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Why not do something like the Rosetta Projectand etch all the pages on to a mass produced metal disk?

And if you don't limit yourself to the requirement that the text be optically readable, you could make 'Feynman's Library,' use modern semiconductor lithography processes to etch the entire library of congress onto something the size of a library card(and in some sturdy material that ).

For the most part we have the technology to do this, the only big difficulty with doing such a thing(aside from scanning all the books!) would be getting liscensing to 'print' all the books in the library of congress.

Feynman's talk on this seems required reading: There's plenty of room at the bottom. None of the linked articles even mention Feynman's name.

Did you ever even ready the good Prof. Feynman's words?

When we get to the very, very small world – say circuits of seven atoms – we have a lot of new things that would happen that represent completely new opportunities for design.

The finest circuits are *already* about 7 atoms thick. What do you propose to do when it's down to one atom, slice it with a pizza cutter?

We're already at the goddamned bottom and Feynman's not around to bail us out.

Feynman's talk on this seems required reading: There's plenty of room at the bottom. None of the linked articles even mention Feynman's name.

Richard Feynman's essay/talk There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom. It's superficially about nanotechnology, but the more important theme that runs through it is refusing to take current techniques and limitations for granted.

http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html or if you don't like to read. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eRCygdW--c

You don't even need electronics to preserve books. We can fit the plain text of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin and all you need to read it is a microscope!

We seriously ought to think about archiving our most important works on microscopic cubes, if only for future archaeologists to discover.

The 1.2 zettabytes quoted recently as the sum of the world's memory works out as about 1/8th of a gram-mole of bits. This does give an idea how much memory you might get from a few grammes of material if you get a 3D structure. If you are stuck to a single surface, the density figures won't be as good. Richard Feynmann gave a talk in 1959 called "Plenty of room at the bottom" (see http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html). His figures haven't really aged much: if you can get something to work at the molecular scale, then you can get a lot of them in. The idea of doing this isn't particularly new. Actually doing it would be a lot more exciting.

Next? The idea for this sort of thing has been around since at least 1959.

Feynman estimated the LOC at about 1 petabit, which would make the Internet Archive containing roughly 36 petabits a cube on the order of 1/50 inch wide.

So it should fit in your pocket.

Why not microscopic etching. One advantage over the stone and chisel approach is that you can carry the mountain in your pocket until the next civilization figures out how to read it...

"There is no question that if the thing [the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica] were reduced by 25,000 times in the form of raised letters on the pin, it would be easy for us to read it today. Furthermore; there is no question that we would find it easy to make copies of the master; we would just need to press the same metal plate again into plastic and we would have another copy.... I have estimated how many letters there are in the Encyclopaedia, and I have assumed that each of my 24 million books is as big as an Encyclopaedia volume, and have calculated, then, how many bits of information there are (10^15). For each bit I allow 100 atoms. And it turns out that all of the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in this form in a cube of material one two-hundredth of an inch wide--- which is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye. So there is plenty of room at the bottom! Don't tell me about microfilm! "

Look back further still, to Richard Feynman in 1959. Absolutely visionary stuff.

That sounds like Aether to me.

Instead of building this huge arc and going there using fusion power (fusion reactors are not small or lightweight), you would build a large space based mass driver (nanotechnology cares significantly less about high-g accelerations than human bodies) and launch a carrier at 0.1c or 0.5c (increasing v if you are willing to expend the energy, decreasing v depending upon the mass required for shields to defend against damage caused by encountering interstellar dust at high velocities). The carrier contains either its own mass driver or moderately large chemical rockets that launch the probe in the opposite direction at -0.9999... * v of the carrier entering the system so as to result in the probe having a net velocity that will result in its capture by the gravity of the destination system. The first probe can then go about constructing an reverse mass driver so future probes can be decelerated using power from the destination system (allowing most of the subsequent mass transfered to be "information content" rather than power systems or velocity control systems [2]).

