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Nanotechnology: Are Molecular Assemblers Possible?
Roland Piquepaille writes "Two experts in the field of nanotechnology, K. Eric Drexler, Ph.D., cofounder of the Foresight Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., and the person who coined the term "nanotechnology," and Richard E. Smalley, Ph.D., a professor at Rice University and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, exchanged open letters about "molecular assemblers" -- devices capable of positioning atoms and molecules for precisely defined reactions in almost any environment. These letters are making the -- long -- cover story of the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News. At the end of this rich exchange of four letters, they still disagree about the issue. Drexler thinks "molecular assemblers" are possible while Smalley denies it. Who is right? Don't count on me to give an answer. This summary contains some forceful quotes from the original letters."
If, in the future, copying physical objects is nearly as easy as copying information on a computer, will corporations lobby to pass laws that make it illegal to do so? In other words, will I be arrested one day for making a copy of my friend's Ferrari?
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.
Also interesting is Ray Kurzweil's comments on the exchange:
/ ar ticles/art0604.html
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=
Even if they are not possible, I suspect by studying a way to make these possible, one may find out something interesting so, let's pretend these are possible...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
How long would it take one of these assemblers to make a cup of "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot"?
Trolling is a art,
You don't get it. You are still in a pretend world where atoms go where you want because your computer program directs them to go there. You assume there is a way a robotic manipulator arm can do that in a vacuum, and somehow we will work out a way to have this whole thing actually be able to make another copy of itself.
Wow. If I talked that way to my corporate overlords I'd be kicked to the curb. Maybe I should have been a scientist!
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
I am certainly impressed with the progress made in the nanotechnology field. Our research lab (which is currently located in south Israel) has been making some studies in the same field. We have invited several world-renowned scientiest to work in our lab. While I'm not actively involved in the said research, I'm responsible for the data warehouse that collects the data into a FoxPro cluster.
One published paper presented the idea of creating a 2.4GHz transmitter in a nanobot which would provide a life feed to the chiropractor when he/she is trying to rehabilitate an athlete. We found that western patients were problematic, since the high content of lead in their bodies scrambled the information sent.
The one thing we are doing is sharing our information. We're currently working on a research portal so that fellow scientist can access our data quickly instead of receiving it on ancient 5.25 floppy disks.
Which is nice.
There is a fundamental obstacle to creating moleular assemblers: What do you make them out of?
Imagine that you were given the task of designing a machine to lay bricks. This probably would not be all that difficult, considering all of the things we already do with robots.
However, the problem becomes much more difficult if I add the stipulation that the machine be constructed entirely from bricks and mortar.
Molecular assembler? Surely you mean Matter Compiler? Or emcee.
I can't be the only person to have read the Diamond Age.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Gnu ASsembler ought to be enough for everyone.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
In lectures and in a September 2001 article in Scientific American, Smalley outlined his scientific objections to the idea of molecular assemblers, specifically what he called the "fat fingers problem" and the "sticky fingers problem."
/.ers have had to face at one point or another.
Aye, this is something that almost all
Hasn't anyone learned from the warnings issued by K Eric Drexler or even Michael Crichton? Will we jump headlong into creating tiny machines with the only aim being making money and doing something "cool"? Technology people are so predictable, maybe what's needed is to station a psychology on every street corner in areas where nanotech is being done and pay them to remind people to have a conscience and grow up a little.
84-page peer-reviewed white paper on nanofactory. Conclusion: we see no hurdles, predicted time line: 10 years from now we could haave the first operating assembler... http://www.jetpress.org/volume13/Nanofactory.htm
*sigh* I'm touched.
Also I found it interesting that the usage of Nanotechnology was changed so greatly that the creator of the term accepts the newer phrase 'molecular assemblers' for that process.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
With a name like Smalley, I can see why this guy went into nanotechnology. Now I understand why Dr. Karl Maxxum was the chief architect of the Empire State Building;)
In principio erat Verbum.
They are possible, and Twinkies(TM) provide the proof. They are manufactured with absolutely no nutritional value whatsoever, and this is only possible if vitamins and minerals are screened out at the molecular level.
They say its impossible, but isn't DNA essentially just that, and I'm quite sure some lab recently built a transitor from DNA so I'd say its definatly possible.
Looks like good ole Prince Charles can relax for a while yet then...
I find it sort of reassuring that a technology as potentially fantastic (and therefore treated with immense enthusiasm) has to undergo a long period of maturation before people can even agree on the basics...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
From reading the letters I don't think Drexler has really addressed the problems raised by Smalley fingers at all, he just tries to brush the problems aside.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
So there, Smalley wins, he got scared children into the debate. Only thing likely to win debates better are beautiful women's tears, knockout punches, and defaulting by just leaving the room in a huff.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
No matter how unlikely it seems, I think you have to be very careful saying something is impossible. Especially something that we are only just starting to explore - such as nanotech.
No you don't, most people don't so don't feel bad. What's more bothering is the fact you're modded insightful...
To paraphrase a saying that I cannot for the life of me find the author of (it was a Sci Fi author, please one of you MUST remember who said it): If a graybeard scientist says something is possible, pay attention to him. If that same graybeard scientist says something is impossible, he's wrong.
...is tomorrow's rock-solid reality. Prominent scientists once thought supersonic flight was impossible, too, but tell that to Chuck Yeager. Hell, my job involves building a jet engine that has a cruising speed faster than Mach 1.
Applied science is a big mountain, and we're still mucking about in the foothills.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
This could be the start of something beautiful.
Compare this with that.
But this issue seems to be fraught with misunderstanding.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
Please tell me how you really feel, don't hold it back.
Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. ...
As Dexter quotes Smalley:
Molecular assemblers are not currently possible so we're not discussing 'now'. As for the future, well anything is possible. Look back through history and I don't think anyone can seriously say that anything is impossible given a long enough timespan - given enough research and progress and time, humans will probably find ways to overcome any physical, chemical, biological etc limit.
So if the future is certain, then all these discussions are about is when. Given the lack of developments in the nanotech area, i doubt anyone can give an accurate timeline as more research/developments is required.
Therefore the whole discussion seems like a pissing contest since neither side can really provide any solid info to predict when their predications will become true.
If I had to bet, I'd say that Drexler was right. Smalley seems to rely on strawman arguments (they'd be restricted to water) and arguments from incredulity (the fat fingers schtick). This is the same sort of plausible sounding arguments that have been used to "prove" (in my lifetime) that we will never detect planets around other stars, that we will never be able to image individual atoms, that I will never have a hi-res colour display on my desk, that we will never be able to clone a mammal, etc., etc.
If you strip away the fancy words (and shamelessly simplify), this becomes much more obvious:
Drexler may well be optimistic about the timeline, and may well be underestimating the difficulties, but I've yet to see an argument that it can't be done that holds up under critical examination.-- MarkusQ
Your body does what you've described all the time using DNA as the storage device, and only a two-part complex to do the actual assembly (ribosomes). One problem is, there we're talking about assembling from a fairly well defined set of components which are themselves complex enough to have ways of being selective (an amino acid of a particular geometry will bind preferably to a particular other structure). When you're talking about single atoms, there isn't that much of a geometric factor acting in your benefit anymore. Of course, we even manage that somewhat, since there are particular proteins in our body which end up having a single metal ion of some type or other in the center of them (hemoglobin - iron, chlorophyll - magnesium). The question is, can we generalize this and make it externally controllable (i.e. we feed the DNA-equivalent in by some remote process that preferably doesn't involve changing the environment we're building in).
In the body, communication is usually done diffusing some chemical species that the other cells react to. So perhaps there'd be a byproduct of what one robot is building, and the others would be designed to be able to detect that byproduct to measure the local status. You should be able to build fairly complex uniform structures just knowing the local environment (periodic structures like crystals or networks), but it'd be difficult to build a single highly specified structure unless you used some other control mechanism with good spatial resolution, like in chip manufacture.
Damn!
Yes, they are possible. Look at what living cells already do ... every single one of them. They convert raw materials into cell structures. We already know it's possible; we just need to figure it out how to do it our way, or copy the way the cells do it.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
why not include some footnotes? this is the internet, after all. links to supporting evidence would make this seem less trolly and much more authoritative.
you really must love america quite a bit. it shows in your writing.
Ribosomes are essentially molecular assemblers that build proteins out of amino acids using instructions from messenger RNA (originally transcribed from the DNA in the nucleus). So, it's not only possible, your cells are doing it as you read this.
[Insert pithy quote here]
yea, your comment resembles that of the comments about first powered flight experiments...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
After all, what is the human body, but a set of carefully-constructed chemicals?
What is a protein? Not a random conglomeration of molecules, but the last step in a long chain of directed chemical synthesis.
I think the naysayers are being too close-minded in their consideration of what a molecular assembler may look like.
Please no Molecular Cobol or Fortan compilers......
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
A Ph.D. who is a co-founder of Foresight.... can't be wrong...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
[ Reply 1, Lusty and irrelevant ]
... Michael Crichton"
An organic psychology at that. Or perhaps you
meant psychology major. As you prefer.
Personally, I'd rather a majorette.
[ Reply 2, Recognizes absurd premise, but
utterly fails to provide substantive
refutation ]
Oh yes, psychologists are renowned for their
morality and maturity. Heh.
[ Reply 3, Identifies ideological bias and
rank absurdities, thus cogently defends
subculture ]
Making money is what keeps you from starving
to death, since your hunter-gatherer skills
have been displaced by reading and typing.
Nanotech is cool because it offers the
potential to eliminate hunger and disease.
"... Warnings issued by
is a quick grin. Should I fear cars and hotels
because of Stephen King?
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right,
but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.'
Arthur C. Clarke
...but I'm really not skilled in reading molecular assembly language.
For a good book check out The Computational Beauty of Nature). Some tasks can be broken down into very simple repeated actions which simple machines can perform. The beauty of these system is that they require little communication between agents. Merely an awareness of what is around you and a simple list of tasks can create some complecated forms.
