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| Men In Tights 2 and Zeptites in Women (click image to enlarge) |
For the past three years I have often been making hypertext links from many of my blog posts about artificial life to
this old blog post about nanites as well as
related pages at the Encyclopedia of Future Science. I've recently had a chance to discuss nanites, femtobots and zeptites with
Gohrlay, so it is finally time to have an updated blog post about these tiny devices and the forms of artificial life that contain them.
Nanites are imaginary technology that might one day be made from ordinary matter.
Femtobots are a million times smaller and made of
hierions, not hadrons. Hierion-based matter allows for creation of artificial life forms that are as complex as a human being, but as small as a molecule of ordinary matter.
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| A femtobot exploring the active site of an enzyme. (source) |
How many angels can sit on the head of a pin? What is the
smallest living organism? Gohrlay insists on restricting our discussions about such topics to material objects. She holds that human concepts related to the existence of non-material things are a cognitive pathology that commonly arises among primitive creatures like Earthlings, but they are useless and irrelevant.
Viruses can replicate, but they are often not counted as life forms. Neither viruses or the smallest bacteria can survive without access to resources from other organisms. According to Gohrlay, we humans are similar in that we require our
zeptite endosymbionts to survive.
Matter
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| Contents of the universe. |
The primitive physical sciences of Earth divide the contents of the universe into just a few main categories such as dark energy, dark matter, interstellar gas and stars.
All of the gas, dust, black holes and stars of our universe are made almost entirely of
hadronic matter: by mass, ordinary matter is mostly in the form of protons and neutrons.
According to Gohrlay, the alien
Huaoshy long ago discovered
additional fundamental particles besides the quarks and the other particles that are known to Earthly scientists. There are two additional families of fundamental particles: the
hierions and the
sedrons.
Hierions
The M-hierions allow for the existence of a form of stable matter in which the bonds between hierion particles are a million times smaller than the chemical bonds of conventional hadronic matter.
R. Gohrlay and her team of
positronic robots spent about 10,000,000 years
exploring how to use hierions for the construction of femtobots. According to Gohrlay, one of the tricks that can be performed using hierions is that it is possible to "convert" a person (composed of hadrons) into a "
replicoid" that is composed of hierions.
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| Humans exploring hierions. |
R. Gohrlay became an expert at working with hierions to create a complex environmental matrix for artificial life forms within the
Hierion Domain. Unlike quarks, hierions are able to move in
additional spatial dimensions beyond the three that we experience here in the Hadronic Domain. Thus, the
Hierion Domain is immediately "adjacent to" us at all times. Our endosymbionts routinely connect us to the Hierion Domain and with some special effort, can give us limited access to information in the
Sedronic Domain.
One of the advanced technologies that was developed by R. Gohrlay is a kind of "portal" that can allow people to move back and forth between the Hadronic Domain and the Hierion Domain.
Sedrons
Even smaller than femtobots are
zeptites. R. Gohrlay was never able to fully understand sedronic matter and gain access to the
Sedronic Domain. Zeptites are a form of sedron-based artificial life that was first created by the Huaoshy billions of years ago.
Here in the Hadronic Domain,
pek zeptites constituted the chief adversaries of R. Gohrlay during the
Time War. Composed of array sedrons, the physical structure of zeptites is at a scale 1,000,000 times smaller than that of femtobots.
According to Gohrlay, we Earthlings are hybrid organisms, only partially composed of biological cells and conventional hadronic matter. We are also partially composed of a zeptite endosymbiont. Just as
Nanoarchaeum equitans is dependent on a host organism for survival, we humans require the presence of our endosymbionts. Humans were designed and originated as Sedronites and the whole reason why the
pek range through the galaxies creating Sedronites is to eventually allow them to merge into the Sedronic Domain.
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According to Gohrlay, the most common type of life in the universe is artificial life within the Sedronic Domain.
Sedronites are hybrid organisms, usually originating as a Eukaryote like we humans but with a zeptite endosymbiont. |
Telepathy, Time Travel and Space Travel
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| Preland agents on Earth used nanites. |
Sedrons are the basis of faster-than-light space travel and they used to be what made
time travel possible. Although the Huaoshy recently
altered the dimensional structure of the universe so as to make further time travel impossible, it was R. Gohrlay's use of time travel technology and sedron-mediated
telepathy that created the basis for the Time War.
