One is not given to waxing lyrical on the obvious deficiencies contained in the blueprints of life! It is far too easy, in these politically correct and needlessly divisive days, to fall foul of some group or other - be they Creationists, Darwinian Evolutionists or any other kind of 'ists' - by suggesting that whoever or whatever came up with the original design template for life was shooting for the lowest possible outcome. Perhaps it was as much as the 'Chinese of the day' could manufacture? I say 'Chinese', not out of any desire to malign those industrious people, but to support my premise with what is demonstrably true, namely, that Chinese products, though undeniably cheap and plentiful, are not noted for their durability. In other words, they fall apart as fast as a papier-mâché dam.
Simply put: life is too damned easy to extinguish! Certainly, there is little one can do to make humans - or cattle, for that matter - resistant to Hellfire missiles. And, while I must concede that the Creator might not have envisaged these weapons when the master plans for life were drawn up, such a lack of foresight does, to my mind, undermine any faith in an All Knowing, All Seeing Deity. That, however, is another subject, for another time. My complaint derives not from the fact that living creatures, human or otherwise, are unable to survive being hit by hi-tech death machines - whether foreseen or unforeseen - but that they have been constructed with so many imperfections that it is a miracle that they survive long enough to reproduce. My ears have started to burn! I have undoubtedly pissed off some group or other, but I remain unrepentant. Many of our more advanced life forms could have been constructed in a better way.
How good, for example, would it be to pay a visit to one's physician and be told that one had had a heart attack, but that one's back up heart seemed to be working fine? How wonderful would it be to be told that one could continue to slurp a bottle of gin a day because, although one's primary liver had succumbed to cirrhosis, one's alternate had got one's back? Of course, there are practical limits to this utility. One could not have backup knee joints without backup legs - though they could be held behind one's back, against the day they might be needed. On the plus side, we already have two eyes, two ears and two nostrils, but they do not provide redundancy. Two eyes give depth perception, two ears allow us to determine the direction a sound is coming from. Two nostrils? Not sure about that one! Perhaps it was simply aesthetics?
Mind you, immortality would not be a good thing, either! Not because we don't deserve it, as a species, but because the world would be an even worse place if we didn't have the comfort of knowing that the psychopaths who seize power and proceed to eradicate as many of us as they can, and steal from the ones they don't, are going to die one day. Indeed, that might be the very reason we are so poorly constructed. Having a sell by date preprogrammed into us gives us a sense of there being a limit to what we can achieve. Of course, there is another side to the coin. The knowledge that our time is short is a spur to our ambitions and excesses. 'So little time, so many companies to nationalize,' the Golden One might well be saying to himself as I write this. And, before I am accused of being unfair to politicians, let me say this: I distrust them, to a man (or woman). Though I am clearly of the twentieth century, my sensibilities hark back to an age when Bankers were 'Professional Men' with an obsessive devotion to maintaining, at the very least, an aura of honor and integrity, while those who worked in the Stock Market were not accorded the god-like reverence they are given today, but rather were regarded somewhat akin to a 'Bookmaker's Runner'! So much has changed, over the years. Corrupt Bankers, CEO's and Politicians seem not to care one jot whether or not we notice them leaving the scene of their latest scam with their pockets stuffed with banknotes. They stick out their double chins, puff their chests and defy us to render them a swift hanging, knowing full well that we have bigger fish to fry, like voting in the latest episode of American Idol! Not that I haven't prospered by my association with the upper class. I have. Then again, I have many expenses. This green ensemble I am wearing cost over $8,000 and necessitated three trip from Belize to Solingen, Germany to be fitted for it.
Mark you. Politicians and Bankers like wars! The former get to distract their rebellious populations with newly identified (or fabricated) enemies, while the latter get to make a fortune loaning governments the money to engage in their adventures, while investing in arms manufacturers - on both sides. Indeed, most advances in our lives derive from the so-called 'elite's' desire to shorten as many of them as they can, as violently as they can. Military research, after all, has given us the Internet, canned foods, surveying and map making techniques... and countless other useful products. It should come as little surprise, therefore, that this issue of 'redundancy' was researched at great length and unbelievable cost on the planet, Lawanda, by the national government of Nesca, in an attempt to win its war with neighboring Jalapenia. The Nesca War Department invested upwards of forty percent of the Gross Domestic Product of the entire nation in coming up with an alternative to the living, breathing warrior. Their answer? Take life out of the equation.
Remotely controlled bombers, drones and tanks had been in vogue for a decade. As is the case on Earth, by reducing loss of life among Nesca's military to virtually zero, they had already made engaging in any sort of conflict, including resolving a minor foreign policy impasse, a hair trigger, reflexive act, requiring little thought and little preparation. And, since no military deaths meant no grieving relatives, such impulsiveness, even if it proved to be a catastrophic mistake, accrued limited political cost.
The secrecy surrounding the development of such technology ensured it could be used as it was always intended to be used: as judge, jury and executioner, any time, anywhere, regardless of whether or not the target was the right one. Mistakes, when they did happen, which was often, could be hidden from public scrutiny. Not that the public would have given a tinker's cuss about the deaths of foreigners, as long as they could continue to sit at a sidewalk table, sipping their equivalent of a latte. From a foreign policy perspective, there's nothing quite like 'Joystick Jurisprudence', is there? Left a bit. Right a bit. Fire! Splat one bad guy. Let's get a beer. But these wonderful toys had limits. They were prohibitively expensive! Their indiscriminate use resulted in tremendous collateral damage which, in turn, bred resentment amongst the victims and the desire to keep fighting. Such weapons, it may be said - and I do - never resolve conflict because only extensive casualties can raise public anger sufficiently to bring to a halt the imperial aspirations of a nation's leaders - at least until such time as their military forces have been replenished, their equipment levels have been rebuilt, and/or a new leader is in office, promising to do things better, this time. With a whiff of 'change' in the air, and hope restored, the public will soon return to its distractions and the slaughter can resume.