Take a look at this:
Here
From the article:
"an atomic manipulation facility, unique in the world. This atomic manipulation facility will enable a new generation of experiments to unfold. It will allow McGill researchers to construct new devices atom by atom, thus developing the science and technology required for future electronic and biochemical systems."
The guy who pulled my wisdom teeth was named "Dr. Mangle". True story.
Now, I have only a vague understanding of the subject, but from what I read, I was lead to believe that you didn't have one little agent running around like a little gnome (or group thereof) building some complicated structure. You had a sequence of these things which acted like an assembly line. Each agent knows how to slap a specific atom or subset of atoms onto some atomic structure it receives, and only does something when it receives that atomic structure. So there wouldn't really need to be any memory, or very little, since it only does a specific task repeatedly. The thing could almost be stateless.
Again, this is my dim recollection from something I read awhile back, so I bow down before more informed heads.
In my area, many of the car break-in's are targeting vehicle registrations and proofs-of-insurance...the cars themselves are generally of lesser value.
When you can copy a car as easily as a document, the car master (think DVD) will become the target, and that will be the time when copies of vehicles become something to liscense, unless of course, you build your own, like many of us already do today.
Who says open source developers are the only group that have flame wars instead of working?
The real question is: Where should research effort be put?
Drexler has been pushing his simple-to-understand vision for some decades. Even a congressman can understand "We stick the atoms together to make the molecules by pushing them into place, just like we make tinkertoy stuff." It's a nice idea. But there is no known way to do it. And real chemists know that atoms are way too small and way too sticky and way too jumpy to be dealt with like bricks. It may not be impossible. But it is impossible right now, and bellowing about how nice it would be is just--bellowing.
Meanwhile, plain old chemical reactions have kept you alive all your life. Your parents too. They do lots of impressive things--like make beer. Have one.
DNA acts as a template mechanism, which lets you build certain types of molecules using a specific set of operations.
The whole point of nanotech is that it doesn't work like that: you can supposedly add one atom at a time anywhere on a molecule, or pluck an atom out of the middle of something. Which makes the problems much more difficult.
Drexler should get credit for being a populizer of the concept of nanotech, but it's good to see an expert in the field giving him some peer review.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I have learned to use the word 'impossible' with the greatest caution.
-- Wernher Magnus Maximilian von Braun (1912-77)
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
First, you can't use Smalley fingers, because they're too sticky: Whatever you're manipulating will attach to the finger due to proximity effects.
Then, you can't use positional assembly, because objects don't stick to eachother just because they get close to one another.
So, uh, which is it? Do or do not compatible molecules bind or adhere when brought in close proximity?
I'm not a chemical engineer (obviously), but even I picked up on this interesting contradiction.
--Dan
Off-topic response to flamebait. This bears a strong smell of British authorship, so I shall tailor my retorts on this basis. First point, the British had about five years to put down the American Revolution before the French came in. At the time, King George III had an impressive Empire that was getting even bigger. The Americans had almost no industry and was under a near-total blockade during those five years. Milita troops achieved impressive victories or yielded Pyrrhic victories to the British in numerous battles such as Lexington, Bunker (Breed's) Hill, Brandywine, and King's Mountain. BTW, no Bourbon French soldiers were in those battles.
The War of 1812 was a poor overall showing for the new nation. While the Brits were busy stoking up the Spanish ulcer, then joining the Allies in their eventual drive on Paris, they had an overseas force that beat a number of American armies and even burned the new national capital. For the Brits out there, jolly good show at Waterloo. Napoleon pressed you and the Prussians awfully hard before even the Young Guard broke and the whole French army was swept away. Welcome to the South Atlantic, your Highness! Oh, and then a British doctor slowly poisoned Napoleon with arsenic bringing on his untimely death. Pefidious Albion!
Frankly, the Union Army of 1865 could have been loaded on the excellent Union Navy ships of 1865 and conquered most of Europe short of Prussia and Great Britain. Instead, it kept the screws on the former Confederacy until the backroom settlement of the disputed Presidential Election of 1876 (same Florida counties involved as year 2000!). Prussia took the liberty of conquering Austria, Denmark and France instead from 1864-1871. Blut und Ehre!
In 1917, the Brits were nearing exhaustion and the French Army had gone into widespread mutiny following its mismanagement at Verdun and other debacles. The entry of the Americans injected new life into the Allied cause and helped turn back the redoubled German force that redeployed from the Eastern Front following the cowardly Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed by the Russians. The Americans acquitted themselves very well on French battlefields using a great deal of French and British equipment. In 1947, as a full player in the postwar peace (unlike 1919), the Americans intelligently embraced the Marshall Plan of rebuilding Europe. In 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles, the French and British had embraced something much closer to the Morgenthau Plan of 1947. Henry Morgenthau, an American diplomat, wanted to turn Germany into a large, unarmed, non-industrialized, agrarian state.
Also, regarding WW2, the Japanese were no pushover and the Europeans had little to do with their defeat. Mostly the Euros were disgraced by the Japanese as their Far Eastern colonies fell quickly before the expansion of the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere".
To sum up, go read some history, moron!
do, if you can assemble objects, could you disassemble them, and send their particles to another location and reassemble them there?
if so, we have Star Trek Transporters.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
They crash, get bad gas milage, cost a lot, and once you use it, you're stuck with a proprietary system that you can't upgrade. I'll be driving my open-source tank. They come up with upgrades for it every few months, they are free, and kernel version 2.6 is just about to come out...
Wait, was I talking about cars or linux?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
My chemistry background isn't tremendously deep, but I see Smalley's point. Right now we don't have a universal method for 'mating' arbitrary molecules with other ones on any particular axis we choose.
What I'll have to figure out is if Smalley is really knocking over a straw horse. Is Drexler really saying that this could be done? That (and this is where my chemistry falls short), that you can create arbitrary valence bonds on whatever axis you choose between any two molecules/atoms whatever.
If that is true, then 'yes', I have to concurr with Smalley that arbitrary matter compilation is a long, long way off.
Contrarily, I was always under the assumption that the matter compilers would use a substance like carbon to build diamonoid substances and that the physical chemistry of this particular combination was doable.
Maybe what needs to elucidated is (1) what elements and molecules Drexler proposes now (2) Why Smalley thinks this cannot be done even in specific cases.
I think if diamondoid or other specific matter can be assembled, maybe that would be a springboard to enlighten us just how far it could be extended. As far as I can tell, the best we can do now is MEMS systems (Micro-Electro-Mechanical). What does MEMS tell us about even smaller scale structures? MEMs work. Just check out your latest DLP projectors.
I could delete my Yahoo personal ad.
Although Feynman proposed the idea first, it was Drexler who actually developed practical ideas about how it could be done. It was Drexler who fully explored the implications of the new invention, benefits and dangers. It was Drexler who designed molecular machinery (in Nanosystems) and calculated their physical parameters.
Fark! Can we PLEASE STOP GATING ROLAND TO /.!
I have Roland in my RSS reader. I have Slashdot in my RSS reader. Slashdot repeatedly tries to want to be a blog by grabbing thoughts from that community, but Slashdot doesn't need to be an aggregator for the weblog world!
Please get an EDITORIAL CLUE!
Many of the arguments used on both sides involve generalizing by comparing to past examples: "Yes, but they said that such-and-such wouldn't be possible either." The success or failure of any previous, and unrelated in this case, venutre has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not the current one will succeed.
Michael Crichton a credulous luddite? No way, you say. Read the foreword to Prey and the book Travels. The guy's a whack-job.
Prey was better the first times I read it: Sphere and The Andromeda Strain.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Go Steve, go Steve!
Do you think Smalley is a word to describe his inclinations or the size of his intellect?
Aren't biological systems essentially nano-constructs, comprised of very small 'builders' (enzymes) that do one thing and one thing only. Since there are so many builders that only do that one thing, memory all of a sudden doesn't become a huge requirement, rather the ability to turn them off/on at a given moment to direct the construction.
Given this, it seems obvious that nanoconstruction at some level is possible. That doesn't necessarily mean we can throw a bunch of elements together and direct them to build a skyscraper, complete with office equipment and name plates on the doors. But it certainly does seem feasible to draw the analogy to biological systems that directed construction is possible.
It doesn't need molecular technology. They already try to come after you even today. See this nice (and real) example:
_ sl r-pl_us.htm
http://www.mb-portal.net/html/news/special/2003
Some guy from Poland "copied" the new Mercedes SLR, long before the real car hits the market. Mercedes tried to buy it from it to get it off the streets. Because that failed, they sue him.
Marc
It won't ever happen because...
1. It would be easier to construct 'The Matrix'.
2. The construction of 'The Matrix' would remove the desire or need to do this.
Many science fiction ideas can be disregarded in this way, including teleportation and time travel. Ignore the ludite anti-machine slant that 'The Matrix' movies have put on 'The Matrix' and you willl see the good it could be used for.
Or perhaps it is like 'the one ring', none of us can wield it although we would use it to do good it would corrupt us.
A matter compiler, as described in "The Diamond Age" is simply a eutactic chamber containing a feed interface, which brings molecular building blocks into it, and some assemblers, which follow a specific program to build something out of those blocks. The MC is to assemblers is what a construction site is to bricklayers.
There are more extensive technical discussions at nanodot.org here and here. One of the problems is that people, particularly Smalley who is a chemist cannot understand the merging of physics, biotech, nanotech, MEMS and computer science. Drexler and a few other scientists attempt to bring these all together. See particularly various comments on Nano@Home from Nov. 22-24 here.
The point should be made that the problem does not appear to be with regard to molecular or atomic assembly. As others have pointed out the ribosome performs this task quite well. As do DNA polymerase, RNA polymerase and literally all of the enzymes known to biology (probably thousands). I have on my desk a basic Biochemistry textbook (Voet & Voet) documenting the 19-step conversion process of Lansterol into Cholesterol which tends to be performed atom by atom or small molecule by small molecule. And this doesn't include the extensive number of reactions that lead up to cholesterol synthesis from Acetyl-CoA! All of these are mediated by enzymes that add or remove atoms or small molecular groups.