If most of humanity hasn't undergone mind uploading several hundred years from now I'd be very surprised. So those early pioneers who decided on the "ark" approach are going to very surprised as they approach the destination system and discover that it has been converted into a Matrioshka Brain [3] and there is nothing left to explore or colonize [4,5].

No matter *how* pessimistic you are about molecular nanotechology developing in the next two decades -- you have to make a *very* strong argument that it will not be developed over the next fifty years [6]. So any future planning scenarios involving 100+ year time frames should be left as virtual reality exercises.

1. This is the "classical" rod-logic nanocomputer described by Drexler in Nanosystems .
2. There are strong arguments that the most efficient way to transfer large quantities of information (e.g. Library of Congress equivalents, human mind equivalents, Google database equivalants, etc.) between stars is by mass transfer and *not* by electromagnetic radiation (particularly if reverse mass drivers captures and recycles most of the energy used to send the information from the originating system).
3. Wikipedia: Matrioshka Brain
4. "Welcome to our system ancient humans. We are happy to utilize 10^-26 of our intellectual capacity to interact with you..."
5. Of course as the humans watch their destination star(s) during the trip they will notice them going dark. So there may be hasty meetings organized to alter course to a virgin star system. Of course altering course at high velocity doesn't come cheap. As Matrioshka Brain conversions are likely to occur on a "most useful system first" perspective, ancient humans had better select systems that the Matrioshka Brains are going to deem "dregs of the galaxy".
6. Those who want to make that argument should read Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near first.

Neither. If you have to have a single source inspiration, it would have to be Richard Feynman, 1959.

http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html was the first search hit on Google.

When a computational system erases a bit of information, it must dissipate ln 2 x kT energy, where k is Boltzmann's constant and T is the temperature. For T = 300 Kelvins (room temperature), this is about 2.9 x 10^-21 joules. This is roughly the kinetic energy of a single air molecule at room temperature.

Today's computers erase a bit of information (in the sense used here) every time they perform a logic operation. These logic operations are therefore called "irreversible." This erasure is done very inefficiently, and much more than kT is dissipated for each bit erased.

>IINAMHS, but the world's smallest hand be used to build a yet smaller hand?

This is actually an idea described by Feynman in his lecture 'There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom,' for which he is often cited as being the first to explore the idea of nanotechnology.

The text is available here.

I'll quote a little of the applicable bit:

[...]

Now comes the interesting question: How do we make such a tiny mechanism? I leave that to you. However, let me suggest one weird possibility. You know, in the atomic energy plants they have materials and machines that they can't handle directly because they have become radioactive. To unscrew nuts and put on bolts and so on, they have a set of master and slave hands, so that by operating a set of levers here, you control the ``hands'' there, and can turn them this way and that so you can handle things quite nicely.

[...]

Now, I want to build much the same device---a master-slave system which operates electrically. But I want the slaves to be made especially carefully by modern large-scale machinists so that they are one-fourth the scale of the ``hands'' that you ordinarily maneuver. So you have a scheme by which you can do things at one- quarter scale anyway---the little servo motors with little hands play with little nuts and bolts; they drill little holes; they are four times smaller. Aha! So I manufacture a quarter-size lathe; I manufacture quarter-size tools; and I make, at the one-quarter scale, still another set of hands again relatively one-quarter size! This is one-sixteenth size, from my point of view. And after I finish doing this I wire directly from my large-scale system, through transformers perhaps, to the one-sixteenth-size servo motors. Thus I can now manipulate the one-sixteenth size hands.

Well, you get the principle from there on. [...]

I'm still holding out for paper that can compute (probably by using rod logic) and then display the results on its surface. A little external memory interface and I can reduce my bookshelf to a harddrive and an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper.

This remind me of low-power reversible computing that I learned back in college from Prof. Jan van de Snepscheut at Caltech... The basic idea is to reduce wasted power by "sloshing" current within the chip, rather than to let the current spill to the ground... (this is a a gross simplification...)