The solution dreamed up by the Nesca War Department, which came with the desired ability to provide 'deniability' and render conflicts 'invisible' to the average citizen, was based on artificial intelligence, incorporated into systems capable of self-replication and repair. The devices used for producing these systems were, themselves, produced by earlier, simpler, devices. At first, atom-sized motors were designed, followed by larger, more complex, nano-machines, interconnected, one with the other, by the molecular equivalent of pheromones. In a remarkably short time a prototype nano-factory was developed, capable of producing a simple, insect sized surveillance drone. Released close to the enemy line, it would over-fly areas of interest sending back real time images and target coordinates. Next came a communications grid, into which the drones would 'drop' their data, followed by thimble sized killer-drones that would destroy a specific target with a micro-charge.
The power of the nano-factory is its ability to manufacture nano-machines from readily available molecules, such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, etc.. In the Nesca solution, a single nano-factory was programmed to replicate itself a certain number of times. This was done by the nano equivalent of simple cell division. When the new nano-factory emerged, it would undertake a series of self-tests to ensure no replication errors were present. Should there be any the device would self-destruct. When the required number of 'factories' had been replicated, this 'source' nano-factory ceased producing copies of itself and switched to a stand-by mode, wherein it would wait to receive from its clones regular, 'I am still here and working correctly', notifications. Should a clone nano-factory fail to send this notification the source nano-factory would manufacture a replacement. All of the replica nano-factories would now begin constructing the desired nano-machine. With twenty nano-factories producing a nano-machine every hour, seven hundred and twenty 'insect' or 'killer' drones could be produced every thirty-six hour, Nesca day. Up that to a thousand, two thousand, ten thousand, and the total production would climb to astronomical numbers. It would take only three months to manufacture one such drone for each of the fourteen million inhabitants of Jalapenia if only four thousand nano-factories were set up, initially! If each nano-factory produced a replica of itself, after producing a thousand nano-machines, it would reduce the production timetable to a matter of days. This, in fact, is what the final design called for.
Within months of the system being perfected, it was shipped to the nearby moon, Crogo. Live field tests were undertaken, pitting one group of nano-machines against another. Herein lay the fatal flaw in the program. For a nano-machine to be able to destroy another, from the opposing 'team', the concept of 'them and us' had to be introduced into the AI construct, as did territorial awareness - that is, the understanding that all of Nesca's population was off limits to nano-machine attacks. This was to prevent nano-machines from being used against their creators should they fall into foreign hands. Results from the field tests were mixed. Many of the objectives were met, but the ability of the nano-machines to reliably identify the opposition, rather than simply whacking whatever came within range of their base, was overstated in the final report, as was the thoroughness of the cleanup operation, post testing.
The 'go ahead' was issued and the nano-machines were released into the wild. Jalapenia surrendered within a month of the nano-machine's entry into the combat arena. Turning the drones off proved to be harder than turning them on, however, because a significant percentage of the nano-machines failed to respond to the self-destruct command issued by Nesca High Command. They went Mustang, and continued to wander around, aimlessly, killing pretty well anything that moved. "Nobody said they were perfect!" Nesca's War Secretary was heard to say during a meeting. "There are always unknowns, both known and unknown."
At length, the Chancellor of Nesca held a press conference and announced, with much fanfare, that victory had been won without a single Nesca casualty. There was considerable surprise at this announcement, because most of the population wasn't aware that they'd been at war. They soon got into the victory spirit, however, and began dancing in the streets and waving their little flags. The nano-machines and factories were moth-balled, having, according to the Chancellor, "Removed the word, 'War', from the Nesca lexicon."
To quote Robert Burns: "The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley, an lea'e us naught but grief an' pain".
With some military spending now diverted to space exploration, the Nesca returned to Crogo. Within minutes of touching down on a dust covered plain, in the North Western quadrant, the crew were spotted, targeted and exterminated by descendants of those earlier 'test' nano-machines. A rescue mission from Nesca triggered the 'territoriality' that was burned deep in their AI construct. They now had an enemy and, having determined the origin of the 'intruders', a target rich environment. Though the journey from Crogo to Lawanda exposed the nano-machines to lethal solar radiation, destroying millions of them, sufficient numbers of nano-factories survived to rebuild their numbers once they were on the planet's surface.
The end of Nescan society needs no further description. All that remains is to errect yet another epitaph to the short-sightedness and stupidity of humanoids. History is, perhaps, our greatest educator. It comes replete with examples of what has worked and what has not. We ignore these lessons at our peril but, sadly, we do ignore them. Humankind, contrary to the universal delusion we embrace, is little changed from those earlier times. Our technology may have progressed but our ability to make sensible decisions has not. It is not just our leaders who 'never let the facts get in the way of a decision'. Witness the recent collapse in the housing market and the ludicrous levels of indebtedness most of the Western and Asian World has heaped upon itself. Perhaps, the Creator, in making our bodies so easy to destroy, had not only anticipated that the gift of choice we were also granted would inevitably lead us to kill, but that any such inclination towards violence could, at some point, be tempered by the prospect of losing our own lives, or those of our loved ones. War should always be expensive, in both blood and treasure, for it is only once too much of each has been spent that we come to realize that talking is the best way to resolve our differences. Take 'life' out of that equation and extinction will be our descendents' inheritance.
