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A Review of Nanotech's Future
captainsaavik writes "A Washington Post article today reviews nanotechnology - 'Nanotechnology, the hot young science of making invisibly tiny machines and materials, is stirring public anxiety and nascent opposition inspired by best-selling thrillers that have demonized the science -- and new studies suggesting that not everything in those novels is fantasy.'"
Michael Crichton's Prey is an excellent science fiction novel about nanotechnology and the possible problems with it. Its an awesome technology, but I would be very concerned about possible abuse or mistakes.
This site has a lot of good information on nanotechnology.
Among other things they address the 'grey goo' or uncontrolled replicator issue.
Basically it would require a deliberate effort to create such a thing.
The spread, while exponential, would be slow due to a nanite's size.
Can anybody think of any kind of new technology that has been abandoned, or even significantly delayed, through alleged (or real) risks ?
GM crops outside of the United States.
Close to 100% of France's electrical power is nuclear, and they export power to much of western Europe.
Japan is big on nukes, also.
Actually, just about every industrialized country other than the USA sees the risks as much less of a barrier to development than they are here... blame the idiot wing of the environmental lobby and the pathetic PR efforts of utilities here for shutting down nuclear in the US, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths from coal-fired power plant emissions over the last several decades.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
"Steven J. Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a columnist for FoxNews.com. "
They love nuclear power, don't see a problem with "second hand smoke", and in general are for anything that can make a buck. While there may be interesting information at the site it certainly does have an agenda.
Anarchists never rule
God, I can't wait for that crazy motherfucker to go away.
.0026mg/kg body weight Junky mentions as a safe dose just means that it takes about 5 years of eating fish, vegetables, etc. for you to build up enough DDT in your fat to give you the effects of a good stroke. The trick to avoiding that is to never lose weight.
Most of what he says there is reasonably accurate, but he also does a good job of leaving out most of the actual problems DDT has. He does a nicely comprehensive job documenting the predictably hysterical behavior of pop-scientists and the inefficacy of committees in doing anything useful, but jumping from there to advocating unbanning DDT is kinda insane.
DDT is poison. This is the whole point. It's also fat-soluable. One of the many things that Junky doesn't talk about is DDT's effect of bats. Bats were hit pretty damn hard by DDT, because bats migrate, and when bats migrate, they first load up on fat, which is full of DDT, so when they start burning their fat in migration season, the DDT level in their blood suddenly goes through the roof and they all die and end up all over your back yard.
Same thing happens to people. Like most fat-soluable chemicals, DDT is cumulative. In an environment saturated with DDT, like the US in 1970, you take in more than you pass. The
Based on just the numbers Junky has, you take a 250lb farmer who's been ingesting 17, 18mg/day of DDT on the farm, have him work hard for 25 years, have a heart attack when he hits 50, decide to try and come down to 180, succeed, and then suddenly he drops dead because he's been flooding his system with backed-up DDT at 400mg/day as he burns off the fat.
Regardless, the millions of lives are being saved anyway. We push DDT all over the 3rd world, it's not like Ghana's banned the stuff. The sad thing is we give them the same old shit that mosquitos have been selected to avoid and tolerate since facism was still cool instead of the vastly more effective, safer, and more stable products we've come up with in the intervening 1-1/4 centuries.
As a side note, those guidelines, almost word for word, ended up in the US Congresses' recent bill on Molecular manufacturing / nanontechnology studies.
The whole anti-aspartame case is based on an urban legend, which started, IIRC, with some "research" published to promote a stock fraud scheme by a "food science" professor at ASU (Arizona State University). Dispite the chemical implausibility of the reactions he proposed (unfavorable reaction paths that require odd conditions + heat to occur even in theory, no repeatable demonstration of them under any condition) has taken on a life of its own. Many people (on both sides) have a vested interest in "winning." The actual data (as opposed to anecdotal reports / internet rumours) to date strongly support the aspertame-is-safe view.
I do not wish to belittle your migranes (they are not pleasent, I know) but simply to point out that it is exceedingly unlikely that aspertame per se is the cause, or if it is the mechanism is not what is popularly claimed. If you are willing to make temporary sacrafice to help resolve the matter, you may want to see if there are any double blind studies being conducted on aspertame in which you could participate. The usual setup is that people who suspect they are sensitive to it are given (on two different days) a sealed pill that either contains aspertame or some inert substance. Neither they nor the person giving them the pills knows on which day they get which. The last I heard (late 1990's) they were still trying to find some greater-than-chance corelation.
If nothing else, it may help you learn more about what you need to avoid.
-- MarkusQ
Yes, there is a huge backlash against GM crops in Europe and Africa (and other places too). It's NOT, however, due to the technology itself, but rather it's a backlash against the companies concerned making the modded seeds sterile, thus forcing farmers into subsistence and reliance on a single source of seeds forever (the ultimate genetic customer lock-in), or worse yet, having those seeds spread to normal crops, rendering THEM sterile. That's why countries refused shipments of American excess grain unless they were milled down - they didn't want their citizens planting the sterile seeds and condemning themselves to a barren wasteland when those seeds don't germinate.
Visceral Psyche Films
If it's so nice and secure (besides the fact that you have to put armed guards for the ashes for 184000 years, which adds quite a bit to the costs) why does no insurance in the world want to cover them at any costs?
If this is true, I would guess it's because the insurance companies don't have an accurate estimate of the risks involved.
If you want to insure something, you have to know 1) what the risks are, and 2) whether it's possible to insure this thing while getting a reasonable return on it, in the expected case.
Insurance companies can afford to insure cars becaus, simply, there are a lot of cars and thus a lot of data on cars.
There are fairly few nuclear power plants around, and I'd guess they differ greatly in the construction procedures and the safety precautions. Plus, in order to assess risk for actuarial purposes, you'd have to have quite advanced knowledge: you'd essentially have to be a nuclear engineer.
It may be that nuclear plants are too unsafe to ever be insured, but it seems to me more likely that the insurance companies are jusst being careful because they have insufficient data.