This (highly technical) paper describes what I'm talking about:
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/electroTextOnly.html

This article mentions a "helical logic" which sounds a bit like what this invention is...

Well such an idea sounds reasonable enough. In fact in Richard Feynman's "plenty of room at the bottom" famous speech, he describes something similar: building small machines that are then used to build even smaller machines, until finally you have atomic-scale machines. This speech is considered by many to be the "original idea" for nanotechnology.

So why don't we have nanobots yet? Well it turns out its a little more complicated than that. The basic problem is that designs for large-scale robots do not work at smaller scales. You can take macroscopic engineering principles and scale them up or down to a point, but eventually they break down. The design of a 200ft long bridge is not just a 4X scale version of a 50ft bridge, after all.

If you read Drexler's technical book on the subject (Nanosystems) he goes into detail on how various properties (strength, elasticity, conductivity) scale down to the nano realm. Some of them scale favorably, whereas others do not. Thus nano-scale robots will not merely be "small versions" of macro robots. For instance the viscosity of a liquid becomes much more important than gravity, at small scales (whereas at large scales dealing with inertia and gravity are important).

My point is that robots cannot simply build exact (but smaller) copies of themselves. The half-sized robots will be useless within a generation or two, and will require new designs, optimized for that size. (Added to that, robot designs that are self-replicating are not trivial to begin with, at any size-scale!)

Let's say you make a lattice of 1Å (100pm) atoms with bond lengths of 1Å. The 3D geometry of the lattice can bring the atoms into proximity limit by their electrical repulsion and the angles of their bonds. That proximity can be shorter than their bond length - it can be nearly any size or shape. This is how enzymes make active sites with feature details at highly precise scales. Another analogous example, especially at these scales, is how relatively large wavelengths can combine to create differential beat frequencies at relatively much smaller scales. When we make devices out of intervals and gaps, we can get asymptotically small. This is, of course, how we already reach those nanoscales from our mesoscale starting engineering.

What's interesting about these kinds of small features, and chemical processes for their assembly is that they make not only smaller features, but also many more of them simultaneously. So nanocrystalline chemistry offers solutions (pun intended :) to both scaling resolutions smaller and aggregates bigger.

There is no bottom - hence Richard Feynman's famous lecture title, which I stole with pride :).

They really take the scenario to the extremes, and the focus is self-replicating nanotechnology rather than robotics, but it's a very interesting read.

Advanced Automation for Space Missions

Here is a good synopsis (the study itself is rather lengthy).

it worked, as a viral message nudity certainly gets my attention in a more positive way then throwing blood on people. In reading the article it wasn't the extremist anti-tech rant I expected. I'm naturally inclined to favour technological development/progress being a child of Sci-fi. Which the group makes a number of clever allusions too.
The few points raised in the article really made me rethink the initial opinion I had formed on what their anit-tech message would be.
- Nano-technology doesn't have to mean sexy little machines like I assumed. It really includes any technology that involves manufacturing on a small scale. That can even be some of the new molecules that we are developing for new polymers and materials.

- The article brings up the medical device example to show where nanotech dangers are happening. The research quoted shows that if pieces (and I mean small pieces, like erodes flecks of surface of the device from the movement of the bloodstream against it) of the device encounter normal cells they are small enough to pierce the membranes, rupturing the cell wall, and they then can continue to the next cell. Get enough of these pieces and yeah I can see the danger. This is reasonable enough

- The main point of the article seemed to be that we are using a new technology that our current thinking doesn't apply too. There do not exist reliable or standardized methodologies to test the effect of these new materials (which really for most of our 100,000 year existence we didn't have much of) on us and our environment. The group wants to call attention to it and encourage more active government participation in the monitoring of these materials.
All right message received.

The greatest hurdle faced by those of us seeking to extend Moore's Law to the pultem calidus (atomic limit) is the exothermic waste present in today's electronics. It's no secret that computers nowadays give off terrible amounts of heat -- excessive thermal generation is a sign that not only is there resistance to cooling, but there is resistance to electricity as well!