So the problem appears to be that Smalley objects to mechanosynthesis in a vacuum or an inert atmosphere (or even an atmosphere which will not interfere with the reactants). Yet he does not make any case for that. Even if his "fat fingers" argument was valid that would still not prevent one from creating nano-structured materials with somewhat less density. Buckyballs and carbon nanotubes are not exactly the most dense materials one can envision. He presents no strong argument with respect to the limits of what could not be constructed with "fat fingers".
The discussion from my perspective is a disappointment.
Engines of creation, as mentioned in the article, is available online, and in palmreader format at http://www.foresight.org/EOC/
We can make them, but how do we get them out of the plasma conduits? __
Tech News, Reviews and Tutorials
And quantum states? They cannot be copied due to no-cloning theorem. In many cases it won't matter but if you assemble a complex and dynamic system (e.g. a living organism), will it work when all the quantum states of the molecules are random?
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
My favorite Matter Compiler!=))
Everyone seems to ignore the fact the with nanotechnology any disgruntled employee can manufacture a nanoplague that will kill off the whole world's population. Imagine something like a miniature time bomb that spreads like a cold virus. At a predetermined time it explodes (Diamond Age's cookie cutters), produces a poison, or compiles a toaster in your brain. With a GPS antenna (graphite is an pretty good conductor) this could be very location specific. With the capability to map the bloodstream, it could selectively kill fat people (body mass index), stupid people (small brains), blacks (thick lips), various asian races (epicanthic fold variances), ugly people (by scanning the face). And all this is no more difficult than compiling a toaster. You can't even enforce assembler containment; read about how Hackworth stole the primer (Diamond Age): any engineer working with assemblers could do exactly the same thing to get himself one. And this ONE MAN can kill off everyone in the world. Now tell me, which benefit of nanotech will offset this not-too-negligible danger?
I've recently noticed that Roland Piquepaille has submitted a lot of stories to slashdot. What do they all have in common? They are self promotion pieces pointing the reader back at Roland's blog. What do you find there? A few paragraphs excerpted from the real story, and a link to the real story. What value does Roland add? _ZERO_.
Why do the slashdot editors condone this blatant self promotion? I thought that was exclusively their province.
You're wrong in your assumption that you're dealing with a Brit. I'm actually from another large European country which shall go unnamed here. Anyway, I didn't write the text myself. Was posted by a Frenchman on some stupid "patriotic" message board I troll on occasionally.
I absolutely love it because no braindead American can resist to comment it.
The problem with manipulating atoms is that they are "fuzzy", in the sense that we don't know exactly where they are. This is quatum mechanics coming in to play. Our current understanding must treat atoms statistically. This brings up serious theoretical issues with nanoassemblers.
As a response to those you point out that "Biology does it all the time," they have a misunderstanding of the differences between nanofabrication and molecular catalysis. Cells build things by using molecular templates and selective enzymic catalysis, these are very chemical in nature. The idea of nano assemblers treats atoms as if they are bricks that can be stacked. Enzymes aren't magic, they are in the simplest sense templates that allow reactions that could already happen to occur faster.
Don't fall in to the trap of simply relabeling technology with new buzz words, catalysis isn't nanotech.
Organicsculpture.com
Hrm..
It does seem that bringing "children" into the debate is occurring with quite a bit of frequency these days, with no thought to the applicability of such argument or relevance to the actual topic at hand..
We already have the famed "Godwin's Law" regarding comparisons with Hitler, should we now coin a term for "Think of the Children" arguments? But whom to name it after...
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Sorry, couldn't resist this one:
Can nanobots build a copy of my wife and deprogram the bitching thing?
You read my post and still call ME braindead?! Oh, Puhlease. Way to go with your destructive, non-factual troll/flamebait. I guess it makes some people happier to go around destroying a reputation rather than building one. My advice is to try and be a fountain, not a drain. Or, for the more erudite, as Goethe said on his deathbed, "Mehr Licht!"
The first one to actually demostrate a working molecular assembler. This *is* science after all! Then only religious fanatics or the extremely stooopid can argue against it.
As some comments get at, but don't explicitly state, the biochemical processes of living organisms already express many of the claimed aims of nanotechnology.
I would even postulate that given the power of evolution acting on life to select the most powerful way to enable a function, that the only practical way to impliment nanotechnology is using life as a guide (biochemistry, enzymology, etc). Want microscopic motors? Look at how bacterial flagella are organized.
Now let's take the next step: if we want nanotechnology, modify life forms to create it. So, if we want tiny subs reaming out our arteries, or repairing organs, modify viruses, bacteria, or parasites to do so. It's the only way!
What about the equivalent of an inkjet printer; instead you have a matterjet printer? Working at near absolute zero you eliminate the problems of temperature and atomic motion (although this creates the problem of making a design that can transition from really f-ing cold to room temp.) That cup of Earl Grey, Hot will start off as Earl Grey colder than anything and then add heat!
Simple right? No? well flight was impossible for the majority of human history and so was medical treatment that actually helped instead of harmed. Oh, yeh and the earth was flat once. Communicating across the world was once impossible, then time/resource consuming, then incontinent, to nearly instantaneous and universal. Maybe the matterjet won't work but something will and it'll get better, cheaper, and universal. I hope I live to see it.
Wish I had some mod points, that was an excellent rebuttal.
I believe you! Every story on Slashdot is completely true!
Yours truly, the Iraqi Infomation Minister.
Of course I read your post. I even read your reply to my reply. That's what trolling is about. Watching how people swallow the bait and laughing at them. In case you haven't noticed: I don't care about reputations and patriotism at all and am quite aware of the fact that my original posting contains some fiction.
But you seem to be a nice guy, so don't take all this too serious and move on with your patriotic life now, okay?
Of course molecular assemblers are possible. Your body contains billions of them -- ribosomes.
A ribosome (a combination of several large protein molecules) constructs arbitrary protein molecules from individual amino acids according to the instructions on a strand of RNA (copied from DNA). Sounds like a molecular assembler to me.
Now, as to whether they can be made smaller and more flexible than that (nanotech's "universal assembler") is another question -- ribosomes may turn out to be the minimum possible assembler. Or not.
-- Alastair
If one reads the license with the Replicator (TM), you would destroy the license (and the originality of your expensive machine). The only one who can create a new license of originality (using their secret key) are the Ferrari vehicle manufacturers...
Flying the Ferrari through the Replicator will void your 'license to use' in that way. So I don't think it will be a problem for the company.
To build a H-bomb, you need a lot of uranium and plutonium; as far as I know, you can only get to the point of H fission by creating enough energy with an embedded 'traditional' nuclear bomb inside (sort of).
I presume that the uncracked version of the Replicator (TM) would not contain a filled jar of Uranium/Plutonium. The tgz-ed information to replicate a full-blown uranium mining facility would probably be available for download from the FastTrack network.
But IANANanotechnologist, but a JAMSAR (Just A Mortal Slashdot Article Reader)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No, I didn't get the memo. But you can send it to me at SlashDotFP@mailinator.com
wrong about being able to copy ferarri because they are not IP. the design of car is an IP.
there used to be a lot of lamborghini and ferarri replica on ebay. there's one company who really made a good looking ferarri out of a chevy v6. they made it so good that ferrari sue the company. now other people make replicas w/ lambo and other hot-stuff cars. you copy it too good, the car company will sue your ass off.
don't think they made ferarri replicas? take a look at ebaymotors.
Be warned, the link in the Anonymous parent comment is not to anything you'll forget soon. It's biology, but not at all nano. Uck!
How is this flamebait? This is VERY insightful is you ask me!
On the serious side, before getting to the fantasy below...
There is a fuzzy dividing line between the macro and microscopic worlds. Various experiments have been able to move that line, AFAIK always upwards, but the line is still there. At some point, materials quit acting classically and start acting quantumly. Molecular assemblers are clearly below that line.
It's really hard to 'work your way down' to the molecular assembler level, because you're either classical or quantum. Even the experiments that elevate quantum effects into normally classical space are highly specific, and could not likely be extended to an assembler.
The chicken-and-egg problem mentioned elsewhere has a solution. Some 'proto-chicken' laid the first 'true-chicken' egg that hatched and became the first chicken. Rather obvious with a little thought.
The molecular assembler isn't so easy, and building the bridge is tough. I see two ways, either building really simple assemblers in bulk, in 'test tubes' somewhat as we build lipospheres, today, and using them to build more complex assemblers. Or building simple, gross molecular assemblers out of the smallest classical assemblers (STM on steriods?) we can make.
In either case, it's a bootstrap process, and by the time we've bootstrapped we may find that we're not exactly where we expected to be. Not necessarily better or worse, just different. Pre-bootstrap expectations are likely to be wrong.
A pet fantasy from my high school days (early 70's) was to build a smaller Waldo-style robot. (mimic my movements, at another place/scale) Use that Waldo to build a yet smaller one, and so on.
The final goal of this progression was to go walking down the grooves of my favorite vinyl LPs, carrying a micro-trowel and a micro-bucket of vinyl patch, and fix the really annoying clicks and pops by hand.
This was never a serious fantasy, but a fun thought. Not only did I not figure the needed size of the Waldo, beyond the 1-mil (25.4 uM) scale, I didn't figure the length of the virtual hike it would take for one LP.
Not only were vinyl LPs obsolete before nanotech (It didn't have that name, then.) truly approached, my old 'temporary, until I can afford better' AR-XA turntable outlasted the format.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
> How is this risk any different than the risk of mass ebola infection by bio-terrorists today?
With a biological infection you generally can quarantine the sick and thus contain the spread if you catch it early enough. This is because ebola and all other diseases start killing the host as soon as they can. A nanoplague can spread with no symptoms whatsoever, since it only needs to create a small spore synthesis plant inside the body, and can be triggered at a predetermined time, so that there is no way to "stop" its spread - everyone dies at exactly the same time. There is also no possible treatment, since the death is instantaneous. Biological diseases, including ebola, never have a 100% fatality rate because they usually can be treated, if not cured, like anthrax. Detectability is also a problem since, unlike biological infections, there would be no symptoms in carriers or those about to die. A nightmare, isn't it?
