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Nanotech Assembly One Step Closer
perrin5 writes "according to Science Daily researchers at University at Buffalo have managed to assemble 3D structures of carbon,silicon, and latex by using "non uniform AC electric fields" as the shaping impetus. I've never really understood exactly what purpose nano-machines were going to fufill, especially in their early stages. Any one care to fill me in?"
It's the damn future! Read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.
For example, imagine if you never had to take a shower or bath again, becuase there were tiny little robots that went over you in your sleep, grabbed all the dirt in their tiny robot claws, and threw it in a tiny robot garbage can.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
One tiny step for minature kind.
Why can't I EVER get it?
Well, let's look on the computing side...
* Assembly of computer chips, atom by atom.
* Reconfigurable computing -- use the silicon to its optimum.
If we can use nanoassemblers to create macro-sized objects, such as Stephenson's feed/seed does, then each item that comes out of the assembler (maybe in your own home, using the master template) will be absolutely identical to the others; no manufacturing errors, no worrying about tolerances, because an atom is an atom.
For that matter, if items can be made quickly enough, there won't be any assembly lines at all; instead, items will be manufactured as needed. No inventories (except of raw materials)...
An economy based on nanotech would be completely different from the one we have now, and IMO mostly for the better; but the transition is going to be murder...
The whole idea of being able to build the first nano-bots is to boot-strap into a real nano-bot era.
Build a small nano-bot sophisticated enough to help you construct v0.000000002 of the bot, which you the use to build v0.000000003, and so on until the bots become advanced enough to perform some real work.
It has many parallels to computing and construction of new processors: build a processor, and use it's power to help you build a bigger better one.
Thats my take on it anyway.
R
In response to all of the smart asses wondering how this could be very useful: Ask someone at Micron or Intel perhaps. Thin layer deposition is cool, but difficult, expensive, and error prone. Transistors and capacitors are relatively simple devices when you get right down to it.
Of course, there's a lot of work necessary before this sort of thing could be done. It sounds like it's only working right now on some semiconducting materials. The article states: "[it] can be used to direct and manipulate almost any particle...whether the particle has a net charge or not...", but then "Alexandridis is developing models to predict how various particles, and combination of particles, will behave under the influence of different electrical fields". Further, the article notes that the structures only stay together while the electric field is maintained. When it is removed, the structures fall apart. They're, uh, working on that small problem. Once both of those problems are solved, there's the issue of doing the nano-construction repeatedly and on a massive scale. Lots of science and engineering left to that.
Now, medical purposes I don't buy quite so much myself. Non-invasive surgeries, including threading a thin wire into your brain to eliminate a potential aneurism and breaking up galstones with a laser, already make scary things into outpatient procedures without the need for this insane level of miniaturization. Protein construction for drug synthesis might be viable, if it could be done more reliably through nano-construction than the "splice genes into random simple bacteria until one works" method.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
Ask me again in 1000 years.
Nanotechnology is a long term investment. Its for people who expect to be around, and have to live with the consequences of their present day actions.
But if you absolutely need an answer on what initial value it's going to have, here's one for you: hydroxyapatite.
Otherwise known as rebuilding your tooth enamel an atom at a time, following tooth decay, instea of putting in these big metal wedges which cause them to crack and which leak mercury, or grinding them down to little nubs and capping them with steel and porcelin.
It's amazing how many new technologies get their start at dentists offices... like, oh, say, anesthetics.
-- Terry
Below, a review I wrote back in '96 of a pretty good book on the subject.
It was originally written for a rigorously nontechnical audience and I decided, what the hell, paste it in here with no modifications for the dashslot crew.
Apologies if you think it overly long or drifts off topic, or just sucks in general.
Should nanotech really catch fire and turn out to be somehow actually workable, the LONG term implications are weird, to say the least.
Potentially very creepy stuff.
