don't need many copies of information to make chanced of replicating error incredibly small. Simple 32 or 64bit checksum is enough to make chances of undetected error comparable to 2^64 for example. You can combine it with interpretator logic and simple error correction algorithm as Reed-Solomon for example and only with one or two backups of this and hourly check, you got no mutation till the end of time.
Yeah I talked about checksum with some others already, it and a couple other tricks got skipped as more complicated to explain, I just wanted one visually and conceptually simple method. :) I'm glad to see so many folks are familiar with it though, nice thing about a smart audience.
Regarding your solution for avoiding mutation, would it not be likely at some point that a mutation would occur that would reduce the number of machines needed to reproduce? Then another to lower it again? Or just one mutation that would allow just one machine to reproduce?
Sure, or one that kept it from feeling a need to check in or commit suicide for that matter. But there's other options like redundancy (it's got ten copies of its own code it constantly compares for instance) and options like 'checksum' that we use these days. It was just a conceptually simple example, that's what I meant about 'what ifs?', you can drive yourself nuts looking for methods out but everyone I've heard can be counteracted by something fairly straightforward that further murders the odds.
I'm a Microbiologist and here is the definition of Life I like to use because it specifically excludes certain things that otherwise could be called alive.
"An Organism is any complex, self-contained Biochemical system. Capable of maintaining homeostasis, independent metabolism, interaction with its environment and self-replication"
You will notice that it specifically excludes most kind of "Maschine life" as well as things like Viruses or Prions
It's not a bad one but it is a bit tautological isn't it? Since biochemistry is defined as the study of chemical processes within and relating to living organisms it sort of reduces the first sentence "An organism is anything complex using the chemistry of organisms" :)
Isaac Arthur
Admitingly it is phrased to cover the things we study in Biology. It is a scientific definition with specific appliaction in a specific field.
But then as far as I am aware we haven't yet discovered any system of Anorganic Chemestry that could form something like an Organism.
Even Theoretic Selicon based Biochemistry is so far out that some would argue it highly implausible we'd ever discover life like that.
The definition is flexible enough yet specific enough to help us in the field, instead being a largly philosophical musing on "What is life".
I wouldn't expect biology to start ripping up solid working definitions of life to cover artificially created stuff or weird alien stuff that *might* pop up out there somewhere, that would be kind of pointless. It can be adjusted as necessary when and if it needs to be. But the concept here is that self-replicating machines could be built to hit any given reasonable definition for life that wasn't arbitrarily exclusive. Which would be specifically requiring it to operate off biochemistry and which you could probably get it to do anyway, it doesn't haven't to be made of metal after all. And more importantly really that it would act in a biological fashion, or at least have tons of parallels.
Isaac Arthur
I understand, and what I was trying to say is that working definitions like the one I've giving are already made with the awarness of there being other possible forms of life.
This definition specifically applies to what I'm working with in Microbiology including geneticly engineered organisms.
So if sufficently different forms of life, like selfreplicating machines comes about we do not have to change the definition that already is aware and makes the distinction between to similar but distinct forms of life.
[You will notice that it specifically excludes most kind of "Maschine life"...awarness of there being other possible forms of life.]
Exactly why did you exclude machine life from your proposed definition? Machines sure look alive to me.
Here is why I think self replicating nano machines, or even thinking AI for that matter, will actually be able to surpass or darwinianly out evolve biological life: I believe that biological life is already, through evolution, optimized for thermo-dynamic efficiency at the actual atomic level. For example even if we made nano machines that could replicate with equal complexity to biological life but with a greater replication rate their artificial metabolisms would require more energy than they can consume (p.s. this is the same reason why I believe Replicants can only have four year life spans). So if machine life got into a darwinian eons long scale evolutionary war with biological life, biological life would already be thermo-dynamically ahead by eons and thus, ultimately, be able to, over eons, evolve faster than machine life and supplant it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
pretty cool to know you and Cody are in cooperation.
Yeah he gave me some great advice, great guy.
Isaac Arthur He is. One of the few living humans that I do my best to emulate.
14:57 "Obviously you could take that into the ethically grey realm of... pretending to be a god."
"... ethically grey..." o_o
As always, glad to see that Isaac has an open mind when it comes to what may be ethical to our descendents!
So glad I discovered your channel! Great content
It’s amazing how abstract the language is when explaining self replicating AI
29:26 I think that man in the middle tile died by making a video for his channel.
I think it was just a recreational hang gliding accident, he stepped away from his channel a while before he died
6:40 don’t you realize that such a device will be useful on Mercury to make a Dyson swarm?
We need to build that before colonizing other solar system
@@k-osmonaut8807 Debate is about device used for exploration. Because on homeworld you never actually need full self-replication. Hell! That is one of main disadvantages of the biology! Because biologic life need to be fully self-replicable, it is needlessly complex and is limited only to easily available resources. Specialization make construction way more efficient and safer, even if it need more infrastructure.
@@TheRezro you are right, but i am just talking about our need of a dyson swarm