> Nobody would ever have to work a day in their lives for food.
We already have this. It is called "welfare". People on welfare tend to stay at home, do nothing, and have lots of children (to raise benefits). Those children will inevitably grow up and also be on welfare. Thus the system perpetuates, but nobody says it is a good thing.
I wonder why, when talking about robots made of thousands of atoms, people never seem to mention how entropy and thermal migration type things will effect such a machine.
While I don't think that we have reached the lower limits of scale by any strech, as a materials engineer it bothers me some that I've never seen this problem discussed. What happens when a stray gamma ray or something reprograms my little nanobot?
And what of thermodynamic laws of matter? There are a lot of ways of arranging things that are inherently unstable. If you put matter into a shape that is highly energeticly unstable, the atoms will spontaneously hop to lower the energy of the system. Different materials next to each other wil spontaneously alloy (look up 'diffusion couple' of you aren't familiar with this) not to mention that for every second a bot is exposed to air, free sulfur and other junk is being deposited on the surface.
If there is a decent discussion anywhere, please point me at it, or respond... Just one of those nagging issues I have with the idea...
Convenient leading choice of metaphor, thanks.
There are some who theorize (Sorry, no reference, I read this years (decades) ago in dead tree form.) that life began bootstrapped on clays.
Some clays at the microscopic scale carry electrostatic charges, and at that level can be somewhat self-assembling through sedimentation. So there is a micro-structure there. Now take the water that that microstructured clay is immersed in (We are talking about sedimentation, after all.) and put some organic impurities in it. Those impurities will tend to self-align on the clay face, drive by diffusion, micro-scale surface topology, and electrostatic charge. At some point you may have a sufficiently advanced scum on the clay surface that if a chance current breaks it off, it can 'do something' on it's on - a sort of proto-life.
This scenario is a case of a self-assembled unit that assembles something else.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It is not really clear to me why Smalley is so hung up on liquide-phase chemistry.
No one is saying mechanosynthesis is going to be easy. There's going to be a lot, lot, lot of grunt work to figure out what reactions are possible, which are reliable, and which of those are actually useful.
But there's an awful lot of cleverness out there, and I'm sure we'll be able to figure out enough useful building blocks. We may end up always using liquid-phase chemistry to build precursor molecules, but I'm convinced that mechanosynthesis will allow the construction of arbitrary molecules and objects.
didn't want to bring you down, my english is bad, i liked your post becaus you say maybe i dont know, and are modded insightful. but /. moderation is so bad, sometimes, i return to read at -1, if very interesting article, sometimes (no, a lot of times!) good posts are -1, sometimes idiot posts +5 with very much answers to them, crazy.
Nope!
Instead, you and your friends will get together, decide that Ferrari's design is NOT optimal, create a better design, open source it and allow others to contribute to it.
The end result will be that the proprietary design will be less desired than the open source one and Ferarri will go the way of the dinosaurs (the large ones, not the flying ones).
I've read the letters of both Smalley and Drexler, and as far as I can tell they're talking past each other. Drexler thinks molecular assemblers are possible, but hasn't come up with a practical way to build them. Smalley thinks that molecular assemblers are impossible, and has come up with some reasons why he thinks so.
I'm tempted to side with Drexler, but really there is no concrete evidence that either one is right. Both are proposing hypotheses now, and I see two possible outcomes: 1)Drexler will be proved right because someone will succeed in building molecular assemblers, or 2) After centuries of attempts at building molecular assemblers, engineers and scientists will give up, more or less admitting that Smalley was right.
At present, I don't think the question can really be settled by argumentation.
Of course, there is a third possibility: nobody will ever try to build a molecular assembler (though I think this is unlikely).
In your terms Smalley's objection is that the current existance proof is a special case. Specifically, Smalley points out that the extant examples are all dependent on WATER BASED CHEMISTRY. Water is one of the most powerfully corrosive solvents known. Smalley implies this rules out nanoassembly of items unstable in water... such as steel, silicon, titanium, &c. At the very least, it presents a highly non-trivial problem, and Smalley thus challenges Drexler to provide an non-handwaving solution. Drexler ducks; there may be a solution (or solvent), but it ain't simple.
The biotic existance proof proves it's not impossible, but doesn't prove that general materials assemblers are possible, due to the limitations of water chemistry. (I don't count humans as a general nanoassembler; not cost effective.)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
The smallest self-assembler is equivalent in size to the smallest microorganism. Nanotech devices cannot do better than the already extant nanotech devices: all the enzymes and proteins in a cell (any cell, any virus, any bacterium). Not a single enzyme or protein in any cell anywhere is capable of reproducing itself from first principles (atoms). Even the small "self-replicating" prion protein cannot make itself from scratch. It requires a premade template protein assembled by ribosomes using instructions provided by RNA which was produced by RNA polymerase, which is itself a copy of a DNA "library" generated by an evolutionary decendent of RNA polymerase called DNA polymerase.
The closest thing to a self-assembling "machine" would be the hypothetical self-replicating RNA molecule of primordial, pre-life earth. The presumed precursor to all things living today. But you don't get much use from a self-replicating RNA except more copies of that RNA, which doesn't even do anything but copy itself. It cannot be a universal replicator. Nothing can. Information takes space. All the information needed to replicate the smallest possible item, a prion, is exactly the size of a prion - and it doesn't do anything de novo, just refolds an already extant protein generated by the minimum-sized machinery necessary to generate that protein. Thus a virus could be considered a measure of the smallest possible self replicant capable of producing complex systems (the virus).
But wait! A virus CANNOT be the smallest possible self-replicator. It REQUIRES a pre-existent cell with all the machinery necessary to start from first principles (atoms and small molecules) and generate more complex "machines" and structures. Thus a virus is not, and can not be considered self-contained anymore than a prion can. No, a full-blown cell, the smallest being independently replicable bacteria, are the smallest possible self-replicator starting from first principles (atoms and molecules as a source of building material). Drexler, not being really versed in anything beyond simple chemistry and physics sees things through rose-colored glasses, and ignores the facts around him.
If a self-replicating, autonomous nano universal replicator were actually possible, it would have won evolutionarily as the most efficient replicator and it would be the dominant form of replicator on earth. Hmmm...nope, none around here. There isn't even anything CLOSE to such a beastie within ANY living organism of ANY type.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
you just whip out your sharpie and disable their not-so-clever protection schemes.
From the above linked article:
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
I myself am a cryonicist, and so, therefore, I sure do hope Drexler is right. But you have a good argument!
eat shiat and bark at the moon
You guys are actually discussing tiny nanobots constructing something the size of a Ferrari?
Wake up. It will never happen.
Not just because it's incredibly far out, but it's such an inconvinient way of constructing, that it would cost you billions of times more money and/or take billions of times longer.
Self-replicating nanobots? I'll believe that when I see self-replicating, normal-size robots.
Will code a sig generator for food
light, not matter
Smalley knows what he's talking about. Drexler never once explains exactly how he expects to hold onto these atoms & molecules without running into problems from interaction between the fragment to be manipulated and the mechanical arm's substrate. This is the "sticky" and "fat" fingers problem. The arm and the base for the reaction will have to be made out of physical, real-world materials that will interfere with the reaction.
Furthermore, Dexler seems to live in a fantasy world where Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle doesn't exist and the position and momentum of atoms can be precisely measured and controlled. While it is theoretically possible to control a reaction if you can move atoms with perfect precision, you simply cannot do this, especially at any reasonable temperature, and exactly how useful is a process that can only happen in a vacuum at near absolute zero? The energy involved in working at room temperature will make atoms jump around wildly and uncontrollably. (Creating pre-cooked food, my arse...)
Then we get into the problem of actually precisely positioning the mechanical arm. It's made out of real-world materials too, and yet it must be perfectly moved on an atomic scale for this to work. What larger mechanism is capable of doing this? We've shown that we can nudge atoms slowly with an electron beam, but we have yet to demonstrate that we can control a reaction at that scale, and I doubt that we ever will. I'm positive that it's absolutely impossible to do at room temperature.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"Thank you for choosing value rep. Please make a selection." ...
Thank you for choo
thank you for choosi
thank you
thank you f
thank you for choosing value rep.
*picks up bullets*
I got your insect right here shodan.
Nanotech assemblers already exist. There are billions of them inside your body. They're called cells.
It may well be that we will use tailored DNA to bootstrap nanotechnology. Cells are already very efficient organisms; perhaps it would be possible to grow them in an artificial matrix, with their DNA programmed so that they would express out nanomachines of arbitrary construction. Or perhaps just parts.
Which is more difficult-- understanding of DNA to the level where that would be possible, or doing it from scratch? My guess would be the former.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
There is no way in hell that any of the worlds governments of today would let a citizen have access to advanced assemblers capable of producing a ferrari.
If it can produce a ferrari, it can produce a 20 kiloton Nuke, or other dangerous items. Just have the 'bots scrounge the right atoms from the dirt under your property.
And if you can assemble then you can probably disassemble as well. Neighbor piss you off? No problem just send a cloud of 'bots to go disassemble him. They'll never find a body.
Want to rob a bank and get away with it? Just change your appearance to match someone else, make sure the cameras get a good look at you.
I'm sure you can think of a million other abuses of such technology. It's too bad too because it would have awesome potential.
It's a good thing the world sucks or we'd all fall off.
If you strip away the fancy words (and shamelessly simplify), this becomes much more obvious:
The argument is about putting molecules together mechanically, as Drexler proposes. Drexler repeatedly refuses to address this point. I agree with Smalley that mechanical positioning, as Drexler advocates, is an inherently very limited method.After a google search to verify the non-existance of the word, I hereby give freely to the world:
roboribosomes
Now that's just fun to say out loud =)
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
To contract AIDS (or rather HIV, as I have not yet seen the connection proved to my satisfaction), you have to exchange bodily fluids with the infected person. That means a blood trasfusion, or sexual intercourse. Since most of us only have sex with a very limited number of people (and those who are on Slashdot probably don't have sex with anybody :), the rate of infection is quite slow and limited. Nevertheless, it is currently the rage in Africa, where apparently the people are more promiscuous than in our prudish western societies.
