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Creating Nanotech Of The Nearly-Now
Believe writes: "CNN has this article about how recent advances in nano technology could be used in consumer appliances (CRTs, Hard drives, etc) as soon as next year. It's nice to see some nanotech applications that could be seen in the real world sooner than the '5-10' year range." What's most intriguing here to me (besides Weija Wen's "white powder of tiny particles") is the establishment of an Institute of Nanoscience and Technology at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. One million dollars though, seems like, well -- like nanofunding.
None of the things mentioned in the article involve self-replication. The question of whether or not you should start worrying about "grey ooze" is unrelated to this article.
Slashdot and it's sibling Andover companies lose a million dollars about every 3.5 days, so it's easy to see where in that environment, people would extrapolate that you can't do much with a million bucks. (That's *net* loss, mind you, they spend a lot more).
To see a non-nanobudget, check the annual report on andover.net's "investors relations" (PDF only). I love the cover, a giant "O" asking investors to "Open Up." Fair warning, given what they ask you to swallow!
Great - they whack me twice
- first to melt the clutch
- the second to resolidify it as it drains through the gearing
just let me know when I can start screaming
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
So its appropriate to start worrying about the 'grey ooze' now, correct??
Only if you're playing Dungeons and Dragons.
-
For perspective, CD-R in the early 90s cost about $1500 for a drive and $20 for media. CD-R didn't see consumer acceptance until these numbers fell about 4x, to ~$400 for the drives and $5 for media. Widespread use required a 10x drop in prices. And this is a technology whose competitors (floppies, Zip disks) had serious flaws. ATA Flash, on the other hand, needs prices to drop by a factor of about 400, just to be on par with a mature, reliable, accepted technology. And, even if those prices were achieved tomorrow (via some miracle) there are still a lot of cons:
- it's slow -- under 4MB/sec versus 20+ MB/sec for a typical hard drive .
- it's not especially dense: it appears you can get 1GB on a PC card, which works out to maybe 20GB in a 3.5" IDE enclosure. New magnetic disks fit 20GB on a single 3.5" platter; you can put five such platters in one enclosure.
- it has a finite life, typically <500000 rewrites per sector. This is fine for digital cameras, but it's no good for a busy database or swap partition.
So when will ATA Flash replace Winchester drives? Considering it took CD-R 10 years to overcome one obstacle against weak competition, and flash has many obstacles and strong competition, I'd say never.That doesn't, of course, preclude the invention of some new solid-state product. A cheap, dense, low-power, reliably non-volatile SS technology would be truly great. But these innovations aren't falling out of the sky (new memory-related inventions are few and far between) and it has a lot of catching up to do before it bests the phenomenal attributes of a $200 hard drive. I didn't sell my Quantum stock today, and I probably won't tomorrow.
cheers,
mike
"We shall fund the company with
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
I think Jerry Pournelle said that about 20 years ago. Yeah, we'll get that solid state hard drive RSN...
Best Slashdot Co
From the CNN article:
In a car, such a clutch might last longer than a mechanical one, Wen said. In a small hard-disk drive, such as for a handheld device, it could remove the need to make tiny, expensive gears and clutches. If used to replace existing parts, the technology could be commercialized in just two or
three years, he estimated.
First of all, the strategy to slowly replace existing parts with nano-parts is a difficult one. in the laboratory, the electrical responses can be very well regulated. In a car, a downed power line, a bolt of lightning, immersion, and many accident situations that will flip the car off its rubber tires that ground it could expose the parts to electricity, making them solid/liquid when they should not be.
Furthermore, what is to prevent the problems that could come with inconsistent or degraded functioning in nano-parts as the parts age? I don't want something that will only change phase in bits and pieces when I need a fast, rapid-reaction, total phase change. The current non-nanotech parts are cheaper and more reliable.
The application for this stuff is currently in the lab and high level industrial applications- places that have got the money and the people to use these tools in a consistent, well supervised environment.
