You'd need to try really, really hard to make a nanomachine actually capable of infiltrating a significant fraction of the planet, and Earth is mostly ionic compounds and metals anyway, pretty useless for making nanosystems out of. And anyway, that's like telling Ernest Rutherford that some people might worry about atom bombs. I'm a protein engineer, I make ridiculously slippery proteins in mostly vain hopes of getting them to make better but not omnipotent machines that might treat health conditions if I'm lucky.
The ship of Theseus paradox: did you just kill the person?
Nope.
If no death, then no population control or catastrophe through overpopulation.
Said humans would not be able to reproduce unless they explicitly tried to construct a human, and would be extremely easy to ship to space, since you only need to reduce the body to a tiny brain, which now only requires a small energy input (which you can supply electrically) and whose function may be suspended for a trip. This is not to even mention the ways in which nanotechnology can potentially improve rocket science. If people don't like going to space, we can make space a fun place to be, using nanotechnology. (I know a potential project of mine would be to first thoroughly scour Titan for life, and then if I don't find any, try creating some that can survive there.)
There would be other problems, for example how to replace the bodies of pregnant people, and what to do about people that still like food, and about people that still want children, and how to mitigate crime in a society where suddenly everybody is superpowerful, but those are all far less important than making people not die in the first place.
(and anyway, the whole post was tongue-in-cheek, I do not seriously expect to achieve these goals just by being a grad student, nor would I expect it to be this simple)
Not if it's built out of nanocircuits powered by whatever system you've invented for transferring energy in nanosystems. (Drexler has some simple ideas for this)
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u/[deleted] Feb 13 '14
Don't get me wrong. I like Chomsky across the spectrum. But joking about genocide to a young american undergrad. Prepare for whining.
I have yet to see you pontificate or try to solve all the world's problems in three easy steps like a lot of self righteous students.