Consider the nanoplague now, which is not limited to this form of infection. Viruses and bacteria have great difficulty surviving outside the host for a long time. Excepting anthrax spores, most biological diseases die off in a day or less when deposited on any dry surface. A nanoplague can manufacture spores that would survive indefinitely and can be spread by touch alone if generated on the fingertips. Such spores will lie dormant on every doorknob the infected person has touched and will infect EVERYONE who touches it afterwards with nearly 100% efficiency. The entire world could be infected in a few months in this manner without anybody noticing.
funny
To build something really complex, you'll actually be using a whole host of assemblers each designed for a specific task.
This dialogue was frustrating, because these two smart scientists seemed to be arguing past each other, about entirely different things.
Drexler seems to be saying "Molecular assemblers are possible, and you can't prove me wrong."
A lot of slashdot posters agree -- "Smalley has no proof that this is impossible".
And, if you look at the question from that perspective, Drexler and the posters are right, largely because it is *very* *very* difficult to show that something is "impossible".
But Smalley is actually arguing something else: he's saying "I've analyzed this proposal for building a molecular assembler, and let me tell you, it won't work!". And, as far as I can tell, he's probably right. Drexler and the posters, of course, say that Smalley is creating (and demolishing) a straw man. A *real* molecular assembler will work differently.
*I* say: OK, you say that was a straw man, so tell me about the REAL man. Let's see the proposal that *will* work. Don't give me arguments that say "enzymes can do it, so therefore we can too". Give me an honest design proposal. (And, while you're at it, give it to someone smarter than I am -- someone like Smalley.)
Then we have a starting place, and we can ask: Does this work? I suspect that a realistic proposal will fall prey to many of the problems that Smalley describes, but who knows?
But without a starting proposal, who knows what we're even talking about? We're not on the same page... Heck, we're not even in the same galaxy.
This is doable in the abstract, we know how to make higher energy reactants as building blocks, but it does make selection of reactants and products for hypothetical nanomachines trickier.
If someone had argued, back in the 1960s, that we would *not* be ruled by AIs in the 1980s because you'd need a computer capable of 4 million instructions per second and small enough to fit on a desk, then they would be guilty of the same fallacious arguing that MarkusQ accuses Smalley of in the grandparent post.
It doesn't mean that Drexler is right. It just means that Smalley needs some better reasons why he's wrong. Either that, or time will tell. And usually, unless the 2nd law of thermodynamics is violated, the person claiming that something is possible turns out to be right.
--
E_NOSIG
He's always supported nanotechnology since he was a student at MIT, but many people have pointed out that he goes about it the wrong way. He's made a lot of efforts to further the science, but he tries to do it in one large leap. A lot of the academic community see him as a pseudo-scientist who is way too optimistic. He's gained a lot of his popularity from saying things that are shocking but don't have much credibility to them.
chillax137
OK, lots of people have read "Prey" or one of the other Shiny! Exciting! Books! that talk about the "Gray Goo problem". Simply stated, this is that nanoassemblers which are trained to self-replicate could potentially go bonkers and start turning the entire planet into more assemblers. As Homestar Runner might put it, "That's just ridiculous" -- and yet this is what some people lose sleep over! The reason that nanoassemblers will never be able to replicate in an uncontrolled environment, and therefore will never take over the world, is that they need energy to function. Lots of it. Breaking pi and sigma bonds can be ridiculously expensive, requiring several eV of energy in some systems. Pulling a carbon out of a single-walled nanotube takes over 10 eV. Where does the energy come from? Absent a large and complex digestive system, the assemblers will have to be fueled ahead of time or provided with a simple energy source along with their raw materials. These robots will not be able to find the energy they need to keep going in the wild. That's why Smalley's not worried about runaway nanobots. The extreme difficulty of doing "machine-phase chemistry" is another good reason, by the way -- assuming machine-phase chemistry is even possible, how are the nanobots supposed to create a clean enough environment to do their work in the wild? If machine-phase chemistry can be accomplished at all, it will be a much more complicated affair, I think, than Drexler would have us believe.
Make gasoline, or hydrogen at home, and then *make* the converter to turn it into electricity.
So yeah, space is really the only thing you'd need, and even then, just fly off to mars in your own custom-built spaceship. Really the only thing that'll cost money (possibly) are the directions for your atomic assembler.
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
> Well, you could have a disgruntled engineer construct a rogue
0
> nuclear weapon and use it to destroy a city.
Fission materials are not that easy to obtain. Sure, some eccentric billionnaire could probably purchase them for a few million dollars, but for most people it is simply not possible. Most engineers would have no idea how to go about purchasing enriched uranium, nor would they have enough money to pull it off. Even Osama Bin Laden, with all his money and all his connections, has evidently not been able to procure any nuclear materials. And if he can not do it, how can your average disgruntled Joe Engineer?
Furthermore, the threat is much lower. A nuclear explosion in a major city might cause millions to die, if he is lucky. The death toll for Hiroshima was much lower. A nanoplague could wipe out entire nations! Quite a difference in scale, don't you agree?
> A case could be made that by the time a person
> gains the education to be able to construct such
> a device (nuclear weapon/rogue nanomachine),
> that the people with the means and the mental
> issues to cause such destruction/death will be weeded out.
Really, now. Were there really no scientists working on biological weapons in Iraq? The Unabomber was an educated man too, you know. Furthermore, it only takes ONE, so I wouldn't put too much faith in this argument.
> And if you read Drexler's book Engines of
> Creation, there are proposed systems that could
> be constructed to keep check of nanomachines.
And how would such a system detect an inert spore sitting on a doorknob in the neighbourhood with a few million dust grains from which it is externally indistinguishable? Will you decompile every dust particle to see if there is anything interesting in it? Will you decompile every grain of sand under your feet, every skin flake, every dust mite? If Saddam Hussein has no difficulty hiding tanks in the open desert, do you really think it would be difficult to hide something trillions of times smaller amid similar items?
Perhaps you meant to install such inspectors inside the body? How will they be able to tell an plague body apart from an erithrocyte, if it were disguised as one? Will it even be able to detect a millimeter thin graphite antenna within solid bone? Will it be able to stop the poison factories in time when that antenna receives a signal to blow, if it may take only nanograms of a strong poison to kill you?
> The key is to focus on developing the defensive
> systems as quickly as possible, to minimize the
> time period that nanomachines could exist
> unchecked in the wild.
But they are not "in the wild". You are thinking of the "grey goo" threat of runaway replication, not about an intentionally disguised, hostile, nanoscopic entity, which can compile any shell it chooses, like a perfect chameleon. Think about a threat that comes from a hostile mind, not from negligence.
> Pehaps the number one method of preventing such
> occurences is to try and find the way to
> minimize the number of people with such strong
> hatred of other people as to be willing to do that.
Very funny. That such people exist and always will, may be illustrated by a random post at nanodot. Check out the first comment at http://nanodot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/24/052123
And in the meantime the Israelites keep killing the Palestinians and vice versa. The Chechens keep killing the Russians. The Serbians keep killing the Bosnians. The arabs keep hating the europeans. The African nations all hate each other are in constant war. And, of course, these days everybody abroad hates the United States too. And, since I am living there, perhaps you can understand my concern?
But so far, nobody has built much useful that way. Positioning xenon atoms works well because they're inert and don't bond to anything. Breaking and attaching bonds without damaging the working tip is tough.
Obvious things to build include read and write heads for molecular recording. You get to pick the recording medium, so you can pick materials and bonds compatible with the manipulator.
STMs manufactured by MEMS techniques exist now, so there's reasonable potential there.
Drexler never once explains exactly how he expects to hold onto these atoms & molecules without running into problems from interaction between the fragment to be manipulated and the mechanical arm's substrate.
Seems to me he's been explaining it for years. In short, the part would be bonded (either covaliently or ionicly) to the arm, with bonds that were designed to be strong enough to "hold" the part but much weaker (w. respect to forces on at least one axes) than the internal bonds on the part. When it was in the proper position with respect to the destination assembly, forces would be applied to create bonds between the part and it's new home. Now the whole thing is bonded together (including the arm). The arm would be freed by applying different forces (at right angles, say) to break the bonds between it and the part.
Dexler seems to live in a fantasy world where Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle doesn't exist and the position and momentum of atoms can be precisely measured and controlled.
Nuts. He has addressed this point multiple times. Besides, in what follows you are talking about thermal, not quantum, positional uncertanty.
While it is theoretically possible to control a reaction if you can move atoms with perfect precision, you simply cannot do this, especially at any reasonable temperature, and exactly how useful is a process that can only happen in a vacuum at near absolute zero?
Cells do it at room temperature. So nature, at least, doesn't agree with you.
The energy involved in working at room temperature will make atoms jump around wildly and uncontrollably. (Creating pre-cooked food, my arse...)
Creating (frozen, say) pre-cooked food should be no different than creating raw food at the same temperature. And note that most of our food is created by creatures that do their work at room temperature, and (at the smallest scale) assemble every molecule with every atom in the right place. The fact that they get sloppy as the sub-assemblies get larger has more to do with the cost/benifit (to them) than to any technical limits.
-- MarkusQ
Maybe when everyone has their own personal assembler, no one will feel compelled to buy anything anymore. Therefore, the only people in business selling a product will be those selling assemblers. But maybe there will also come a day when the government provides them, too... kinda like phone booths. The phone book could be a directory of things it can make. Anyway, the market would die, but only products. People selling services would still be valued. ;). Maybe if everyone had anything they wanted at the touch of a button, we would all shift our new attention to creating new and better things, instead of the pursuit of money. Of course, money would have to be kept track of electronically, if it still existed, since it could easily be copied. True, the serial numbers would be the same, but it could be spent before it was caught as a double.