Geeks, geeks, geeks.. technology is not ALWAYS for the masses. Or lets put it this way; the masses will benefit more by the useful application of new tech by a few, instead of the gimmicky application of new tech to mass consumer goods.
Goat sex free since 2001
"... a flexible material thinner than paper that can absorb 95 percent of the microwaves that hit it."
They just came up with a type of Radar Absorbant Material (RAM). Sounds like a nice coating for my stealth fighter...
99.99% of inventions never see the light of day. Of the remaining 0.01% few are ever applied in the timeframe their inventor first imagines.
Go through the back issues of any periodical and you'll find predictions of all sorts of things; few pan out.
The most useful skills one can develop are the most timeless: The ability to learn. The ability to communicate. The ability to reason. The ability to empathize.
These are the skills that will serve you well in any future scenario be it post-holocaust desert or a nano/quantum paradise.
In the meantime just focus on the mid-term and let the blue-sky folks keep plugging away.
-- Michael
I want my silver body-suit! I want my personal jet-pack! I don't care that they make me look like a flying baked-potato!"
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Buggy Software - Nanothings are small computers that do what they're programmed to do. Surely by 20-50 years from now when we've got the hardware technology well-developed, we'll have figured out how to write bug-free software - after all, it's just a Simple Matter of Programming, and the mere fact that the machine is so small that you don't program it directly, you just use other software to transmit object messages to negotiate with it shouldn't create any problems. (Bwah-hah-hah!) Yeah, right.
Then there's the privacy issues - what are the implications of Smart Dust computers that are networked together? Vernor Vinge's book A Deepness In The Sky discusses the issues of locators in a fictional environment.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I fear the grey goo, and I've been thinking about ways to combat it. It SEEMS inevitable that some sick psycho will eventually develop a grey goo nanobot (GGN), and release it into the environment.
:) But these are just my personal observations based on what little I know. Can anyone shed some light on these issues? Keep in mind that I do NOT care if you completely rip my ideas apart. I am trying to find the truth here, not prove any particular point of view. Let's brainstorm, people. :)
Problems with this scenario:
1) A tiny little nanobot has to be able to break all common chemical bonds for this to become a disaster. If a nanobot normally cannot muster the energy to do so, then it's going to have a bitch of a time self-replicating, so the speed of a GGN colony would be slowed by the time it takes a single GGN to do something useful like break a chemical bond. So it's not like we have a rapid, speed-of-sound conversion of Earth into grey goo.
2) GGNs would in theory still be susceptible to things like heat, electrical charges, and physical shock. If you have a colony of grey goo eating away at a mountain, it wouldn't seem particularly difficult to blow it up, burn it, melt it, or maybe engineer counter-bots to tear the little bastards to shreds.
3) As far as I know, GGNs wouldn't be able to replicate very fast. Yes, I know it would be geometric growth in theory (each bot makes 2, which each make 2 more, etc.), but that's only allowing for infinite surface area of the growing mass. In theory a GGN colony would form into a sphere, growing outward, but it could only disassemble things along the surface of the colony, not the inside.
4) A GGN colony could not go very deep, lest it be crushed by the mass of the colony above it, or collapse thousands of tons of dirt upon it, which would no doubt slow its progress (even a tiny little nanobot can be rent to pieces, right?). Or, if they went WAY deep, the heat of the inner parts of Earth would melt them. Or maybe they'd dig a hole into a magma pocket, and the entire colony would collapse through it into the magma, being melted.
I feel a lot better now
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
..that a 'consortium' of software and hardware manufacturers are working on 'copy protected' hard-drives that send burrowing nanomites into your brain if you try to make illegall copies of the latest Nsync MP3.. of course if you are collecting Nsync MP3's the nanomites may not be able to get much of a foot-hold in your grey matter..
air and light and time and space
While the idea behind having a 'liquid' clutch is neat, the article focuses mainly on the information technology's dependance on moving parts, ie: spinning disks and levered sweeping read heads and lasers.
