My novel's antagonist wants to use gene-editing nanobots to end death and disease forever. My protagonist refuses. What's the real range of a tech like this — good and bad?
Working on a sci-fi universe (novel finished, trailer in progress) and wanted to run the core technology past people who think seriously about this stuff, separate from the plot.
The starting point: a scientist named Apar builds nanobots that enter the bloodstream and carry out a genetic "instruction." In my novels, I have tried and used 4 versions of these bots.
Version 1. Instant healing, repairing damaged tissue, fatal wounds gone in seconds.
Version 2. Healing upgraded to fixing genetic defects and DNA repair. Built to fix, not to change.
From there the same tech splits into two very different directions, and this is really what I want to ask about:
Version 3. Forward-push evolution. Instead of repairing an organism back to normal, push it past its natural limits. Accelerate mutation, strength, adaptation, indefinitely. Take a species that missed its evolutionary window, and push it into becoming the apex predator of its own lineage.
Version 4. Reverse evolution. Instead of moving forward, wind an organism's code backward. Undo evolutionary changes, resurface traits and forms that a species left behind millions of years ago.
In the story, someone with real power gets hold of an early version and wants to use the forward-push side on humans directly. The pitch is that it could genuinely end death and disease, permanently, framed as a gift to the species. Apar, who built this to heal people, refuses to let it go there, due to the risks.
I've worked out where that refusal leads in my own plot, but the question I actually want to put to this sub is separate from it: if nanobots like these could enter the bloodstream and rewrite genetics by unlocking dormant pathways, where does that actually end? What's the real range of what something like this could do and what would stop it?