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Foresight Taking Advanced Nano Discussion to DC
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Foresight Institute, the nanotechnology public policy think tank founded way back in 1986, is heading to Washington DC this October with their new event, the 1st Conference on Advanced Nanotechnology. The government's original motivation for funding nanotechnology was in large-part due to Foresight's leading educational role and vision for molecular manufacturing. That vision, led by their co-founder K. Eric Drexler, has now become extremely politicized, as Ed Regis discusses in this month's Wired Magazine feature on Drexler."
If it was possible to make a Nanobot that could turn everything into grey goo, wouldnt everything already be grey goo?
It's been pointed out that it already is.
It's called the biosphere.
But when someone is out there preaching "If we're not careful a scientist somewhere will accidently turn earth into cybertron" and he's the one being listened to, it's a problem.
At minimum, you can postulate that artificial nanoconstructs can do anything biological constructs can - because biology nicely demonstrates that it's possible to build devices with the performance characteristics of bacteria, and at worst we can tweak nature's existing designs.
Building-eating viruses? We already have dry rot and termites. Goo that reshapes the world in its image? We already have the biosphere, and it did exactly that to a primordial Earth of barren rock, empty oceans, and CO+hydrocarbon atmosphere. I'm skeptical of us building nanoconstructs with performance capabilities much _better_ than biologicals, for general-purpose constructs at least - after all, life has had a long time to opimize its designs. However, handwaving the problem away doesn't work either, because at minimum we can build constructs that are _competitive_. We even have blueprints and working examples laid out for us.
The fact that Eric Drexler was one of the first (after Feinman) to write about the dream of nanotechnology is widely recognized. But as the parent post notes, Drexler ignores chemistry. His critics are all experimental chemists. Not exactly a group to be ignored.
All accomplishment starts with a dream. But the path from dream to reality requires something more than dreaming. Here Drexler falls down.