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The original was posted on /r/siloseries by /u/CAPTCHA_later on 2023-09-12 05:20:25.

Mostly conjecture, SPOILER for non-specific but pretty significant details at the end of Dust.

I realize a lot of the series is left to reader imagination, but would love to see if someone understood more than I did, has read something by the author that addresses this, or has a better theory.

My conundrum: It is heavily implied that the bad nanos killed the human race rather indiscriminately (and as far as we know, the only nuclear bombs that were used in the omnicide were to scare the group outside Atlanta into the silos). If the nanos weren’t so comprehensive, there would be pockets of survivors out in the world ready to attack the winning Silo or consume the resources at Seed. (So possibly the Iranian nanos were designed to attack certain genetic Western lineages, or to attack everyone without counter-cure Iranian bots. The US did the same in reverse to combat specifically the Iranians, and… extinction.) The easiest way to do this would be to design nanos that attack eukaryotic cells, or ones that target heart muscles (or a similarly critical but animal-exclusive system). Which would mean that all of the wild animals also died and the end of Dust (with the fish in the sea and the animals howling in the distance) doesn’t make sense. This “complete destruction” model is also enhanced by the dome of destruction surrounding the silos, which appears as a grey barren wasteland due to the continuous out-pumping of bad nanos that kill _all living things_.

I see only one real way around this, but didn’t recall there being anything about it in the book. It would have to be that all of the original bad nanos were only programmed to end *human* life, and animals were spared. Then, Thurman et all would have had to design extra-evil nanos that would destroy *all* life but not travel far, and puff these out with the inert Argon to create a controlled but complete shell of destruction around the silos. That seems a little far-fetched - as a biologist I speculate that designing nano bots to exclusively attack humans would be pretty tricky, but it’s all science fiction anyways. Was this anyone else’s read, or is there some other theory out there? Personally I was hoping Seed contained a thousands of cryo-pigs and popsi-horses, but that Ark would have been quite a project to undertake without anyone noticing.