Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Season 3 Viewing (Spoilers)

[Ruin Explorer]

Its actually an interesting question if that kind of longevity is even possible. Sake of argument lets say your a super advanced race that uses nanites or something to repair and maintain everything, perfect over time. Well those nanites themselves have to be repaired and replicate....and with every replication comes the risk of an imperfection.

Our DNA is amazing at replicating accurately at high speed, but mistakes still happen. And even if a nanites system has a replication ability that is even more accurate....unless its 100% some measure of error will be introduced over time, and eventually the system will shift in some direction away from its exact function.

Is it actually possible to replicate things so perfectly that no error is ever introduced?

The issue is the DNA is evolved, not designed.

Nanites, presumably, would be designed.

So you could have much stronger and more reliable error-correction, which doesn't evolve, because it just doesn't matter that much so long as a creature doesn't get terrible errors before it reproduces.

If you somehow had the tech to build nanites that could build and maintain structures and themselves, then frankly the error-correction would be absolute child's play compared to that first step. That's not to say something bizarre couldn't happen, but so long as the nanites were programmed to eliminate nanites which were not reproduced correctly (and/or to self-eliminate) you'd be looking at something insanely more reliable than DNA. Potentially there's no clear limit on how long that could operate for. Maybe there are processes we don't know about but if so they're unknown unknowns rather than even known unknowns.

Everything has a cost though, note. Making error correction a priority for nanites could probably keep them operating for 100k or 2m or w/e years, but would probably making the require more energy/processing power and reproduce more slowly (this is true down to a cellular level with living things too - basically nothing is free - even when a bacterium evolves drug resistance to an antibiotic, for example, that has a cost, to the efficiency of that bacterium, that limits it in certain ways).

 

[Stalker0]

That's not to say something bizarre couldn't happen, but so long as the nanites were programmed to eliminate nanites which were not reproduced correctly (and/or to self-eliminate) you'd be looking at something insanely more reliable than DNA.

This is actually what your cells do. You have immune cells that look for cells no longer following the program (ala cancer) and kill them, and your cells are programmed to die if they veer too far off the course. Of course those programs are based on dna and your back to the propagation of errors.

Ultimately its a tricky problem to maintain an absolute perfect copy of the original over large spanse of time, but likely not an unsolvable one. And again once you have solved that problem, maintenance simply becomes a resource management scenario.

 

[Ryujin]

Keep in mind that the sort of structures that we're discussing, on Earth, don't have even basic mechanical functionality, let alone what the sort of Precursor stuff they have in Star Trek does.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This is actually what your cells do.

I am well aware. That was implicit to literally everything I was saying - I'm surprised that didn't come across.

But they're only so good at it. If you could design the body as a whole, you could make that a higher priority and budget more energy towards it etc.

Ultimately its a tricky problem to maintain an absolute perfect copy of the original over large spanse of time, but likely not an unsolvable one. And again once you have solved that problem, maintenance simply becomes a resource management scenario.

That's precisely what I'm saying. The cost might be significant, we don't know.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Keep in mind that the sort of structures that we're discussing, on Earth, don't have even basic mechanical functionality, let alone what the sort of Precursor stuff they have in Star Trek does.

Stonehenge works just fine. I used it to calculate the entrance codes to underground city beneath Giza just yesterday.

 

[Ryujin]

Stonehenge works just fine. I used it to calculate the entrance codes to underground city beneath Giza just yesterday.

Zero moving parts.

 

[Stalker0]

But they're only so good at it. If you could design the body as a whole, you could make that a higher priority and budget more energy towards it etc.

I think we are in general agreement, the crux of the debate (if there is any really) is on this statement above.

Simply put, we don't know what the level of effort to maintain 100% perfect replication would look like in terms of time and energy. And it may be shown that the costs are simply too great, to do so requires replication that is too slow and too costly.

Or...its simply a technological block, and once you have cracked the code, its "relatively simple". Hopefully we find out one day

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think we are in general agreement, the crux of the debate (if there is any really) is on this statement above.

Simply put, we don't know what the level of effort to maintain 100% perfect replication would look like in terms of time and energy. And it may be shown that the costs are simply too great, to do so requires replication that is too slow and too costly.

Or...its simply a technological block, and once you have cracked the code, its "relatively simple". Hopefully we find out one day

I suspect it'll be closer to the former than the latter, but we almost certainly shall not see at the current rate! Maybe someone's great, great, great etc. descendant will though!

 

[Ryujin]

I suspect it'll be closer to the former than the latter, but we almost certainly shall not see at the current rate! Maybe someone's great, great, great etc. descendant will though!

Given that we're currently moving more and more to disposable tech, and away from lasting quality, there's really no incentive to create things that are self sustaining.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Given that we're currently moving more and more to disposable tech, and away from lasting quality, there's really no incentive to create things that are self sustaining.

Sure there is. It’s just human greed and stupidity that chooses to ignore them.