"BradGuth" <bradguth@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:eaaf070f-235f-424b-824e-614835b557e8@z10g2000prh.googlegroups.com...
On Feb 10, 6:19 pm, "BGB / cr88192" <cr88...@hotmail.com> wrote:

"BradGuth" <bradg...@gmail.com> wrote in message

news:a419a1da-d51e-45d2-a999-15426e1f4b3e@g28g2000prb.googlegroups.com...
On Feb 9, 3:49 am, "Skybuck Flying" <IntoTheFut...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Where do you draw the line then ?

Do you consider a human being with a mechanical heart to be alive ?

What if his whole body is mechanical except his brain ?

What if parts of his brain are mechanical ?

What if his whole brain is mechanical ?

I think you are on a slippery road...

In fact the thruth might be that we are all just organic robots.

I also wonder if our "conciousness" / "humanness" is learned from
generation
to generation and not necessarily inside the human brain/dna. Evidence 
of
this is in children who grew up between animals... they remained 
behaving
like animals for the rest of their lives... (They lacked other 
"concious"
human beings around them to "program" them with "conciousness" ;) :))

Bye,
Skybuck.

<--
Intelligent engineered Borg like androids could be the cosmic norm,
and the biodiversity that we consider as necessary and intelligent
worthy could be just like an ant farm to those cosmic androids that
are by default always smarter than us and essentially immortal.
-->

Borg are also notable in that their "technology" is "lifelike"...

humans + nanoprobes = more borg...
(granted, it is a slight bit more like a host/parasite relationship than
typical life though).

so, even as such, they are still notably different than current 
machinery...

as-is, creating borg-like entities would require notable levels of
involvement and difficulty (engineers, manufacturing, ...), so it would be 
a
bit more like in Robocop than like in Star-Trek.

hmm, idle thought of Borg assimilating Zerg or vice-versa...

<--
Few humans are w/o parasites.  For the most part we need all kinds of
micro/nano forms of complex life within our body.  So what's another
trillion nanobots here or there?
-->

if the nanobots replicated along with the host, maybe it would be less of an 
issue...

but, the borg tend not to reproduce directly and instead typically 
assimilate everyone (admitted here there is a slight difference here between 
a few early ST: TNG episodes and most of the later ST: TNG and 
Voyager-related stuff...).

no particular reason exists, why not use both strategies?...


hell, why not have a much tighter integration between the biological and 
mechanical parts as well?...
for example, large ships which are partly biological and partly mechanical.

but, I guess all this would be more like what would happen with borg+zerg. 
new race with possibly their own collective (apart from both the borg and 
zerg collectives). could be like, members ended up linked with both 
collectives, but ended up being incompatible with both, and so the race 
adapted into having its own collective.

ship is some giant bio-mechanical thing, containing large amounts of "creep" 
with mechanical appendages sticking out all over...

they could also assimilate ships by sending out globs of goo, which (if it 
gets through shields, ...) then spreads around a ship sort of like slime 
mold, absorbing people and stuff as it goes, ... (but, I guess it could be 
hindered partly by force-fields and by toxic gases or chemicals). (a ship 
itself would need to rather internally adaptive as well to be able to fight 
it off, ...).

or such...