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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.'"
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
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.
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.
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