Of course, I can imagine that someone would get the idea to copy a person so that they wouldn't even have to pay for services... just make a servant. I think in this case the government would make a law against copying a human- much in the same lines with the cloning issue today- so as not to devalue the human life
Well, that's the end of my rant.. tell me what you think. Also, I have a question. Forgive me for not RTFA, but from what the poster said, it seemed to point at the fact that the assemblers simply rearranged matter. On what level does this happen? i.e. would i be able to make an apple if i threw in some raw glucose, pure water, etc.? would i need even that?
The power of Christ compiles you.
A Random Blog
Hasn't life already performed this? Will nanotechnology merge with biologist and create living machines for this purpose?
They're already available. Didn't these guys read Michael Crichton's excellent documentary Prey ?
where the comment ends and sig begins
So how would this differ from the way clothing designers operate? Clothing designers seem to put out loads of crap at the beginning of their season, which is immediately and cheaply copied by knock-offs and Wal-Mart clothing purveyors.
But somehow, the clothiers always seem to make a profit, even with cheap imitations coming out almost immediately.
In the book "The Diamond Age", a nanoengineer steals a program from his employer by inserting code to create hackleburr-like seeds on the cover of the product (a book). When he handled the book, the burrs stuck to his palm, enabling him to carry it out of the laboratory on his person. While trying to carry eighteen pounds of plutonium out of a secure nuclear weapons factory is ludicrous at best, to carry out a plague spore is not at all unrealistic, since it would be indistinguishable from the rest of the microscopic garbage we normally carry on our skin. To further evade detection, the spore could infect our malicious engineer (remember, the disease is very selective, and will not kill anyone unless he tells it to) and allow him to pass the most thorough of skin examinations. The spore could then interface with his retinal HUD implants for further instructions, use the considerable resources of his body to replicate and generate more spores. He could then select the criteria for detonation. Our Palestinian engineer could, for instance, use the plague's GPS capability to restrict the fatalities to the borders of Israel. Then, all he has to do is set the detonation time, which he could easily do by encoding it into the plague itself, which is capable of accurate timekeeping. Then, one fine morning, everyone in Israel will die within the same five minutes. No accountability. No warning. No trace. No culprits. No more Israel.
I read the letters, and skimmed Drexler's "Nanotechnolgy: ..." book.
...". Nanotech is going to make heavy use of indexes like this. Storing all those enzymes, and shipping them one after another to the right place, is going to be SLOW. I suppose you could pipeline your enzyme fetches.
I think Smalley's argument is that for a specific reaction between two molecules, you need something like an enzyme designed specifically for that reaction. The number of possible molecules is astronomical, and the number of pairs astronomical squared.
I hear you can treat most of molecules mechanically except for a few dozen atoms surrounding the reaction site. That limits it to, let's say, 2^^30 possible molecules, so 2^^60 reactions you need specific enzymes for. Designing any one of those 2^^60 enzymes or reaction paths is feasible. Making an index iwth 2^^60 entries is feasible, given atom-scale memory, although it isn't microscopic. Drexler suggested such an index for diamondoid struts of different sizes in "Nanotechnology:
The real number of enzymes needed is much smaller than 2^^60. To get a self-assembling molecule, assuming you feed it the right basic building blocks, you don't need a universal assembler. DNA limits itself to 4 molecules with a single type of connecting part. Proteins limit themselves to 24 molecules (I don't know if the connecting parts are standardized but I suspect they are). Ribosomes can construct ribosomes, so we already know self-assembling machines are possible.
An interesting question is, given an assembler that knows how to do some fixed set of assemblies, what can be built? How big a set is needed? The smaller the set, the less work is needed to get the correct configuration for each reaction. Perhaps we need specialized factories for some building blocks with standard connectors, then just a tape-reading assembler that can connect standard connectors? Standards simplify things.
> Maybe I should have been a scientist!
Then you would never achieve tenure. Scientists have as much, and perhaps even more, political pressure than corporate serfs. Dissenting opinions are hardly tolerated, and the likes of Isaac Newton would never make it nowadays.
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
> Smalley has no proof that this is impossible
"There are known unknowns, that is, there are things we know we don't know. And there are unknown unknowns, which are the things we do not yet know we do not know." -- Donald Rumsfeld
He's kind of pompus. Ask anyone who's taken his CHEM 102 Class at Rice. He's been like this even before the Nobel prize. He's smart, but at the same time he instantly lost the buckyball/nanotube crown after discovery because (so the rumor goes) his lab was unable to reproduce any of the results others were making in building new structures.
When I took that class, he made some statement about "spending Daddy's money to buy this book" which instantly pissed off some people. It was funny to watch them start protesting his class because of that one quote though.
(I've only read from the abbreviated version link, so I'm going to refrain from discussion until I go through the other one)
Drexler thinks "molecular assemblers" are possible while Smalley denies it.
Are DNA molecules not protein "moleculer assemblers"? Cetainly it's possible. Nature already does it.
Assemblers exist in nature. Therefore assemblers are possible. Argument ends.
I acknowledge your supremacy you good sir.
I think the two of them are arguing past each other. No, I don't think Drexler's simplified thought-experiment version of nanotech -- conceptually, little nanoscale forklifts and welders -- is physically realizable, for all the chemical/QM reasons given. However, useful fine-tuned molecular assembly and even self-replication can be accomplished; in fact, it's happening right now inside the organism typing this message. An existence proof is the strongest kind of proof.
So the question is not "is nanotech possible?", but rather "will useful human-created nanotech look more like industrial engineering or applied biochemistry?" Personally, I believe it will emerge from a fusion of the two approaches, but still looking more like advanced biochemistry than scaled-down industrial engineering.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
My fingers are bigger than screws. And yet I can twist some appropriately shaped screws into place by sheer finger power (high precision). I can also pick up any screw (low precision) and position it so I can use a screw driver or hammer on it (akin to gunning a molecule into place by using a molecular peashooter or a laser).
What happens years from now when that word will be needed but everyone has forgotten that you gave it to us? Make sure you write a paper about it, publish it on the web and make sure that paper gets archived in google and some other major search engines. Better yet, start up an open source project for the purpose of archiving words created before their time.
What we have here are two different worlds colliding. Drexler is coming at this from the point of view of a theoretical physicist, while Smalley is an experimental chemist.
Drexler has found certain theoretical processes which would lead to molecular assemblers. The key problem comes from his assumption of complete control over the atoms. Despite his assurances to the contrary, you still have one big fat sticky finger which you've attached your strained structure to. He simply sees that it is possible (of course, if you read his books, there is a glaring lack of chemical calculations).
Experimentally (I'm a bit biased here, I'm an experimentalist) this is a bunch of crap. No one is anywhere close to doing anything like this. First we need to show experimentally that his idea of creating stressed structures and twisting them apart will work, and no one can touch that right now. How do you create the strained structures? In addition, this would have to be done in vacuum to keep interactions with the environment at a minimum. It would also have to be done at cryogenic temperatures to keep the atoms from vibrating out of place (remember we're relying on two unstable structures). This leads to an expensive and difficult proposal.
There are a few groups (I know of Wilson Ho's group at UCI - great pictures by the way) which are working on joining one atom with another. It's done under extreme conditions inside a scanning tunnelling microscope, and it's VERY hard. They don't do any twisting, they do the sensible thing and use applied voltages to excite and bind atoms.
Quite frankly, Feynman and Drexler have been major impediments to experimental nanotechnology for a long time now. There are plenty of interesting, self-assembled structures out there that can do some amazing things which are not related to the assembler idea. There are plenty of good research groups which are dismissed funding in favor of groups which are flailing around in the dark.
The first thing you learn about nanotechnology is that any intuition about the macroscopic world doesn't carry over. Trying to fit our notions of the rest of the world into the nano-scale world is foolish and wrong. Those strait lines between atoms in a molecule are not always strait.
Before we try to use nanotechnology to shape the future we need to understand it. Drexler gives the impression that we already do, and that it's time now to move foward, but no one knows how yet; we just don't understand.
I think it would be wrong of us to say that molecular assembles are impossible. Personally, I think it is possible, and that's why I do this. But to say that they are "close" or to give ANY prediction of when we will see them is just silly. After saying that, let me say something silly and say that although I hope to see nanotechnology come of age in my life, I don't expect to.
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.
Feynman talked about working downward using bulk mechanical processes. (That's exactly what the semiconductor industry has been doing, by the way.) When you approach the molecular level the rules change drastically. As with crossing the sound barrier, you need to make some fundamental changes.
Drexler took a different approach: START at the molecular/atomic level, working with molecular/atomic rules from the start. Biochem offers both a proof-of-principle (in the form of complex systems build from molecular machines) and bootstrapping tools for implementing your early designs.
So Drexler's work was profoundly distinct from Feynman's conjecture.
Also: Drexler followed through enough to inspire others to start both basic and applied research projects, and to form organizations for exchanging information and advancing the field (even if SOME of them are now taking Feynman's approach using mechanical scanning microscope technology).
Just as Columbus vs. Lief Ericsson (or Pythagoras), it's the person whose work leads to ongoing development, rather that the one who first speculated correctly, who gets the credit.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Smalley says:
"You still do not appear to understand the impact of my short piece in Scientific American. Much like you can't make a boy and a girl fall in love with each other simply by pushing them together, you cannot make precise chemistry occur as desired between two molecular objects with simple mechanical motion along a few degrees of freedom in the assembler-fixed frame of reference."
To strain the analogy - no, but you can probably get them to mate and that's good enough. A better analogy may have been that you can't take Feynman's parents and smash them together and get Richard Feynman. That would be truer, though if you did it enough times you would probably come pretty close. Drexler's ideas on mechanosynthesis assume a certain amount of waste and a certain amount of "close enough".
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
The idea of a nanobot twisting a pi-bond here and snapping a sigma-bond there seems quite ludicrous; where such reactions occcur in the real world it is because of the properties of the exact molecules involved and is reaction-specific.
