One of the major un-classified research uses is for molecular modeling for the study of nanotechnology. This really consumes a lot of computer time because one is dealing with atomic motion over pico-to-nano-second time scales. An example is the work done by Goddard's group at CALTECH on simulating rotations of the Drexler/Merkle Neon Pump. If I recall properly they found that when you cranked the rotational rate up to about a GHz it flew apart. (For reference macro-scale parts like turbochargers or jet engines don't even come close...)
In the long run one would like to be able to get such simulations from the 10,000 atom level up to the billion-to-trillion (or more) atom level so you could simulate significant fractions of the volume of cells. Between now and then molecular biologists, geneticists, bioinformaticians, etc. would be happy if we could just get to the level of accurate folding (Folding@Home is working on this from a distributed standpoint) and eventually to be able to model protein-protein interactions so we can figure out how things like DNA repair -- which involves 130+ proteins cooperating in very complex ways -- operate so we can better understand the causes of cancer and aging.
Anders Sandberg wrote a paper back in 1999 covering some of the topics mentioned by Krauss & Starkman. See: "The Physics of Information Processing Superobjects: Daily Life Among the Jupiter Brains". The appendices discuss forms that computers may take based on the limits discussed in the paper. All I believe are different from the intergalactic computing architecture that Krauss & Starkman seem to have in mind.
One reason for this is if it takes you 3 or 5 billion years to get all the information back from many light years away there may be a significant possibility that you or the message transports will be exposed to a Gamma Ray Burst that wipes a significant fraction memory. The second reason is that you can't have a significant "conversation" across millions of light years -- the chances are significant that you will have computed the answer yourself by the time you send a probe a million light years away and get a response back from some colonized system. Finally we have know for the last ~25 years (since the Project Daedalus study that you can't send probes out, matter based messages back, etc. at anything close to the speed of light. The energy released when you strike a piece of space dust or even particles from interstellar solar winds is going to erode the ship. Proj. Daedalus solved this by building a big shield on the front of the ship. But if you do that you are going to need a lot more energy to accelerate ships or message transports to higher velocities. Many of these problems are discussed in the Matrioshka Brain papers.
I would suggest that Krauss & Starkman may be very good physicsts & astronomers but I would think twice about putting them on an engineering project.
Sigh... Computing can be done essentially for free. This has been worked out long ago by Landauer and Bennett. The problem is that whenever you erase bits you generate heat. The solution to this is to use reversible computing. This was the design behind Drexler's rod-logic nanocomputer (Nanosystems, 1992) which produced a system that that could do a trillion MIPS using 100W (and yes those numbers are accurate). Currently the best work on reversible computing is probably being done by Dr. Michael Frank at the Univ. of Florida. He is trying to produce reversible computing systems using current manufacturing methods rather than those we may have to wait 20 years for.
I would suggest that the article doesn't have a reasonable frame of reference. I and another talented programmer produced a system that emulated a PDP-10 (mainframe) on a PDP 11/70 (minicomputer) with about a couple of months worth of work in the late 1970s. (I.e. we had program that ran on a PDP 11/70 that executed programs that were compiled to run on a PDP-10.) [For those of you not well versed in computer history -- a PDP 11/70 is a 16 bit minicomputer while a PDP-10 is a 36 bit mainframe. The instruction sets were quite distinct.]
So friggen what if Adobe decides to desupport a platform? Just build an emulator for what they decide to support. The computers are sufficiently fast now-a-days that you aren't going to notice the delay time involved in an emulator (at least if you did a reasonably decent job on it).
Human beings are essentially 100W (or 100 Joules/sec) machines. A recent home electric bill suggests that my home consumes ~1000 kWh/month. That seems to work out to ~280 Joules/sec.
So even if humans are leaving behind perhaps 10% of their energy intake in their waste products it would appear that you are going to need something like the waste of 10 humans to power even a single 100W light bulb *if* you can get 100% conversion efficiencies (doubtful). It would seem that you would need a houseful of people lined up outside the bathrooms if you wanted to power the house using human waste products. Of course it would be nice to see a detailed thermodynamic analysis of these topics but that doesn't appear to be forthcoming from the popular press.
This seems to be a case of "hype" over "substance".
Diamond has a very high heat conductivity -- perhaps the highest of any material. So you could remove the heat at much higher rates from diamond than you could from silicon. So though the melting point for diamond is lower than that of silicon it is much easier to keep diamond based chips cool.
We are entering the era when the paste between your chip and your heat sink may not be "silver paste" but "diamond paste" (or the heat sinks themselves may be made out of diamonds).
Diamond is also normally an insulator, just like the sapphire used in SOI chips, unlike silicon which is a semiconductor, so chips based on diamond have very interesting properties relative to chips based on silicon for the control of electron loss via leakage as well as heat removal.
The whole dark matter/dark energy perspective could be flawed. It depends upon the perspective that the Universe (as viewed) is most probably dead. It does not ask the question of what the Universe would look like if it were alive. But as work by Charles Lineweaver (a noted physicist at the Univ. of NSW) and his students have shown that may be a very questionable assumption. Their work suggests *most* of the Earths (60%+) in this Universe should be *much* older than ours.