During the Time War, R. Gohrlay deployed femtobots on Earth and the pek routinely made use of zeptites, and we might wonder: was there ever advanced nanotechnology in use on Earth? According to Gohrlay, the
Grendels and the
Prelands who visited Earth both made use of nanites.
For example,
Preland and
Grendel agents who operated on Earth were a mixture of biological cells and nanite structural components. They used nanites to alter the form of their bodies, making it easy for them to take on any convenient form.
Due to a combination of laziness and ignorance, I often incorrectly use the term "nanite" to refer to either femtobots, zeptites or true nanites, without making a distinction between the vastly different size scales for hadronic, hierion-based and sedronic matter. Nanites are typically composed only of hadronic matter, but Gohrlay tells me that there can be special circumstances when it is useful to make hybrid devices that contain hierions or sedrons within a nanite superstructure.
Sedronites
One of the greatest sources of confusion for me has been the technical term "
Sedronite". According to Gohrlay, when the pek first reached our galaxy they "seeded" planets like Earth with zeptites. Thus, life on Earth has for many hundreds of millions of years evolved in a zeptite-rich environment. In many subtle ways the zeptite of Earth guide the course of biological evolution. Finally, about seven million years ago, the pek took some primates from Earth to worlds of the Galactic Core and the first Earth-derived Sedronites were crafted.
Special thanks to
Miranda Hedman (www.mirish.deviantart.com) for the DeviantArt stock photograph "
Black Cat 9 - stock" that I used to create the blue "
sedronite" who is in the image shown to the left.
Already at that time, there were other much more advanced Sedronites already in our galaxy, including some who had their genetic origin in the
M2 globular cluster that orbits our galaxy. Some of those advanced Sedronites are what we Earthlings know as the
Nereids. In those times of the far past, the main concern of the pek was crafting derivatives of "naturally occurring" biological-zeptite symbiotic life forms that could transcend their hadronic limitations and merge into the Sedronic Domain as purely artificial life forms.
Many genetic experiments were performed on worlds of the galactic core that involved mixing genetic patterns from different species in order to facilitate the cell-zeptite interactions that are required for transcendence to the Sedronic Domain. According to Gohrlay, it is important to remember that in addition to the pek, the
bumpha have also played a role in crafting the human species. Not all Sedronites merge into the Sedronic Domain as quickly as possible. The Nereids were crafted as a hadronic life form that resisted transcendence and that wanted to exist as a technologically-advanced biological species for an extended period of time in the Hadronic Domain. Thus, when R. Gohrlay was in need of allies, it was natural for the
bumpha and the Nereids to offer their help.
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Other artificial life forms such
as the Phari played a role in shaping
human civilization in Deep Time |
According to Gohrlay, the agents of the bumpha (such as the Grendels) have always operated under the Rules of Intervention. There is considerable speculation about the exact form that the Rules of Intervention take, but the only lists of those rules available to us were guesses created by people such as
Ivory. I've never seen the actual Huaoshy
Rules of Intervention, so I must speculate about the true nature of the rules under which the Grendels operated on Earth. Apparently by restricting the Grendels to the use of nanites, the pek could at any time "over-ride" the Interventionist efforts of the bumpha.
When R. Gohrlay finally realized that she and her allies could not compete against the advanced zeptite technology of the pek, a path to the
Trysta-Grean Pact was cleared.
It remains a sore point for me that we Earthlings go through our lives unaware of the zeptite endosymbionts that reside within us. My great fear is that we are all puppets, our behavior controlled by the endosymbionts that reside within us. Gohrlay admits that many features of human biology reflect the fact that our biology was long ago adjusted to make it possible for endosymbionts to control our primitive ancestors. For example, the ease with which human memory processes can be disrupted is a remnant of our ancient design that allowed for the pek to quickly and efficiently erase the memories of anyone who "knew too much". Gohrlay claims that we are now in a new era when such memory wipes are not performed, but I'm skeptical.
Next:
Beyond the Downwhen Terminus.