And the same applies to macrotechnology. Look at an actual factory: It does NOT consist of a single robot arm with a single tool-tip. You have hundreds of specialized machines and jigs. (Just for starters you do NOT handle molten steel with a pair of pliers.)
The concept of an "assembler" as a single robot arm expected to build ANY molecular structure by positioning its component atoms, one at a time, regardless of the type of atom, the type of bond to be made, or the electromechanical environment of the partially-assembled product is a strawman. A real system will use multiple specialized jigs and tools - perhaps creating some on-the-fly - to apply force and fields in specialized situations - explicitly solving the "fat fingers" and "sticky fingers" problem Smalley claims is intractable.
Yes, there may be some configurations of atoms that are very hard, or even impossible, to construct. But given the ability to build nanoscopic jigs and specialized tools to apply mechaincal, electrical, and magnetic forces, tuned electromagnetic energy, and kinetic energy (in extreme amounts if necessary), a nanofactory should be able to make essentially everything that can be made any OTHER way, including duplicates or modified versions of everything we see around us now.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Most of the posters write comments about social and environmental contexts that nanotech will make obsolete - something Drexler warned against in his first book.
Smalley's comments are on a par with the IBM guy who said back in the fifties or early sixties that the world would only need, what was it, X (where X was an extremely small value) computers.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Where is the energy coming to extract the atoms, move them create the chemical bonds move the nanites etc etc. I think we will get nanotech but a lot of the nanotech postulated just seems like modern day alchemy ... just wishing for a magic wand. Reality check required I think. And don't forget the amount of information required to position all those atoms to duplicate the Ferrari, where is it stored, what about inter-nanite co-ordination and communication ... argg. More likely there will be nano facilities (as in 'factories') that will make components for robot assembly, but just a bunch of nanites building stuff forget it ... look at bacteria for a model and see what they can and cannot do, they are highly sophisticated nano machines.
Bitter and proud of it.
I read Engines of Creation, got all fired up, went back to undergraduate school for a second undergraduate degree in chemistry, and really loved quantum mechanics. But organic chemistry opened up a serious can of kick-butt on me!
So I can read the debate but damned if I can make an intelligent contribution to it. Maybe I can translate it down a little:
Drexler: Yo, machine-phase chemistry is the bomb. We can put atoms wherever we want and make anything we want!
Smalley: No you can't, dork. Atoms are not little balls and bonds are *really* not little sticks. You can't build molecules like tinkertoys.
Drexler: Enzymes do it in nature, therefore it's possible.
Smalley: Well, if you wanna make more better enzymes, great, but enzymes only work in water-based living cells and it's kinda hard to grow a cell phone from organic components.
Drexler: My machine-phase chemistry will be to living enzymes as a metal airplane is to a bird.
Smalley: Whatever. Go do your "machine-phase chemistry" and come back when you've actually built something. Hint: I think it's gonna take you 200 years.
I think Smalley is wrong when he says that it's by nature impossible. And I think Drexler is wrong when he says nature has already provided an existence proof. I think we should get started on those 200 years of work and see what we can do!
A while back, Sean Morgan did the most interesting work I've seen on a timeline and prerequisites for Nanotechnology. At present, odds are that we'll see an assember sometime around 2022.
Every organism on earth does it at a cellular level, so what knob would think that we couldn't just replicate the machinery and do it ourselves? Obviously it's physically possible or none of us would be alive right now
Apparently my design for a molecular assembler is deemed impossible for the sticky or fat finger aspect, but I need help understanding why this is impossible. I think I can circumvent that problem.
Anyways here's the design. It is simple and achievable. It is not conducive to building/replicating itself easily though.
The core is an STM microscope-like device, with many parralel tips each working on its own square millimeter (or smaller) area. Needle Tips or fingers doped with the next mollecule (properly oriented) to be inserted move along a conveyor belt where each are inserted into one of the parallel heads, the head then sticks the molecule in place, then the needle is sucked out, and sent to be refilled.
I don't really have a process for making mollecules, and placing them in the proper orientation on a needle.
The one good thing about this design, is that there probably exists a needle material than can react "properly" with any given mollecule, such that it can 1) capture it, and 2) release it. (One method of releasing could just be to jab the needle quickly forward, flinging the package into place).
There's one problem with Drexler's universal assembler theory, with little publicity, that is only partially solved by my design. There is not an infinite number of universal assemblers created instantly, and as a secondary problem, programming them to work and move around cooperatively is not easy, and increases their required size if only because of the massive cpu they need to operate with.
The Other issue only partially addressed is speed. If everything is built using 3d tetris-like merging of 10nm building blocks (mollecules), then finishing a square milimeter takes 10B blocks. A quadrillion blocks makes a cubic milimeter of something. Even at 1 billion blocks per second, it takes 11.5 days to make 1 milimeter thick object. The billion blocks per second seems outrageously high to reach, but another way to increase throughput (but increase congestion of feeder needles) is to have denser parallel heads. If each head works on a square micrometer area, then building a cubic micrometer object takes 1 million 10nm blocks. At (only) 100K blocks per second, a 1mm thick object takes 10,000 secs = 2.77 hours
There's one other big problem. Like building a house of cards on an uneven surface, mollecules won't necessarily maintain a desired orientation without simultaneously placing adjoining molecules to couterbalance them. Seems like there would be a solution to this, with all the arms in such close proximity, but it would also slow down the process.
> I do believe we will be able to build objects, I just don't think little robots will be doing it.
> I think we it will be more like creating and destroying matter by combining/absorbing
> energies in organized fasions.
So, you're basically saying that you find a Star Trek transporter to be more plausible than molecular assemblers? Okaaaaay.....
Author: Atkinson, William Illsey
Title: Nanocosm: nanotechnology and the big changes coming from the inconceivably small
Summary: Atkinson is a technology reporter who surveyed the nanotech field (actually talked to researchers), and from his perspective, Drexler's assembler is not feasible, but he gives lots of other examples of nanotech now in labs around the world.
If you think Drexler is right, reading this book might change your mind.
But that's just my point of view - I dislike Drexler's constant reference to Feynman, his total lack of any experimental pedigree, and his unwillingness to take on board the views of those who actually know a bit about what he spouts off about, because they have tried it.
Reading the article, it seems that Drexler in his second letter ignores the fact that he is contradicting what he says in his first letter, because the mechanisms proposed in the second would inevitably require the very same 'Smalley fingers' that he derides in his first polemic.
Drexler is just pissed that someone with credibility and experience has pointed out the holes in his arguments, and cast doubt on his percieved achievements (which are roughly on a par with other Sci-Fi authors, IMHO).
Leave it to guys like Smalley - we'll end up with nanotechnology that works - maybe not the grand self-replicators in the first iteration, but at least we'll have technology rather than the PR puff and self-publicity that characterises Drexler's current output.
Sorry for the rant, but Drexler really, really pisses me off.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
They are called "enzymes". They are built from stuff, mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, that is ideally suited to doing this sort of thing. And they have been optimized over a billion years by "genetic algorithms" for doing this thing. It seems pretty doubtful that one can design a better toolkit for "molecular assemblers" than what molecular biology already gives us. We'll be able to build different tools out of that toolkit, but nothing of the sort as described by Drexler or in Stephenson's novels.
From the exchange, Drexler gives the impression that matter at the atomic scale behaves in the same way as matter on the macroscopic scale that we live in.
Physicists and chemists would know that this assumption is false. The Dalton theory of atoms as billiard balls has been refuted a long time ago.
How is a mechanical manipulator going to "grab" another atom? These manipulators are also at the atomic scale! Duh.
Today near the bottom of the http://www.foresight.org/ website, it shows a unrealistic graphic of one of Drexler's proposed nanofactories. There are what appears to be spherical atoms being manipulated by machinery. -- It fails to accurately show that the machinery is no more solid than the lego atoms that the machinery is manipulating. (Unless maybe the machinery material is made of some sort of selectively reactive/nonreactive, subatomic material)
When I see pictures & notions like that being bandied about and sold to the public, I get the same feeling when people push Jules Verne's voyage to the moon as science rather than science fiction. -- Baloney.
Right now Smalley wins. He's a doer, an implementer.
Drexler may get the last laugh in the far future, but some real science must appear first to make science fiction a reality.
The really hard stuff is in the implementation. The implementers deserver the real credit.
That works, until you have several cars, trucks, motorcycles, boats and airplanes :)
In a virtual world there IS NO SCARCITY, so why immitate it? Because it's what people are used to? There's room for multiple planes of existence along side the common "consensus" reality.
Anyway, back to Earth (sortof): In a nanotech future, there's still the fundamental scarcity of the following:
However, the sun is abundant free energy, and there's more than enough living space on Earth (underground, and on & under the oceans), in outerspace (Mars, orbitals, rings, etc.), and in innerspace (the transhuman "matrix").
The other reasons I didn't keep playing SL was the crappy physics (esp. most vehicles), low graphics detail compared to what I'm used to, and no linux client (unlike "A Tale in the Desert", which is most similar to Secondlife).
--
Power to the Peaceful
I'm a PhD student in biophysics at the University of Michigan. Reading Engines of Creation and Nanosystems a couple of years ago (when I was an undergraduate in physics) inspired me to do what I am doing today. Since then I have learnt a bit about biochemistry and enzymology and exactly how we currently think things work in the protein and RNA nanomachinery that you and I are built out of. Based on what I have learnt, I don't think that Drexler's proposals are feasible. In my opinion Smalley is all the way right and Drexler is all the way wrong in this exchange. Smalley makes a very accurate explanation of why Drexler is wrong, and Drexler's second response sadly goes into my 'hot air and hand-waving' file.
