The Life Artificial

Tracie and I saw the movie "Robots" recently, and while we both thoroughly enjoyed the movie, it started a chain of thoughts in me that are at once fascinating and perhaps a little more than profound. In the movie, you find a world completely inhabited by robots; robot men and women, robot dogs and even robotic birds. No real life forms could be discerned, they were all mechanical. Could such a world exist?

Given an infinite number of possibilities, it could. In the Piers Anthony novel "OX", the human explorers find themselves going from one alternative universe to another. One such alternate world is abandoned, but it appears that it was entirely automated; even one of our explorers is hurt when a robot flower closes on his finger. This was my first introduction to this bold idea, and the movie "Robots" has again sparked interest in it.

How could it work? How would you create an entirely automated ecosystem?

Some technologists fear that we may accidentally create a race of nanobots someday that will run roughshod over our humble planet and leave behind a "gray goo", a writhing mass of nanobots that covers the planet... or perhaps even planets. This seems to be the robotic equivalent of a bacterial experiment. Let's say that you have a test tube filled with a nutrient solution. Into this test tube you plant a starter colony of dental plaque bacteria. Within a day or so, the bacteria multiply until all of the nutrient solution is absorbed and its entire weight has been converted into a single mass of plaque. The problem is that this is a sealed environment; the bacteria begin to die once all of the nutrients have been used. The same would happen to a nanobot environment, unless you designed them to fulfill certain niches. In short, you design them to fill the same roles as organic life.

These would be the equivalents of plants and animals, macro and microorganisms. Imagine a world where artificial plants convert nutrients in the soil into mass that is then used by larger artificial animals. Once the artificial organisms "shutdown", their components are recycled back into the environment. This insures that the robotic ecosystem always maintains just the right balance.

Just like our natural world.

Perhaps this has been done already.

The comparisons are easy to make. On the most basic level, all life on Earth is composed of molecules that are programmed to do just the above. If one system tries to overtake another, it is put back into place. Balance is maintained. Life thrives.

This idea is certainly is rife with controversy, enough for all sides to condemn it. But for myself, I find a strange comfort in it. If the purpose of life is to create more life, then perhaps our ventures into artificial life are merely continuing a task that was started billions of years ago. Maybe we're working towards a culmination. It will be a long time before we see where it leads.