Living creatures—including humans—would be the primary victims of an exponentially spreading nanobot attack. The principal designs for nanobot construction use carbon as a primary building block. Because of carbon’s unique ability to form four-way bonds, it is an ideal building block for molecular assemblies. Carbon molecules can form straight chains, zigzags, rings, nanotubes (hexagonal arrays formed in tubes), sheets, buckyballs (arrays of hexagons and pentagons formed into spheres), and a variety of other shapes. Because biology has made the same use of carbon, pathological nanobots would
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