What baffles me is that while reversible computing is a concept that has been around for decades, it has all but disappeared from the modern CS cirriculum. Reversible computing holds the key to unlock both unparalleled levels of computing performance and complex nanotechnological machinery (i.e., any that does not solely rely on chemical or physical properties of tiny matter to get the job done). The concept is nearly above my head, let alone you folks, but I'll try to simplify it as much as possible.

In the 80s (and maybe before) computer scientists determined that virtually all exothermic waste is given off by erasing bits. Some even created a language, Janus, which demonstrates reversible computing principles. The concept is that if you create a chip and a lanuage that permit you both to advance in your program (normal behavior) but also reverse to any previous execution point, you only move bits around instead of erasing them.

One of the problems with reversible computing is that occasionally you get more bits than you have space for. At the time, they felt that each chip could be loaded with as many bits as you needed like an electronic abacus at the factory, and perhaps this is practical for nanotechnology, but development hit the wall until the concept of "garbage collection" emerged as a programming idiom.

There is a step before quantum computing, or perhaps it's the other foot stepping besides it, and it is reversible computing. Tomorrow's PC will look much like today's, but reversible computing in conjunction with garbage collection will shift extra overflow bits from your CPU to your peripherals and underflow bits from your peripherals to your CPU. It will be hybrid technology with unreversible computing, as any interface to hotswap peripherals would put a reversible computer at risk of a deficit of bits if disconnected at the wrong time, but it will function much as your computer of today. But cooler -- in more ways than one.

What does reversible logic mean for cryptography? Take a look at the quantum solutions, which rely on the fact that the act of observing changes the observed: a weak photon with a particular spin can only be picked up by one detector -- an eavesdropper will be instantly spotted because the message won't get through, the communication will be broken, and the eavesdropper won't have enough of the message to do anything. I argue that the parity of reversible computing offers the same solution: apply it to a network connection, and if an extra bit appears or disappears the message is undelivered but also undisclosed to a snoop.

If there's anybody out there working on reversible computing, I'd be interested in perusing your research. It seems like a lonely field but one with lots of potential if venture capital ever comes available for IT R&D in the industry again.

Real men use phase change coolers as defined by Drexler and Henson in US Patent #4,759,404 also briefly discussed in Section 11.5 of Nanosystems . That is because the heat capacity of solids going to liquids is higher than that of liquids going to gases. Of course the engineering of a system to circulate nanoscale ice cubes within ammonia (or methanol or ethanol) and refreezing the water back into ice cubes in the "condenser" is slightly more difficult than the engineering required for heat pipes.

I'm a bit surprised that NASA didn't ask Zyvex to work on this for them... I have friends who work there, and they do some really neat stuff. (Including working on those crazy quantum nano-tubes).

Contrary to popular belief, their office is actually quite large.

It's Von NEUMANNactually (I am glad I payed attention in my Operating Systems and Assembly Language classes). Ok yes they are more than Kernals, so is Linux these days. Windows and OSX (and Linux) are Kernals that come packages with a lot of extra software. In that way Windows and MacOSX are no different than linux except in that you can update the kernal in Linux but not in Windows (no idea about OSX sorry).

All operating systems consist of a Kernal and it's support software. Depending on the design more or less of the core of the system is directly controlled by the Kernal. The Kernal of windows is just not transparent to the user.

Do we have carbon-fiber cable yet?
If we do it probably comes from here: http://www.zyvex.com/

And Roddenberry brilliant idea came only a decade after Richard Feynman talked about it.

IAACNTR (I AM a carbon nanotube researcher), and the whole point of using CNTs is that their atomic precision and aspect ratio (10 nanometers diameter, micrometers to millimeters (or more?) long) make them wonderful tensile specimens. Without the ability to at least do a statistically significant testing of the CNTs you produce, there's a very good chance your tubes will have defects that will render them less useful than graphite fibers.