So the question must be raised *what* would the Universe look like if/.ers had had a billion or more years to work on it? Yes, I know that many of you will argue that it should not look much different but you have not run the numbers as I have on planetary disassembly times. Nor do you understand the limits of nanotechnology to the extent that I do.
I've tried to explore and address some of these questions in my papers about Matrioshka Brains as has Dr. Sandberg in his exploration of the various types of Jupiter Brains.
These are not new concepts -- they have been discussed on the Extropians list for perhaps a decade. There are a few good astronmers and astrophysicists who discuss these ideas but to a large extent mainstream science seems stuck in the paradigm that the universe simply must be dead.
Until we deal with whether or not that is a fundamental misconception we may be plagued by concepts like Dark Matter and Dark Energy that could be resting on very questionable evidence.
While it is beginning to be quite feasible to begin to connect neurons in the brain or motor cortex to neurons or muscles whose normal connections to the brain have been disrupted this is a far cry from a Matrix-like interface.
Current estimates by Robert Freitas suggest that it is going to require at least a trillion nanorobots in place within the brain and most probably the installation of an extensive fiber optic network to handle the required bandwidth to provide a matrix-like interface (either for real time full bandwidth human-computer interfaces or for brain/mind uploading into a computer). This may be documented to a limited extent in Ray Kurzweil's forthcoming book The Singularity is Near (est. publication early 2005) and perhaps to a greater extent in several years when Nanomedicine Volume III is published.
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Individuals or firms who require such tools to distribute information have way overengineered their sites. They are going for bells and whistles rather than reliability and trust relationships. (There may be exceptions to such assertions but they are few and far between. I can read/., the NY Times, the BBC and a host of other sites without problems. Reuters insists on telling me that they will not support my browser and I've told them that I thumb my nose in their general direction.)
I've followed these policies fairly closely for the last 3-4 years and have not had any problems. Sure I still get SPAM but I heavily filter it using both spambouncer and spamprobe and I read it entirely in PINE using CRT (a telnet application) to the Linux server that receives the mail. I.e. there is no HTML or other attachment processing etc. that takes place on the email that is being read on the Windows 2K machine. And I *don't* require virus/spy/ad ware scanners.
Whoever moderated this up to "Insightful" doesn't know what they are talking about.
Nanomachinery certainly could be powered by batteries as the energy storage capacity of batteries will be greater using nanotechnology. However, chemical energy storage may be denser still. For example in Nanomedicine Volume I (its online) has nanorobots being powered by glucose (just as the nanomachinery in cells now is). Alternatively one could have nanoscale fuel cells being powered by methanol, ethanol, methane, etc. Finally as Freitas points out in Nanomedicine Volume I one could have them powered by nuclear reactions, specifically he selected Gandolinium-148 as a good choice.
"Grey goo" has nothing to do with submerging nanotechnology in its own fuel. It has to do with self-replicating nanosystems that contain their own source code (as much of the "green goo" spread all over the planet does today). Nanotechnologists have proposed solving this problem by what is known as the "broadcast architecture" (i.e. whatever is replicating never has its own source code). So the "mutation" problem never arises or can be dealt with with a sufficient amount of error-correction-code just as certain biological machines and computers deal with errors now. With respect to "how would you monitor that?" the answer is simple -- heat sensors -- nanotech that replicates fast runs hot and can easily be detected. Nanotech that replicates slowly can run cool but one can obviously use sensors like those we currently have to detect chemical or biological weapons to detect its spread.
With respect to "large scale" nanotech that is a problem of parallism and systems engineering. Both of these are discussed in Nanosystems. For example there is a study done by Josh Hall on a nanotechnology enabled air car design that has thousands (or more) of micro-scale, nanotechnology based engines to power it.
Note the statement: "is a technology reporter" and "from his perspective". Since when has a reporter ever been able to judge the scientific or engineering feasibility of something? Then when you have a reporter talking to scientists one has to ask whether or not they are *really* informed about the topic. In this case one has to ask whether or not the scientists have read Drexler's papers as well as his PhD thesis (recast as Nanosystems)? If they have not done that they cannot be considered informed sources and so their opinions may be useful but hardly authoritative. Its like going to the leading hitter in baseball and asking him for advice on how to throw an great pass in football.
Drexler, Merkle and Freitas (as well as some scientists at Caltech like Goddard and the nanotech group at NASA Ames) are the authorities in this area. Anything anybody else says should be subjected to intense scrutiny with a raised eyebrow.
I agree with much of what is said by ghutchis. Organic chemistry is a very messy business and there is a lot that is still unknown (also will admit that my organic chemistry experience is limited to several quarters of education so there is much I may be unaware of).
