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Zaine comments on The basic argument for the feasibility of transhumanism - Less Wrong
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Comments (36)
EMP's affect only circuitry which can be broken by high voltage. The intersection of this with nanotechnology is not empty, but also not the same as all nanotechnology.
A faraday cage should be enogh to block the effects of an EMP (full-body chainmail, anyone?).
I really wasn't presenting it as an argument, but more a request for information. I view technology of the sort I imagine nanotech requires as necessitating electricity, which I had thought susceptible to EMP's; I know brains aren't affected, but could not fully elaborate why.
If it appears to you that I didn't treat it as such, I apologize.
It appeared an assumption that I was informed could be inferred from the comment; if I have caused you distress, I too apologise.
I would be surprised if a human were completely unaffected by an EMP that trashed the electronics around them.
Nuclear EMP effects had real-world impact damaging electronics, but I never saw any mention of human health damage from the EMP (as opposed to the fallout).
Street lights are an extreme case - hooked up directly to a very long baseline with no real protection to speak of. Anything capable of taking on, say, a cell phone, would have to be several orders of magnitude stronger.
The link mentioned that if the detonation had been over the US, the effect itself would have been 6x stronger - quite aside from being closer than 1500 kilometers to places that mattered. And that wasn't even designed to maximize EMP effects in any way.
Besides that, when someone says 'the electronics around them', I think that covers a lot more and more important stuff than one's cellphone.
The context here was EMP to be deployed against nanobots, not power grids. The source will thus be optimized to produce EMP, and to minimize collateral damage against general infrastructure - perhaps by producing smaller pulses closer to the target rather than enormous pulses further away.
In particular, the ability to affect microelectronics is paramount. The ability to take down the grid is irrelevant.