Never say never - in 10 to 20 years the average Joe will almost certainly have the ability to molecularly manufacture almost any object he wants for only the (free stored solar) energy costs of rearranging the component molecules. Enforcing IP/patent law in such a future makes little sense (unless you've got the Excessively-Greedy gene).

"The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom." - Feynman

--

When that blissful day comes that ...everyone can copy anything, including the boxes that themselves make the copies..., we'll certainly have to completely revamp the notions of ownership and attribution.

But that day is here as far as digital goods goes. Why fight it? Our respective industries will still make money, and fighting it just draws attention to it and leaches funding that would have gone toward product development and advertising, to legal and protection costs. That hurts the budget while alerting others to the fact that they can get it for free, too.

I remember back in the mid-90s, Napster came on the scene but it wasn't until I heard Metallica speaking out against them that I decided, perhaps now's a good time to see what Napster is all about.

So I'm the perfect example of "don't let the cat out of the bag."

We're in for a major upheaval. Don't believe it won't be painless; those in power will not want to relinquish the control they have over others. Luckily, many of us will be able to just leave the planet and set up shop on an asteroid. Or Pluto or something, we will be able to get anywhere.

And they can't stop it. Anyone can build a STM (Scanning Tunneling Microscope) for about $200, and once you have that you can move atoms around. Not as efficiently and effectively, but you can still build things once you know what you're building. And all it takes is building one arm to help you out; then it goes a little faster, because you can stop with the STM and let the arm take over. It builds an arm, then they build two more arms, then 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. Once you're up to millions, then they can start working on the matter duplicator box.

Once you have one box, it can make more. So you repeat the doubling experiment with the boxes, then start handing them out. After a few days/weeks/months every human on the planet will have one.

Zyvex was founded by Jim von Ehr with the express purpose of creating an assembler, which is a nanomachine that can make more nanomachines. Once we have one of those, the rest is history; it will only be a short time until the machines are smarter than us, and then they can solve problems faster and develop technology at an exponential pace--so that after a day, a hundred years of technological growth could occur. Imagine the difference between 1900 and 2000! That'll happen in a day. Or less, as time goes beyond that point.

I believe all this will happen in the next 20 years.

PS Sorry about the ilk, I was attacking the idea not the person and I apologize for letting that through my filter.

Parent is right; Richard P. Feynman is the true father of nanotechnology. His December 1959 lecture There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom is the foundational work of nanotech; it's short, to the point, and to this day still makes a fascinating and exciting read. Any discussion of nanotech should begin with Feynman's lecture, and I'm surprised it hasn't already been linked in this discussion.

Drexler *never* said that "grey goo" would consume the biosphere. What he actually said was "Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we made no preparation." (emphasis mine, see Engines of Creation Chapter 11). It has been known for more than a decade that there are easy solutions to the problem of designing "safe" replicators that do not grow exponentially using strategies such as the "broadcast architecture" (in computer science terms -- you never give a replicator a copy of its own source code). [See Merkle, R. C., "Self Replicating Systems and Molecular Manufacturing", JBIS 45:407-413 (1992)].

Nor is the idea that assembly lines produce better manufacturing systems than self-replicating systems new. [See Hall, J. S., "Architectural considerations for self-replicating manufacturing systems", Nanotechnology 10(3):323-330 (September, 1999).] It is obvious that the ability to self-replicate is extra overhead when compared with assembly systems optimized for specific assembly tasks.

Finally, it was shown several years ago that we have the technology to detect out-of-control self-replicating systems (nanorobots generate heat which can be detected by existing satellite systems). [For a discussion of various scenarios read: Freitas, R. A., "Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators with Public Policy Recommendations" (May, 2000).]

