Original subtitles

A demon of our own making.

Machines that are too small to see become the enemy inside us.

Will science save us or push us towards extinction?

Leading minds join forces.

To craft scientifically plausible scenarios of Armageddon.

And find the secret to human salvation in the

face of ultimate disaster.

Every time that we make a transformative leap forward in technology, we know

it's accompanied by an equal increase in danger.

The men who first split the atom knew that with the incredible power also came

the potential for unspeakable destruction.

Today, we're on the verge of a new technological breakthrough at the

level.

And it comes with the kind of power and the kind of danger that may make nuclear

weapons look like child's play.

This revolution is nanotechnology.

54 are dead tonight in New York's Staten Island.

The first victim, 45 -year -old construction worker John Sparello, was

pronounced dead at 8 a .m.

Victims seem to be eaten away as if they've been bathed in acid.

The cause of these bizarre deaths is still unknown.

But health officials are warning that it may be linked to a contamination of the

city's water supply.

If we think it's the drinking water, we would trace back the drinking water to

its source.

So we'd check the common pipe that leads to that building.

We would check, you know, the pipe that leads to that region.

We would take it further and further upstream.

But we would have to know what we were looking for.

Nanotechnology is progressing quickly and we're only just now beginning to

understand its incredible potential.

I've never seen anything like this.

I think it's alive.

What we're talking about are tools that work on a molecular level.

In theory, they could do extraordinary things, but they might also be

extraordinarily dangerous.

Nanotechnology is the field of extremely small artifacts,

tools, and machinery.

Nano means one billionth.

and nano in this context means extremely small, on the order of a billionth of a

meter. A meter is about like that.

If you look at an individual hair on end, that's about 100 ,000 nanometers.

We've been developing tools to take us farther and farther toward the scale of

molecules and atoms, and we're now finally developing the tools.

to where we can manipulate those atoms and molecules one by one and build

with them.

We still have a ways to go before we fully realize the control over matter

nanotechnology can ultimately give us.

But we know where we're headed. We're going to have unprecedented control over

the natural world.

Building with molecules is like building with bricks.

You take a lot of them, you put them together, and you can build almost

you want.

Everything in the universe is made of the same natural materials, the

The only difference from one material to another is how those elements, the

atoms, are arranged.

But if we can take control over those patterns, there's no limit to the power

can wield.

The ability to manipulate materials at the molecular level is almost like

We could take carbon dioxide out of the air and synthesize it into fuel oil.

We could make building materials out of carbon that are many times harder than

steel.

The real excitement of nanotechnology begins when we start to look at how it

affect the human body.

If we were able to...

edit the molecules that are in our body and we knew how to edit them, we

could cure any disease, any cancer, any problem that we were having in our body.

We can imagine a surgical robot that actually stitches individual cells back

together that closes wounds without a scar.

We can imagine robots small enough to fit inside your bloodstream that help

blood clot much more quickly.

make you a lot more resistant to injury.

It might be a revolution comparable to the invention of agriculture.

Humans at one point discovered fire.

So with fire we got metal, glass, ceramic, jet travel.

And it changed the way we live in every way.

Nanotech's really similar.

Now we can not only manipulate matter at atomic and molecular levels, but we can

do it atom by atom.

And people ask, is that dangerous? Will we come to harm? It's a silly question.

Of course we'll come to harm. I mean, did anyone ever get hurt by fire? Yes.

So how could nanotechnology, which promised us to be so amazing, turn out

something that could threaten life on this planet?

by ending up in the wrong hands.

Any technology can also be used, and especially biological technologies or

environmental technologies, can be used for nefarious purposes as well.

Obviously, the gains we hope in many cases, in all of these cases, would

outweigh the dangers.

But you have to be aware of the fact that anything can be misused.

It might just start with a disgruntled employee looking to get even.

Some people who aren't always that responsible or have agendas are frankly

crazy.