BOOK REVIEW: Nano, Ed Regis, Little Brown & Co., 1995
There's a monster living under the bed. And I've got the proof. It's called Nano, the emerging science of nanotechnology: remaking the world - molecule by molecule. And it concerns itself with exactly that.
It's a scary motherfucker.
Scary as hell, in fact.
Ed regis takes us on a guided tour of hell. And it's one of those extra creepy hells that you'd find in an old Twilight Zone episode. One where all the damned had fervently hoped, wished, and dreamed for exactly what they wound up with.
My guess is that this fucker is coming and there's not a thing in the world any of us can do to stop it.
Our tour of the coming nightmare is told somewhat as a biographical sketch of a certain K. Eric Drexler. It follows him around from the time when he first really glommed on to the realization that this incredibly outre shit just might work (read: there's really nothing to stop it) down to the near present, wherein he shouts of riches and evils beyond the ken of imagination to a world filled with people who are mostly deaf. Like one of those unpleasant recurring dreams you have. Like hell.
Along the way, ER takes time to explain the scenery in a way that allows us to more completely understand the chilling implications of it all.
I'm sure that you are a lot like me. That is, you probably know more about the lyrics to Dead Kennedy's music than you know about goofy shit like molecular bonding, enzymatic reactions, and other wooly boogers of similar esoteric boredom inducement. ER, bless his heart, explains crap like this only when it's really necessary and in a style that could mislead you into thinking shit like this might actually be fun to muck around with.
No small achievement, that.
After finishing this pecker, I feel like I actually know what's going on.
I'd rather not.
It's brutal.
Allow me to digress for a bit, if you please. Years ago, when it finally dawned on me as to the full ramifications of genetic engineering, I was seized by a vision most bizarre that I occasionally would twit my son with. The "Steak Tree". Which is exactly what it is. A tree upon which would grow delicious sirloins, rib eyes, or whatever you wanted. With real hemoglobin, cholesterol, muscle tissue, the works. Anything producible by our good friend, DNA. Anything. And all that that implies.
Turns out that I was a piker.
By quite a bit, too.
Drexler envisions a "meat machine".
I quote: "The machine might be about the size and shape of a microwave oven, for example, and it would work the way a microwave oven did, too, more or less. You'd open the door, shovel in a quantity of grass clippings or tree leaves or old bicycle tires or whatever, and then you'd close the door, fiddle with the controls, and sit back to await results. Two hours later, out rolled a wad of fresh beef."
Unlike my "tree", Drexler's "machine" isn't limited to things that ultimately come from DNA. Artifacts produced via nanotechnology are limited only to what the laws of physics impose on them. If you've ever peeked at a physics text or maybe read The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, you'll immediately realize that the restrictions on Drexler's "meat machine" are hideously loose and permissive.
It's all allowed. Manufactured items, diamonds for free, living/nonliving hybrids, duplicates of yourself complete with the fucking thoughts preprogrammed into you head, horrible new virus things that aren't really viruses but are instead maybe little mechanical sherman tank doodads no bigger than a pneumococci that are programmed to maybe place nasties like thallium atoms in very specific locales, reproducible people that not only can't be killed (they'll just make more of themselves) but that could conceivably self replicate and take over the whole fucking world. Half man half cyclotron crosses....all of it. And a whole lot more.
Disposable humans.
Disposable SELVES for fucking sakes.
All dwelling in a world where the business of producing goods and services via the efforts of people or "traditional" manufacturing processes has been abolished.
Throw some crap into the box, stand back a while, and pull out...whatever the hell you can imagine.
Including more boxes. It's endless.
Where do humans fit in a world like that?
Yes yes, I know I know, you've about by now decided that I've lost my fucking mind. Can't really blame you. In truth, I hope I have lost my mind. Along with K. Eric Drexler, Ed Regis, and an ever growing list of others.
Yes indeed. Here's to hoping we've all lost our minds.
Is it fascism yet?