Ask me again if Slashdot is still around in fifty years. By that time, perhaps we will have made some progress on the folding problem and the design problem and the aggregation problem in protein manufacture. Maybe we will have long term simulations (get to work, supercomputer aficionados!) and we will be making awesome custom proteins and doing great things evolution never thought of. Perhaps then we will be able to do some kind of positional control magic that will allow us to make Drexler's end-of-Nanosystems bootstrap from proteins, lipids, and RNA to diamondoid materials. Until that time...well, if Richard Smalley, one of the world's foremost carbon chemists, says it will never happen, and it is his word against non-Nobel-Prize-winning-carbon-chemist K. Eric Drexler's, I will go with Smalley's opinions. (Three years ago I would be appalled at myself for writing all this!)
I will always appreciate Drexler (and Ion Storm and Neal Stephenson) for getting me fired up about investigating what goes on at the nanoscale. Without those wild claims I might not be having the fun I'm having today.
In closing: cheer up, nanofans! You and every other living thing on earth are glorious nanomechanical devices, well worth detailed study and sincere appreciation. In the future we shall hopefully be able to improve upon Nature's wonderful handiwork. For the time being take comfort in the sublime fact that millions of nanomachines all must strive together to do something as seemingly effortless as attaching the period that will now close my post.
H4x0r Economist - k33ping d3m0cr4cy l33t 51Nc3 1987
I need the copy for when I crash the first one!
:0)
ooops
Better copy myself too.
i see nanotech becoming real and accessible at the same time as quantum computers become useful. the same magnetic wells can be used with varying degrees of fineness to manipulate individual atoms and components of atoms into more complex objects. the lack of actual contact with the suspended molecules removes the sticky, butter finger aspect and resembles the blowers in newspaper plants that incorporate the flyers into the paper. molecules can be assembled in multiple chambers and moved to an assembly station for final inclusion in a product. interesting to think that the fusion reactors of the past (tokamak, with their pool of plasma to draw from)) will be the basis of nanoassemblers in the future....
building blocks to "Replicate" your free stuff.
Besides... who wants to spend time "Assembling"
stuff all the time.
Prolly be much cheaper to go to a "Replicator" outlet and put in an order for what you want and
pick it up before you leave.
Let the pros design the crap and the outlets
wharehouse the raw materials. I just want a home
replicator for basics.
In the meantime I suggest you get a bit more schooling. Your logic is flawed.
I mean what could be simpler, and what could produce more wealth than owning livestock, only the things need shots from the vet so they don't die from disease, and the calving process can get kind of hairy, and these things produce piles of poop which needs to be shoveled off to some place, and you kind of get the picture. And then everyone's neighbor has a stable of these things so milk gets cheap and it is really hard to make a living at it, but I guess milk is cheap and abundant to consumers.
What I want to know is that when we get self-replicating machines, how will they differ from livestock, especially with regard to the waste-management and keeping them free of disease ends?
"When an distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he says something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." - Arthur C. Clarke
http://web.archive.org/web/20020802085307/www.colu mbusgaming.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi
/PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Nanogen, Inc. (Nasdaq: NGEN - News) today announced that it has been issued U.S. Patent No. 6,652,808, "Methods for the Electronic Assembly and Fabrication of Devices," ("the '808 patent") by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. This patent is the parent of a series of pending patent applications that significantly broaden Nanogen's proprietary position in the nanotechnology and nanomanufacturing areas. The Company has now been issued nine patents during 2003, bringing the total number of patents issued in the U.S. to 56.
[snip]
Nanogen Issued Key Nanotechnology Patent
Wednesday December 3, 8:02 am ET
Newly Issued Patent Broadens Proprietary Position in Nanomanufacturing and Nanotechnology
SAN DIEGO, Dec. 3
[/snip]
Makes me wonder if both of these guys are missing the boat, b/c to my lamen eyes it appears that nanogen just patented something like what they are talking about...
-disclosure- I own nanogen stock, and have for more than 2 years.
-Joejoejoejoe
Silly Rabbit: tricks are for kids.
ten to fifty years - that is, within the expected lifetimes of ourselves or our families."
-- K. Eric Drexler, "Engines of Creation", 1985
When I read these words in 1986, I only remembered the "10" and forgot the "50". This is the problem with books containing predictions.
Okay Drexler: 18 years are up. When we hit 25 you will officially be branded an "over-optimist". Then you'll have 25 more years before you're officially an "insane crank".
Plenty of people will say that molecular/atomic assemblers are impossible right up until the big breakthrough that makes it possible. That's how science works. People said that all sorts of computing stuff was impossible because vacuum tubes were too big, and then, all of a sudden, somebody figured out how to make transistors. All kinds of important stuff was impossible to figure out because the aether complicated it all and could not be measured, and then Einstein pointed out that it did not matter because the aether did not exist. Right now people are insisting that we will hit computing speed limits due to the limits of CMOS-but does anyone really think that there won't be a replacement?
Anything can happen with science. Magic is just what science cannot explain, because we have not figured out how to do it yet. But eventually, given enough time and resources, anything is possible.
I think a Long Bet is the answer.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your candor is refreshing, sir!
:)
Have another glass, on the house!
In a word, no. In another word, yes.
... is hilarity ensuing yet?
This is not part of my post. It's my signature. I bet you're disappointed.
Let's get a string of molecules to encode information, and then get a structure to translate it into actions, and then get robots to communicate via chemical concentrations..... .... ...Wait, doesn't this just describe LIFE?
So we can build artificial life, and get it to create artificial molecules from tailored amino acids. Cool.
This should not be underestimated, but we'll do it by genetic engineering, not atom by atom.
What are the chances of assembling things atom by atom, as Drexler "Look kids, nanotechnology is possible, according to math proofs I lack space to show you" keeps insisting it is?
BTW, that was his response when there was a big Scientific American article why molecular assemblers are impossible. (that, and his response also included "I'm sure we'll find a solution to some of the other problems REAL SOON NOW")
Most people do not really understand the potential impact of mature nanotechnologies. And it's easy to see why - even Drexler's book Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution gives some really ridiculous examples (may be to make it simplier to understand). Here are my responses to two of particularly misleading comments in this thread.
:
:
2BorgDrone
However, if molecular assemblers ever become mainstream I'd rather design my own car and let it assemble that. If everyone is driving a Ferrari I'd rather have something different.
When molecular assemblers become mainstream, having a car would be rather pointless. First, there are unlikely to be any streets where you can impress chicks, since everyone would be able to live wherever on Earth they like. Second, there probably won?t be any roads, since you don?t need to transport goods (they can be manufactured from CO2 on the spot) and it?s easier to fly people from A to B. Third, designed cars would be as old-fashioned as horse carriages now ? smart completely transformable people-movers would be all the rage. And forth, you will be able to drive any kind of car in your personal virtual reality simulation, so you don?t need to actually design the car (just program how it should behave) and the issue of IP would be moot.
2jchoyt
Money will still have value. Someone has to create and/or design food, clothing, medicine, entertainment, etc.
Strong AIs will be able to create and or/design everything, including these things you describe. Furthermore, people will not need food, because it will be easier to just get energy from the environment without any conscious actions like eating from your side. Clothing is likely to be designed for the sake of it. Most couturiers are not in this business for money, they do it because they like it, and when all fabrics and basic production operations will become free, as well as everything they need personally, they are unlikely to charge you anything for their latest fashionable clothes. Medicine will not be used, because our bodies will be redesigned to include a smart AI-based immune system, capable of fixing most problems, except, may be, for being in the epicenter of the thermonuclear explosion. So most things you mention will not be needed and those that still will be needed, will be done by professional volunteers for free.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
No, neither chemistry nor physics are approximations, the words refer to aspects of reality
The only way in which this makes sense is if you interpret "aspects" to be a near synonym for "aproximation" (something like "situationaly valid aproximation"). But that's a far cry from saying they "are reality," which I gather is your intent.
That's just nuts, especially with regard to chemistry.
- The vast majority of the universe by volume is in the intergalactic voids, where atoms are so few and relative velocities are so high that chemistry as we presently know it doesn't apply. Maybe someday we'll have a relativistic chemistry of ultra-hard vacuum, but it isn't what we know as chemistry today.
- The vast majority of the universe by mass isn't even normal matter.
- The vast majority of normal matter in the universe exists in plasma where chemistry as we know it can't take place (all the orbitals are unoccupied) or in deginerate matter where there aren't any orbitals possible.
- The vast majority of what's left, while potentially chemically reactive, never has a chance to do much beyond meeting another likeminded hydrogen atom for a few eons of H2 action.
Chemistry is an aproximation that gives a very useful description of some aspects of reality under a narrow range of conditions that happen to be interesting to us.It is not "Reality," any more than biology, economics or cartography are "Reality."
-- MarkusQ
I think it is understandable why no one is building assmblers now, but we can expect some assmblers in the near future. Not nanoassemblers, of course... The problem is that we currently don't have computing and programming (AI) capability to build even a simple universal robot, much less an assmbler, much less on a nanoscale. We can definitely see today how fast will robotics develop. There are many good projects on various important aspects of robotics, there are first consumer robots, there are first relatively autonomous robots, we are making a good deal of progress in actuators, energy storage, etc. Without doing a good deal of analysis, I can give a very rough estimate that 2010s will end in a robotic boom - a visible stage of exponential growth we are already experiencing (like Internet in late 1990s). At that stage it will be possible to design and somewhere around 2015 build a macroassembler - a robot (robotic plant) capable of turning relatively simple parts into anything that can be built out of them (including more such robots) given right instructions. Ordinary people will see it as, for example, robots doing more construction work and maintenance. At that stage nanotechnology might progress by approximately 1-2 orders of magnitude. This would allow to gradually shrink our universal assemblers and by 2020-2030 they might become nano-scale.
So I surely agree that building a nanoassembler is out of our reach now (although some theoretical work is still in order), but assemblers are much closer. The theory of building assemblers is related to cellular biology and correlates nicely with our gradual progress in that area and in scanning/imaging technology.
The ideas above, are of course, just speculation, and is not based on hard data, but this is an example of what kind of planning is, in my opinion, necessary.
As for your age, I happily admit my error, but now I am surprised by your "deathist" attitude. Why shouldn't you to live to see the assemblers even if that will take 70-100 years? Surely some life extension technologies will arrive much earlier.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.