Yes, let's assume that we produce them not in the tens of millions, but in the tens of *billions*! At one cubic millimter each that will be tens of cubic meters of dust. That's a lot of batteries to throw away in your backyard, but if that is the entire production volume of dust (I said tens of billions, remember), it is so far down on the scale of bad things to do to the planet that it is not worth discussing.
If it's just tens of millions, then we're talking about a volume of about a liter. A 10cm cube. My local grocery store sells more than that in a day, and I'm sure that lots of those don't get recycled.
But wait, you say, this is different, because they are being distributed everywhere, and maybe I'll inhale one. A good point, it does make it different, but again, we're talking about a *liter* here, and it's not exactly plutonium. If you inhale one, which I think is extremely unlikely, you will cough it up very quickly. That's what our lungs are designed to do. I'd far rather inhale one of my dust motes than smoke a pack of cigarettes.
We're sending out the first optically programmable chip on a 0.25 micron run this week. It's very simple micro-controller with a little bit of RAM just to get our feet wet. There's a great temperature sensor chip that was made at Oak Ridge (I think) that you can program with a TV remote control. I've got to track down more info on that. ksjp
It wasn't "the authors", it was me - don't blame my colleagues for what's on my web pages. I was only flip about it because it seems like such a non-issue to me. There is so much great potential for this technology that it seems obvious to me that I am doing the right thing by working on it. It isn't that I don't spend time thinking about these issues, it's that I've spent so much time thinking about them that the conclusion seems clear. Another reason that I was flip with the issue is that it is such a stereotypical response to new technology: 1) this might be used for bad things 2) I bet that the people working on it are evil/ignorant/arrogant and are just doing it for fame/money/whatever. I can't imagine going through life with such a negative attitude. There are so many people working so hard to make this planet work, and so few people who are actually doing things because they are evil/ignorant/arrogant, why not go with the statistics and assume that there are some good people working on this project, and that they spend a *lot* of time thinking about the implications of what they are doing, and that they try to make the right decisions. I'm sure that we'll screw up occasionally, but we're not the assholes you make us out to be. ksjp
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Yes, let's assume that we produce them not in the tens of millions, but in the tens of *billions*! At one cubic millimter each that will be tens of cubic meters of dust. That's a lot of batteries to throw away in your backyard, but if that is the entire production volume of dust (I said tens of billions, remember), it is so far down on the scale of bad things to do to the planet that it is not worth discussing.
If it's just tens of millions, then we're talking about a volume of about a liter. A 10cm cube. My local grocery store sells more than that in a day, and I'm sure that lots of those don't get recycled.
But wait, you say, this is different, because they are being distributed everywhere, and maybe I'll inhale one. A good point, it does make it different, but again, we're talking about a *liter* here, and it's not exactly plutonium. If you inhale one, which I think is extremely unlikely, you will cough it up very quickly. That's what our lungs are designed to do. I'd far rather inhale one of my dust motes than smoke a pack of cigarettes.
ksjp
We're sending out the first optically programmable chip on a 0.25 micron run this week. It's very simple micro-controller with a little bit of RAM just to get our feet wet. There's a great temperature sensor chip that was made at Oak Ridge (I think) that you can program with a TV remote control. I've got to track down more info on that. ksjp
It wasn't "the authors", it was me - don't blame my colleagues for what's on my web pages. I was only flip about it because it seems like such a non-issue to me. There is so much great potential for this technology that it seems obvious to me that I am doing the right thing by working on it. It isn't that I don't spend time thinking about these issues, it's that I've spent so much time thinking about them that the conclusion seems clear. Another reason that I was flip with the issue is that it is such a stereotypical response to new technology: 1) this might be used for bad things 2) I bet that the people working on it are evil/ignorant/arrogant and are just doing it for fame/money/whatever. I can't imagine going through life with such a negative attitude. There are so many people working so hard to make this planet work, and so few people who are actually doing things because they are evil/ignorant/arrogant, why not go with the statistics and assume that there are some good people working on this project, and that they spend a *lot* of time thinking about the implications of what they are doing, and that they try to make the right decisions. I'm sure that we'll screw up occasionally, but we're not the assholes you make us out to be. ksjp
I didn't imply only as many motes as Pentia - I used chip area in the calculation, not number of chips. ksjp