And I can't wait until we can manipulate atomic strucutres using the strong and weak forces directly, instead of these large, clumsy electrical fields. Geez, it's like doing brain surgery wearing oven mitts.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
that's all it is. Nanotech isn't magic and isn't going to perform surgery on you in the next fifty years. Nanotech is and will be "new fancy materials" for a very very very long time. Frankly, by the time we have nanobots that can assemble things automagically we'll probably have to so closely duplicate nature that nanotech will be non-organic biology. Hell, might even endup as "genetic engineering from scratch"
Again, science fiction can show some of the range available to us in the future.
Obviously "The Diamond Age" has been pointed out as one possible future. Rather an odd one, as it has both dystopic and Utopia features to it. Usually literature focuses more on one or the other.
Joe Haldeman brought out another possibility in "The Forever Peace" where he invoked similar capabilities to The Diamond Age, but with a completely different model of control. In The Diamond Age, nanotech construction was available to anyone at a market price. In The Forever Peace, the US government managed to convince everyone that nanotech was inherently dangerous, and ran a small number of NanoForges on a very limited basis. At least public use was very limited.
Greg Bear's use of nanotech in Queen of Angels, Slant, and Moving Mars is somewhere between, but probably closer to Haldeman than Stephenson.
I also just finished A Deepness In the Sky by Verner Vinge, which skirted nanotech, and brings up an interesting contrast.
Briefly, nanotech in science fiction takes on two forms, replicators and itsy-bitsy machines. The Diamond Age had both models. Greg Bear used mostly replication in Queen of Angels and Slant, with itsy-bitsy machines in Moving Mars. Haldeman focused on replication.
Obviously replication becomes an interesting issue framing today's copyright debates. Itsy-bitsy machines are interesting in the context of today's security/privacy debates, since the most basic use seems to be surveillance.
Replication was also touched on much earlier, in a story (name forgotten) where aliens give us a replicator. Of course first you replicate the replicator, then watch the economy break down as goods become free. Some even wonder if giving us the replicator was a prelude to an invasion because of the economic effects. Then someone hits on the idea of Originals, and the economy is saved! Copyright triumphs, effectively.
Fortunately we're a long way from any of these concerns. In the meantime, I hope for some moderately itsy-bitsy machines, most notably the pill camera as I approach 50.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Won't argue with you a bit, I was reporting on what I've read.
Take a look at what's underlying the whole copyright debate, and you'll see that the real end product is scarcity, itself. It's ironic, in that originally the publishers' role was to make media less scarce. In the process of spreading knowledge and arts, they became choke-points. As technology threatens to make their distribution role obsolete, they seek to strengthen their choke-point role. In other words, their product is scarcity. If it's not scarce, it doesn't make money.
If/when nanotech ever gives us replication technology, expect to see the same kind of response out of the classical manufacturing sector.
Perhaps in our fight against copyright abuse, we should also be examining scarcity, itself. When scarcity truly exists, it appears to create an economy. Is 'created scarcity' a 20th century invention, or what is its historical role? I guess England created a manufacturing scarcity in the Colonies to give themselves a market for manufactured goods, kind of the essence of "The Company Store".
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Bloom, by will McCarthy envisions a more Bill Joy-style outcome.
Basically, years before the novel begins, a nanobot that turn organic material into more of itself using only radiant heat for fuel gets loose and "blooms" until the entire earth is consumed by it. Mankind retreats to the outer solar system where it can defend wih cold the now highly develped "Technogenic Life Forms" that inhabit the inner region.
It's a pretty fun and exciting book that I highly recommend. It's also a good companion to Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science," as it sees the potential for nanobots to evolve in the way of cellular automata.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
Engines of Creation
This book is a classic reference to nanotechnology and discusses some of the more interesting applications, consecuences, etc.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Trust the slashdotters to think that not washing is a good thing :-)
Personally I like taking a shower in the morning.
The manufacturing industry would disappear overnight if we had universal assemblers. It would collapse to nothing but programmers for the assemblers, and/or engineers and machinists whose job it is to make the first copy of widget X.