Get hold of these abilities and really fundamentally new abilities create

interesting and dangerous possible scenarios.

Imagine a programmer or engineer, talented but emotionally unstable.

He gets fired from a nanotech company and sets out to get revenge.

He tampers with their product, making it dangerous and setting it loose.

It's plausible.

Nanotechnology is small.

And at some point in the future, you might not need a large industrial

to develop it.

We all know that corporations and governments control all the truly

technologies in our society.

We must fight back.

Now imagine that he's got the company mailing list, and he mailed out the

harmful version to clients around the globe, and waits for it to wreak havoc.

What I am about to do will change.

Everything.

There's been no public statement yet as to a possible cause, though our sources

say health authorities and police are pursuing a strong lead.

The age of nanotechnology will literally transform how humans live their lives.

But it's such a powerful force that if it winds up in the hands of someone

irresponsible or someone with malicious intent, the results could be

catastrophic.

Don't touch that computer.

Don't touch it. Get away from it.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is our suspect.

Yesterday, we arrested this man, Lawrence Markovic.

One year ago, Mr. Markovic was fired from the Hydrofast Corporation.

For the last two months, he's been distributing a bootleg version of their

product, which they call Hydrofast Pro.

This is a technology which can rapidly and permanently clean up oil sills and

contaminate drinking water.

One drop of Hydrofast Pro actually contains millions of tiny machines that

digest oil.

safely breaking it down into hydrogen and carbon gas.

The changes Markovic made turned HydroFast Pro into the most deadly

Earth.

The first generation of nanomachines might actually be more like molecules

robots.

These are man -made molecules that are shaped in such a way that they can

attract other molecules.

And even pull them apart.

One of the first applications of a device like this could be in

cleanup efforts.

But Markovic, seeking revenge for what he considered an unfair termination,

altered the formula and changed it significantly, making it extremely

Progress must belong to everyone, not just the wealthy and powerful.

We must fight back.

Markovic modified or hacked the design of HydroFast Pro in two important ways.

One, his machine can digest not just oil, but virtually all organic tissue.

Fossil fuels like oil and coal are basically made up of carbon and hydrogen

atoms. And our bodies are carbon, hydrogen, we also have some oxygen and

nitrogen. Anything that's designed...

to break apart hydrocarbons, carbon with hydrogen, could conceivably get into

our bodies and start breaking bonds in our molecules.

So a hack, a nanomachine like we're discussing, could allow it to make use

different feedstock so that this nanomachine would then start doing what

originally designed to do.

in a completely inappropriate situation, like inside a living body.

Now you've got something that can dissolve organic tissue, that can

eat animals and humans.

The second modification he made, it can replicate itself.

As each one of the tiny machines consumes organic material, it can make

machine.

Self -replication would be a great strategy for a small rogue inventor.

You don't need a giant manufacturing facility.

Your inventions can just make copies of themselves.

The value of self -replication is that no matter how expensive it is to make

very first self -replicating device, all the millions that we make after that

are at almost no cost, relatively speaking.

We believe that Hydrofast Pro was responsible for the deaths on Staten

last week.

It seems it was added to a city reservoir by a water department worker

purge a contamination before his supervisor found out about it.

Unfortunately, by the time of his arrest, Markovic had already distributed

deadly bootleg to hundreds of locations around the globe.

So what happens when you put this self -replicating nanomachine into a

contaminated water supply?

The machines will break down the contaminants, self -replicating quickly

exponentially.

This is a disaster because this type of nanomachine would be nearly impossible

to contain.

And the self -replicating aspect means that in a period of time, you have a

great many from one.

We're going to be choked with them.

And in this case, being choked by nanomachines means people are going to

Lots of people.

A nanorobot or a nanomachine.

is not a moral entity.

It is going to do what it was designed to do.

Someone has intentionally created a self -replicating nanomachine that digests

human flesh.

And they've distributed it throughout the globe.

we're barely ready for the benefits of nanotechnology.