Personally, I don't think this is going to be an issue in the near future. We already have companies making fast, solid-state ram drives. It can't be much longer before the first fast solid-state eprom drives hit the market.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
So its appropriate to start worrying about the 'grey ooze' now, correct??
Moderators: This is not a troll. The grey ooze is a term for corrupt nano-bots that create too many replications until it suffocates our air.
--
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Also, I have to confess that I find the technology a little scary in some ways. I mean, I really would not like to see a Von Neumann machine running amok (I know I will get flamed for this. It's just my irrational Catholic upbringing in Scotland).
My ex-boyfriend (thankfully) was always talking about nanotech, and I think I have been interested since because of that. He also introduced me to Science Fiction.
Anyroad, I think that it is amazing that these devices will actually be in use in little over a year! And to think I thought it would be closer to 50.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
If you want to get more background info on nanotechnology check out the Foresight Institute (http://www.foresight.org) or find one of K. Eric Drexler's books:
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era in Nanotechnology
Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation
The former is cheaper and less technical than the second one (which I still haven't gotten around to buying).
Certainly looks like the direct route to nanotech is going to reach a usefull state before the biologically based bootstrapping that I was always more interested in. Myosin motors and DNA/RNA computers, Oh My!
--Bleyddyn
Dude, electrons ARE quantum particles, and ALWAYS behave as them. Namely, they're 1/2-spin fermions, are indistinguishable from each other, obey Pauli Exclusion Principle, and under the central-force potential of nucleons (ie, protons and neutrons), make atomic orbitals possible, which account for most chemical interactions we witness everyday.
losing none energy, emitting no interference, and theoretically display superpositioning and entanglement
Man, don't bogart the buzzwords. :-)
Entanglement is interference of the individual spin (or angular momentum) of several particles, giving an apparent total spin (angular momentum) of the system of particles. Ie, it's not possible to measure the spin of the total state of particles while simultaneously measuring the spins of the individual particles. This is how you can have an even number of fermions (half-integral spin) behave as a boson (integral spin), etc.
So there IS interference, which is how the entanglement is realized.
Also, they supposedly can be used to make a capacitor that holds up to a billion amps.
Dude, get your terminology straight. A capacitor stores charge (manifested as an electric field between the two terminals). It does NOT store current!!! Maybe you meant to say is that nanotubes can function as superconductors, passing a current of 10^9 amps. However, I don't know if this is true or not. (hopefully I'll have a better understanding of condensed matter physics in a few years). .V / _` (_-<_-<
.\_/\_/\__,_/__/__/
__ __ ____ _ ______
\ V
make world, not war
For instance, it exceeds the rigidity standard set by General Motors Corp. for use in a clutch, which the auto maker has been researching for more than ten years. Why haven't we seen the liquid clutch in an F1 car yet? I haven't even heard the teams discuss it.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
All they have to do is purchase one robot with the million, then that robot builds ten smaller robots, then those robots build ten smaller robots, which then assemble piles and piles of crisp, 100-dollar bills out of component molecules.
This is true weirdness from the article (link added):
Over the past year, Assistant Professor Weija Wen has created a white powder of tiny particles that, when combined with oil, can be either a fluid or a solid. It changes its state when an electrical charge is applied or removed, a property known as electrorheology". Wen's is not the first substance that can do this, but the molecular properties of Wen's particles make this fluid much more rigid than those that have gone before, he said. For instance, it exceeds the rigidity standard set by General Motors Corp. for use in a clutch, which the auto maker has been researching for more than ten years.
In a car, such a clutch might last longer than a mechanical one, Wen said. In a small hard-disk drive, such as for a handheld device, it could remove the need to make tiny, expensive gears and clutches. If used to replace existing parts, the technology could be commercialized in just two or three years, he estimated.
I don't know, I have visions of someone zapping the car, and watching it melt around me as I fly down the pavement at unhealthy speeds.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Technology Review did an article last month on the same subject.
Wen envisions a small shield on a cell phone that users could flip up next to the phone's antenna, to shield their heads from radiation.
Haven't we had these for years?