Fighting Nanobugs

Fighting Nanobugs, or defeating the grey goo scenario

In scifi and also in some of the more enthusiastic of tech lovers will make nanomachines to be the ultimate of all weapons, things capable of turning all matter everywhere into copies of themselves. Perhaps they could if they were the fantasy convert all matter into themselves type, but you see nanomachines in the real world would not function that way. Nanomachines are their heart machines in the physical universe and as such must act as all machines of their size must act in the physical universe. Unless they are a order of technology beyond our comprehension, nanomachines are would be capable of making use of existing resources, and not all resources are created equal, and of utilizing energy, to make use of those resources; they must make use of only what is available, which means they cannot make elements over into something else, in addition they cannot replicate using energy they do not have. However they like all machines, would have prices extracted upon what they do, and unique  constraints given the specific environment they are in, and the unique resources they use. A useful way of looking at fighting them would employ methods already used to fight the small, i.e. bacteria and viruses, and ways biology already operates in the realm of the small.

So anyway with that longwinded explanation out of the way, on to fighting nanobugs if they get out of control. Note this would a discussion about real nanobugs, not the fantasy ones in fiction. So the first way you fight a nanobug is the method of essentially draining the swamp, or depriving the nanobug of the resources it needs to replicate. If a nanobug operates in the real world, it will be dependent on specific combinations of materials to function and replicate. This is not out of the air guess work, it is extrapolation both from current created machines and life in general, both of which require the same principle to keep going. So to fight a nanobug, you burn through the resources it needs to replicate, and in so doing possibly kill it or at the least confine it to a specific area. An addendum making the nanobugs deliberately out of the most exotic materials would also serve to help limit their spreading in a worst case scenario.

The second way would be to infect the nanobug, or in other words make it sick. You can do this through the selected application of a information attack (a computer virus), or a actual physical virus, both would serve to interfere with the nanobugs capacity to replicate. The physical virus would be a fairly simple nanomachine, who’s primary purpose would be to infect other nanomachines.  A real world example of this would be the case of bacteria phages, or viruses which infect and kill bacteria. . In the case of the nanomachines though, the nanovirus and the computer virus too would have to obviously be specifically designed for any specific nanomachine.  Give a nanovirus the capability to mutate fairly quickly and it might mutate quick enough to keep pace with any hypothetical  mutations which the nanomachines themselves might go through.

The third way would be to basically poison the nanomachines, real nanomachines require specific combinations of materials to function, as do many machines, as do many organisms.  You disrupt the balance of those materials, say with a engineered material of a type you can disrupt and perhaps destroy many parts of the nanomachines machinery. It might be incongruous to think of poisoning machines, but it is better to think of the nanomachine as biology vs. machines, and if a analogue is needed think of adding water to the engine of a car, which would effectively poison yes even a machine.  A real world example of this would be antibiotics, which are nothing more than a glorified name for what amounts to bacteria poisons, given bacteria evolved them to  fight other bacteria, we just use them to also fight bacteria

The last way I wish to talk about, obviously there are probably many more just as there are for anything in the real world, but the last I wish to talk about is the destruction of the matter that makes up the nanomachines. This would be the most drastic of control methods, this involves at the lowest energy level, using electromagnetic pulses against the nanomachines control mechanisms, and at the highest some variant on the nuke em options, essentially concentrate enough energy on a small enough space and you can destroy anything.

Lastly with regard to designing a research base for nanomachines, never design nanomachines with materials that are relatively common, rarity is key, and from that design base with materials that are relatively poisonous and in addition of lowerquality then the materials you are designing the nanomachines with.. If placing a base, place it as far as  possible, but also with a suitable combination of materials and environment that would prevent the nanomachines from spreading very far, and also from having the energy to do all that much even if they could.