Drexler alludes to the fact that we are already in the midst of a "green goo" ("We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.") Most people are unaware of the fact that they have more copies of foreign genomes (in the form of self-replicating bacteria) on or in their body than they have copies of their own genome. Some of these bacteria actually produce vitamins that humans use. So "goo" scenarios should not be viewed as completely negative. It is worth noting that the same methods that can be used to stop the "green goo" (e.g. heat or radiation) can be used to stop the "gray goo" if we are prepared to detect and eliminate it. One sees examples of this today as government agents circulate through the crowd waiting to view President Regan's body in Washington with biological and chemical weapons detectors. It simply comes down to understanding the hazards and being prepared to deal with them.

It is also worth noting that the design of fully self-replicating nanorobots is *not* a simple or inexpensive task. (Look at how long it took Nature to get it started...) So it is highly improbable that such abilities could be developed by rogue groups before civilized nations developed robust detection and elimination methods.

For people who want to read more details, the IOP press release is here and points to the actual paper (registration probably required).

Also, I would respectfully request before you post any responses to this note that you "go do your homework" (that will put you one up on the reporters reporting on this and allow for an informed discussion).

They claim that every computation step requires at minimum energy of ln 2 k_B T (k_B is Boltzmann's constant, T is the temperature of the system). This is only true for irreversible operations such as setting or erasing a bit.

But computation doesn't have to be irreversible. There are various proposals on how to build reversible computers that don't consume this minimum energy per operation. More information about reversible computing can be found in this introduction.

You can go back earlier than Drexler in 1986... The first references to nanotechnology (though not under that name) seems to be in this talk by Richard Feynman in 1959.

Error correction again seems like one of the bottom less pits... like trying to achieve zero kelvin... perfect vacuum and of course this landmark talk by feynman.

Another thing that worries me is why all prepostrous claims are met with so much resistance.... relativity, quantum mechanics, secure-crashfree-windows(oops)...
strange world we live in.

More information about Neumann:

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/VonNeumann.html
http://www.neumann.com/
http://www.mbi.ufl.edu/~vetneumann
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathemati cians/Von_Neumann.html
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~neumann/
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/vonNeumann.html
http://www.karto.ethz.ch/neumann/
http://www.rit.edu/~drk4633/vonNeumann/
http://www.fsm-a.org/neumann

Are you talking about money as a medium for exchanging value, or the physical specie that represents it? I think we're always going to need a medium for exchange and storage of value... as for the physical aspect, check out Tangible Nanomoney for an insightful look at the problems of cash in a nanotech world.

Why can't we manufacture these small computers somewhat like we manufacture the big ones? Why can't we drill holes, cut things, solder things, stamp things out, mold different shapes all at an infinitesimal level? What are the limitations as to how small a thing has to be before you can no longer mold it? How many times when you are working on something frustratingly tiny like your wife's wrist watch, have you said to yourself, ``If I could only train an ant to do this!'' What I would like to suggest is the possibility of training an ant to train a mite to do this. What are the possibilities of small but movable machines? They may or may not be useful, but they surely would be fun to make.

Richard Feynman talked about nanotechnology way back in 1959--before "nanotechnology" was even a word.

It kind of irks me that the person who coins a word gets more credit than a person who talked about the actual process--nearly thirty years prior.

Read Feynman's talk at the Zyvex Web site.

Here's a link that could clear up things. On the other hand, it may not.

Universiteit Gent has some pictures of reversible logic gates, including a four-bit adder composed out of Feynman's "NOT, the CONTROLLED NOT, and the CONTROLLED CONTROLLED NOT" reversible logic gates, and some other circuits they've built.

They also have links to other sites about reversible logic and reversible computing, such as Ralph Merkle's Reversible Computing page (from Xerox).

Also note the bottom of the page: there's a vacancy in the research group, for all those just aching for a chance to work on reversible computing! (Looks like you'll have to speak Dutch, though.) ;-)

Short-term greed in our pre-abundance society is already fueling companies, governments, and research scientists to develop nanotechnology. Long-term, this tech will be the great equalizer, with even food and hardware being open sourced. Can't keep the genie in the bottle.