So if nanotechnology went wrong, if it turned on us, we wouldn't be prepared at

all.

Enormous mounds of flesh -eating goo have begun erupting in multiple

around the world.

A disaster of as yet unknown magnitude.

More than two dozen rural provinces throughout Africa are also afflicted.

Reports of similar blobs are coming in from Thailand, India, and the Middle

East.

Millions of nanobots become billions.

And billions of nanobots become trillions.

Think about what that means.

They could start eating our livestock.

If they get into the oceans, they'll start eating all sorts of marine life.

The Earth's entire food chain could unravel.

And then, of course, they could eat us.

The blobs are extremely dangerous. More than 800 deaths have been verified as a

result of people coming in contact with the material, which dissolves flesh in

seconds.

outset of an attack of nanotechnology that eats us alive.

We have no historical precedent for that. This never happened before.

It's not like a flood or even a disease.

Here's something we can't understand. We can't put into a category. We don't

know where to place it.

It seems to be the element that kicks off the most fear in us is the unknown.

When we're dealing with objects that challenge the limit of our scientific

understanding to manipulate, to design, to act upon, that's really, I think,

exacerbating this horror.

Today, the U .S. Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed that the blobs

fact masses of self -replicating micro -robots.

which were distributed by this man, a mentally unstable scientist who released

the machines in hopes of damaging a past employer.

The U .S. has stated publicly that its military will assist in efforts to stop

the spread of the material.

So how would we combat these flesh -eating nanobots? One would suppose that

initially we would try conventional weapons.

You can imagine that shooting a projectile into the middle of a massive

can kill some of them, but it might spread the rest around.

Conventional weapons would be too clumsy.

These machines would be microscopic.

So it's possible the only tool that we can use against them would be another

nanomachine.

The good news is that if we live in a world where something like HydroFast

exists,

You can be pretty certain that the military is working on their own version

nanotechnology.

It may not be in production yet, but there would be prototypes, so we

be starting from scratch.

It will become the most primary order of business for the good guys to develop

nanotechs that can take out the attacking nanotech.

There are all kinds of nanotechnologies that are being developed and exploited

in military context.

DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and was actually

just after Sputnik to prevent technological surprise and develop new

technologies and new capabilities.

Militaries are already working on small flying spy bots.

And molecular manufacturing would be able to build them smaller, longer

better communications, easier to hide.

It's just a matter of shrinking them and integrating them.

And we've proved to be very good at shrinking and integrating complex

At this point, the military may already be using nanoscale technologies to

create complex machines.

Machines with moving parts and multiple functions. The first true nanorobots.

Whatever tweaks or design changes are needed to get the nanoweapons onto the

battlefield, they would need to happen faster.

Millions of lives are at stake.

The United States has egg on its face.

So there'd be tremendous pressure to get these militarized bots

into production quickly.

A deadly nanomachine, originally designed to clean up the environment, is

posing a threat to human life.

And the only rational way to destroy it is by using another nanomachine, one

developed for military applications.

After multiple failed efforts to combat the enormous nanomachine threatening the

globe, the U .S. military has released a new countermeasure effort, a military

-grade nanobot called the Eradicator.

So to me, this is an incredibly important event for the Army that allows

protect our strength, to protect our nation, protect our economy, protect

everything that we do.

Until a week ago, it was still in the development stage.

But faced with the HydroFast crisis, it's being hurried into mass production.

Planes from Nellis Air Force Base are distributing the eradicator as we speak.

Once we have the military nanobots built in significant numbers, and I mean

billions, we now begin to deliver them to the sites.

Contact tower 128 .15.

Jim 7 -1, contact Houston Center 120.

You have go for eradicator deploy.

Affirmative.

That might look like a program of global airdrops.

As we go to more sophisticated systems, there's a tremendous downside

disadvantage in terms of control.

One of the most talked -about strategies for deploying these tiny devices is a

swarm.

