On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 04:14:45AM -0400, Richard Aiken wrote:
> This was referenced up-thread. Someone posted that nanobots targeted at
> minerals would ignore biological creatures because the amount of minerals
> within them was negligible.

The closest I can think of to that in the thread would be a
misunderstanding of something I wrote.  I suggested that successful
self-replicating nanobots would have to ignore nearly everything
because nearly everything would be a net loss to eat.

Oddly enough, the exception is that living matter generally *would* be
worth eating, considering its chemical energy content.  However, it
would very likely not contain the right types of compounds or even
elements to be useful in repairing itself or building more nanobots
(as they are generally envisioned).

So about the best of both worlds would be to eat living organisms (or
recently dead matter) for energy, and use that energy to extract
suitable elements from the (probably rare) types of minerals that
contain the right mix.  If both of those happen to be in the vicinity,
that is, and the energy stores were sufficent to break enough of those
strong ionic bonds to extract the right elements.

- Tim