--

Whenever lay tech writers talk about data, they describe it in terms of Libraries of Congress, which I've always felt is a pretty bullshit quantizer, as the library obviously has things like photographs, movies, and albums that would take a lot of honking space, so much so that no storage medium exists that could conviently and economically store even 1 Library of Congress.

Sorry to interrupt your crusade against ignorance, but I though you'd find interesting that as early as in 1959 among all people Richard Feynman himself spoke about storing Libraries of Congress (to be exact, about storing Library of Congress plus British Museum Library plus National Library in France). His estimate was that about three square meters of surface was necessary to store all books in the library (all pages visually, not the text in ASCII) using electron lithography.

Speaking in terms of Libraries of Congress instead of terabytes or petabytes is not an oversimplification, it's an easy way to convey the idea of large storage to people who still confuse HDD capacity and RAM.

Define "near term." Advances in the evolution of all kinds of technology will continue to progress at an exponential pace; so the long-term is closer to the near-term than you would think.

but really, if it can be made to work you aren't going to need a lot of other new, new ideas.

What do you mean "if it can be made to work?" Nature already does it, and "The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom." artificially.

--

European? No. Ignorant? Yes. CPUs, no matter the heat limitations, require a certain wattage to operate properly.

To see why this is so, consider a modern semiconductor circuit. Information is stored as 1's and 0's, with the 1's meaning a capacitor is storing a charge at some voltage. A 0 means the capacitor stores no electrons and sits at ground potential. To switch a bit from off to on today involves stuffing electrons into a capacitor until it is charged. To go the other way, from 1 to 0, requires grounding the capacitor. "The real dissipation comes from the fact that when you switch you normally throw away the energy that's sitting in the device capacitances. The charge is sitting there, and the energy is stored in there, and you normally throw that away. That's the easiest thing to do with it" ... The amount of energy wasted per capacitor is minuscule, but discharges take place millions of times or more a second all over a chip. What's more, standard programming practice is to clear all registers and set them to a known state before beginning an algorithm. That, too, throws away information.

If you ask me, it's because it is easy to blue-sky some possible scenarios and get credit for breaking new ground, and also not be held accountable for any demonstrable results from your research. Or is it just me?

Your complaint is unjustified for two reasons: (1) You misunderstand what ethicists do, and (2) you mis-represnt what most of their work deals with.

(1) Why not come up with some practical solutions to existing problems of discrimination, civil rights, etc?

Ethicists are not lawyers, or politicians, or political theorists (for the most part), or economists, or political activists. It is not their job to come up with "practical solutions" any more than it is Stephen Hawking's job to design cheaper lasers, or safer cars. Ethicists deal with theoretical questions about what actions are right or wrong, and which states of affairs are good or bad. Actually making the world a better place is an entirely different activity, just as designing cars is a different activity than investigating the laws of physics.

(2) ...because it is easy to blue-sky some possible scenarios...

Feynman spoke and wrote about nano-tech long before it became anything like a reality. He also did a whole lot of very important work in theoretical physics. Likewise if you take a look through a typical ethics journal (like this one) you will find that most of the articles deal with real contemporary problems like the nature of political feedom, the problems of abortion and euthenasia, and so on. Sometimes people who do ethics also like to think about ethical problems that will soon be apon us, but which are not quite here yet. If that was all they did then you might have a real ground for complaint, but in fact it is only a small part of what they do.

Sorry, but that's not "nanotechnology". Nanotechnology mean atomically precise, self-assembling, nano-scale machines.

I suppose given the utter failure of nanotechnology to achieve anything to date, it's not surprising that people are retreating on their claims. Even the staunchest proponents are weakening the requirement for self-assembly, but to call iridescent paints "nanotechnology" is going too far for even the weakest definition.

Google spake thusly:
Scientific American nanotechnology articles: linky.
Richard Feynmand's famous talk: linky
Ralph C. Merkle's Small World article: linky

Some more google results: linky

Just though I'd share.