Fish, birds, and especially insects move together in large groups.

And even though they change direction very quickly, they manage to stay

together.

So this natural phenomenon...

might be a good model for nanobots to follow in their motion.

One real challenge is a power source.

What kind of fuel can you deliver to a machine this small?

Already, photovoltaic cells have been miniaturized to be about the size of

glitter. It's called solar glitter.

they can be made almost too small to see and still function.

A nanobot that collected solar power would be able to keep itself running

much indefinitely.

Then, of course, what makes the military nanobot a weapon?

And how can it take out the flesh -eating nanobots?

A military robot like this...

might just grab ahold and hang on, it would seek out other nanobots and would

probably start cutting pieces off.

Exactly what's done in ant colonies when they fight, the first thing ants will

do is they just grab onto the enemy insect.

The second thing they do is they start biting.

A swarm of small weapons built...

by molecular manufacturing with that level of capability of power would be a

fearsome thing.

The sound you hear is cheering as the latest efforts of the United States to

the world of the hydrofast blobs appear to be working.

This is a live camera shot of Bangkok, where for about two hours now, the U .S.

eradicator robots have been eating away at the giant mass just over the palace

wall. And wait, you can see them now. It appears that they are now departing and

that the blob is gone.

This is a scene similar to many across the globe.

At this point in the scenario, it seems like mission accomplished.

The good nanobots have taken out the bad nanobots, and we can get back to life

as normal.

Except now we've opened Pandora's box.

We've populated the world with microscopic robots that are self

capable of tearing apart not just organic materials, but virtually

And when this happens, you better pray that you've got complete control.

Swarms of the Eradicator are hovering over several cities where the hydrofast

masses were destroyed.

The U .S. military has assured officials that this behavior is normal and that

soon a homing command will be issued, clearing airspace and bringing the

miraculous robots back to Nellis Air Force Base.

How would military machines, like the ones in our scenario, be controlled?

Like drones are currently, with a human pilot operating them by remote control?

Maybe not.

Remember, we have millions of nanobots, so it's not practical to have millions

of pilots.

Even if one pilot could control a whole swarm of nanobots, the individual

nanobots would still have to have a lot of autonomy in order to function.

They would have to be able to recognize a target evaluate it, and then go after

that target according to their program.

In that sense, they would be true robots.

As weapons get more computerized and more roboticized,

it could become pretty difficult to program destructive robots so that they

destroy what you want destroyed.

Ultimately, anything we build that's an autonomous system, a nanotech war

machine, it's still built by humans.

And we make mistakes.

So there are lots of opportunities for things to go wrong or lose control.

There's no such thing as software that's bug -free. All software has bugs in it.

When a commercial piece of software is released, there are going to be

of known bugs that will be worked out later.

Now, in the military software development cycle, things are much more

There are higher standards to be met for testing and quality control and so on.

Because any little bug can have life or death consequences.

Stand by, command.

We seem to have a problem with the eradicator targeting system running

diagnostic.

With the design rushed into production, the military standards could well be

compromised.

And in this case, a mistake could mean worldwide devastation.

Our sources tell us that the military has lost control of eradicator robot

swarms across the globe.

A programming malfunction is causing the machines to target and attack seemingly

random targets, including a U .S. aircraft carrier.

There are no answers yet as to how this has happened or what the machines are

looking for, but we are urging everyone to go inside.

Currently, the swarms are over the Atlantic Ocean, but based on the rate of

travel, they will arrive at the eastern seaboard of the United States in just

under two hours.

This is a classic out -of -the -frying -pan -into -the -fire situation.

These military -grade robots can move on their own, and they can destroy not

just organic material, but just about any material.

The complexity for the programming of an autonomous robot like this is enormous

by today's standards.

There might be millions of lines of code, and think of each of those as a

part that has to interact with every other one.

If you have a programming error that causes these robots to malfunction, how

would you troubleshoot the problem and determine what caused it?