There would be no more assembly-line jobs, and intellectual property would become a real bitch, if everyone has the capability of copying the latest N'Sync album atom by atom.
Maybe manufacturing jobs would be replaced with jobs fetching and purifying the raw materials.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
In order for nanobots to create anything useful, man would have to create a self-replicating universal assembler!! That is, we would have to create a tiny nano-bot that is capable of creating a copy of itself. Otherwise, there is NO way the little machine could make anything large enough to be visible. Even if man created thousands of them, they would not be able to make anything other than microscopic things unless they are given eons to complete the work.
However, self-repleicating universal assemblers can multiply so fast that you will have billions of them working for you in no time! Then, they can start constructing clothes, food, cars, buildings, planes, spaceships, ANYTHING!
If we ever reach the day where we actually HAVE these type of assemblers, we need to be careful because they really could consume the whole Earth if not controlled!
Consider how a tiny microscopic machine could even replicate itself? How would it store the information? Even if it only took a single atom to store a "bit" of information, the machine would have to be bigger than its own size just to store the information on how to build itself. That is why it would have to employ some really good DATA COMPRESSION! That is the only way! (Well, I guess, if the little creatures could receive some kind of "signal" from a master computer, they can download the instructions..heh heh!)
Paul
I've wondered about this overmultiplication effect, but from a different angle. What if fast self replicating nanos were launched at an approaching asteroid. Could enough nanos eat a whole asteroid, thereby remove a threat. I know that there are many factors are involved, but the idea itself is pretty exciting. Give them date by which to cease operations, launch them at armegeddon like asteroid, wait, watch gazillions of nanos burn up on re-entry. I could only think of 2 basic problems: 1.) make sure the stop timer is set right(wouldn't want them to re-enter and munch on earth) 2.) find some other earth saving labor for Bruce Willis and crew.
"...3D structures of carbon,silicon, and latex...
...I've never really understood exactly what purpose nano-machines were going to fufill, especially in their early stages. Any one care to fill me in?"
Finally, a condom Howard Stern can use.
Ahem.
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
That's a very good idea... and they would have enough time to eat up an asteroid (because they multiply at an exponential rate) However, the entire mass is still going to slam into the Earth. I guess it would be better though, because a bunch of tiny particles would probably do less damage to the Earth than one large solid mass.
Here is the other problem though....Do the asteroids contain all of the elements needed to build nano-bots? I assume they would need other materials that are not on the asteroid. (Without all the of necessary atoms, then only the nanobots that we send up there will be able to disassemble the asteroid -- That is, they will not be able to spawn more to help. In that case, I doubt they would be quick enough.)
Paul
This is exactly the kind of stary-eyed, far-fetched sort of thing that is too many decades off to be realistic and is exactly why I was saying I saw few medical uses in the near future. Nano-machines complicated enough to do anything without outside assistance, especially on that scale are at least 20 if not 50 years away. Aside from other issues, there is the matter of the sheer amount of power one of those would require. That's a lot of energy density with something so small. Wait, you want it powered by the energy of muscle contractions? More likely such a machine would be fried by those very potential differences.
And the same issues applies to the assumption of some kind of bootstrapping process. Creating nano-machines using nano-machines is a pipe dream. A very appealing imagery, true, but it comes across the same problems as above. You're looking to pack an incredible amount of sophistication into something very small. The energy it would need to control in order to make smaller items may well be enough to break the very bonds holding it together! To speak nothing of the liklihood of its breaking apart due to the heat of the energy necessary to drive such a complicated process. Think your Athlon gets a fair amount of heat density?
Nice dreams, but not practical.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
Yeah, once we've got nanoassemblers, we're pretty much screwed. Devour the planet? How about whole galaxies? A self-replicating machine that can fuel itself on any matter is the epitome of destructive (and creative, for that matter) power. On the other hand, I would like laser guns and flying cars, and nanotech seems to be on the route to those. So... Yay nanotech!