Normally, you would have a laboratory where you could step through each line

code and find the offending line of code.

Trying to figure out exactly which line of code is faulty could take months.

And that's time we just don't have.

The nation's capital is under siege by an enormous swarm of eradicated robots.

Police and National Guard forces seem powerless to stop the robots and are now

simply attempting to get people to safety.

At

least

12 ,000 are dead and that number is climbing.

Unconfirmed reports from China and the Russian Federation suggest that

swarms are now attacking Chongqing and St. Petersburg.

Things have gone from bad to worse.

The microscopic robots we designed to save us have now turned against us.

And the crisis is much more deadly than it was at the beginning.

In a real crisis of destructive nanoweapons, initially the military

conventional weapons against these nanobots.

One device that might work is called a fuel air explosive or a thermobaric

device.

Basically, you take a fuel as an aerosol, spray it into the air, and set

fire.

This will create a huge explosion and a shockwave.

Even the best hardened designed robot would probably be somewhat susceptible,

and you might get as much as 8 % of them killed off, maybe a little more than

that.

But we're talking about billions of enemies, so if you don't get them all,

you're still in trouble.

Next step, I would think, would be to assume that within the robot there were

some components that might very well absorb some kind of microwave.

And I would hope that if I selected exactly the right frequency, I

might be able to weaken or destroy a particularly radiation -susceptible part

that robot that would shut it down.

If you did have a very small machine, a nanite of some kind, you could get a

part of the electromagnetic spectrum, like a microwave, that would be exactly

the right length to have it absorb it, and when it absorbs the energy from

it would get hot, and it would heat it up just like we heat up water in a

microwave.

If we've got a really small robot that has maybe a nanowire running down its

length, I would imagine broadcasting at a frequency that that nanowire would

resonate with would be a good approach for killing that robot.

So what can broadcast high -intensity radio waves? A radar station does this

pretty effectively, but you probably couldn't get the nanomachines to fly

a radar tower.

So you bring the radar to them.

We have a piece of equipment that can do that. It's called Airborne Warning and

Control, AWATS.

Something analogous to an AWACS would be a very good candidate for combating the

swarm frequency by frequency.

These very large flying radio stations are engineered to be able to look

at a very wide bandwidth of signals, and they have capability

of broadcasting on a very wide bandwidth.

This is a dangerous mission because you have to be in close proximity to the

nanomachines. And you have to experiment with the radio frequencies until you

find exactly the right one that will affect them.

We need to get close because we want to broadcast as intensely as possible

because whatever we hope to get into the swarm, it's got to be effective.

Switch to BTH mode. Switching to BTH mode.

The approach that I can see for attacking the swarm would be

strength, many, many broadcast centers surrounding as much as possible the

swarm.

Broadcasting as intensely as possible a signal that will target one or several

components inside the robot and cause them to vibrate and heat and seize up or

melt.

Setting the frequency 75 .2 gigahertz on my mark.

3, 2, 1, mark.

No good.

Resetting frequency, 76 .2 gigahertz.

On my mark, 3, 2, 1.

That's not snow you're seeing. That's millions of deactivated eradicator

short -circuited by microwaves fired from military aircrafts just moments

The State Department is issuing statements claiming the threat is over,

many now view that claim with skepticism in light of the past month's activity.

Human beings unlock the power of the atom, and then we live under the threat

global devastation for 50 years.

If we create nanomachines like the ones in this scenario, we could be looking at

human extinction.

One of my main concerns is that if we have several militaries developing

competing weapon systems with molecular manufacturing, then we could have this

cauldron of destruction with weapons far advanced from anything we have today.

The promise of nanotechnology, I mean, realized as fully as we're talking about

in this context.

It is at the level of the secret of life.

Scientists and engineers are already racing to create these nanomachines

the benefits are almost too great to imagine.

It's good to be a little bit afraid of something so powerful so we keep

ourselves in check.

So our own hubris doesn't get the better of us.