What I think will happen is that chemists working on things like mechanosynthesis with AFMs or similar devices will develop simple reactions that they are comfortable with that are known to work (just as perhaps organic chemistry developed). At the same time biologists and biochemists will understand an increasing set of reactions that are accomplished by enzymes as the structures and mechanisms are worked out. This will eventually lead to the design (or perhaps directed evolution) of enzymes that work with different substrates, elements, etc. The combination of these will ultimately provide the toolkit that is needed to begin something like the assembly of a nanogear. I am hopeful that it will not take a few hundred years because companies that demonstrate robust nanoassembly abilities are likely to be very successful so there is a fairly large financial benefit to those who figure out how to do this.
Well, we have a claim of knowledge from "authority". Not too much different from the claims that Smalley seems to make. I would ask the questions of (a) what fractions of molecules that can be created by retrosynthetic chemistry programs actually fail during the synthesis process? and (b) are the "failures" of the form that the desired chemical reactions do not take place or simply that they do not take place in quantities required to make the production process efficient? Because one has the problem -- if one can produce even a single molecular assembler and if it is able to produce a wide variety of products with a precise moleculular structure (something I will admit is open to debate) then your objections would seem to be on swampy ground. So this transitions from a chemistry problem (low efficiency of the reaction) to a biological problem (how can I select the precise molecular product which fits the design specifications -- something antibodies are very good at).
You make them out of the same elements that biological or semiconductor components are made out of. I.e. C, Si, B, N, P, O, S, H, F, and Cl. See Nanosystems Section 9.5.2c (you need to do you homework before you post to/. -- or sometimes you might get kicked to the curb:-)). The problem of designing machines from completely higher level descriptions has been addressed in part by the DEMO group at Brandeis. Their machines were designed from something as simple as LEGOs.
In general it sounds as if you are unfamiliar with the topic and the methods required to solve the problems involved.
This depends upon what molecules are attached to the tip of the fingers and how they are attached. If they atoms/molecules are attached to the tip by ionic or hydrogen bonding then sending a small number of electrons down the tip should be sufficient to repel the atom/molecule at the proper time. There is also very complex atomic bonding theory where atoms/molecules have greater affinity for binding to other more preferable molecules rather than the molecules they may currently be bound to (stronger vs. weaker bonds). So one may transfer atomic groups bound to a tip to other surfaces under the right conditions.
Obviously the positional assembly argument is ca-ca. Lets see -- you take a bunch of carbon atoms, bond them into some type of graphite sheet and then random motion causes them to curl up into a ball or a tube (where the free ends are in reasonable proximity) and voila you end up with a completely bonded buckyball or buckytube. The work for which Smalley won a Nobel prize would not have been possible if atoms in proper positions with respect to one another did not form bonds!
Atoms in the proper state which are positioned properly with respect to each other will form bonds. Its the entire basis behind chemistry.
This was a really interesting discussion, but in the end Smalley did not end up contributing much.
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.
Read Chapter 8 of Nanosystems -- "Solution-phase synthesis and mechanosynthesis". I doubt Smalley has. Then go compare Drexler's CV with Smalley's CV. While Princeton is a good school it is *not* MIT. And even if Smalley were smarter than Eric, something I greatly doubt, Smalley would still have to go up against assertions by Feynman (a Nobel prize recipient like Smalley). So on a reputation basis Smalley cannot trump Drexler and Feynman.
With regard to the hemoglobin molecule example this is precisely the problem that Smalley has -- a lack of knowledge. There are at least 3 other examples of a porphyrin ring carrying an atom other than iron known in nature. So it seems perfectly reasonable to structure alternative carriers. Yes, all possible tool tips will not work as expected. But the that does not mean that all possible tool tips will fail as well. The notion that mechanosynthesis will not work seems to contradict current chemical methods where chemical reactions occur by random interactions between atoms/molecules. If these aren't random mechanical interactions then I must misunderstand chemistry.
You are not up-to-date on the literature. The questions you pose are addressed by Robert Freitas in the ever expanding body of literature on Nanomedicine. Specificially the recently published Nanomedicine V. IIA deals with biosafety issues and the 4 year old Nanomedicine V. I deals with things like power delivery and movement. If you want to educate yourself and contribute to real molecular nanotechnology, or as Drexler has recently suggested zettotech progress, (rather than simple nanomaterials which is much of what people talk about today) feel free to come on over to the Nano@Home project. We could use a few good developers.
First, ultimately you're guessing. We just don't know because extra-terrestrial life hasn't wandered by to say hello.
Ca-ca. I'm completely willing to allow for the fact that the Earth is infested with a nanoscale ET lifeform that we haven't bothered to look for. We could easily be under observation on a continual basis (on-world or off-world) but be completely unable to verify that. The majority of the current SETI searches depend on the fact that advanced civilizations are going to "talk" to worms. The scientists conducting the searches are the ones invoking improbabilities -- not I.
Second, you assume that an advanced civilization would be willing to speak to such a lowly race as ourselves. Why not? If I thought nematode worms were sentient I'd strongly support studying and interacting with them. [snip]
You just don't get it (and I'd advise you read some of my papers before you reply to this). You have to assert that a species with 10^15 times less thought capacity (yes, I mean all 6+ billion humans combined) can be considered "sentient". I don't know about you, but I'd consider things at that primitive level of development to be grains of sand. Your argument is reasonable when one is comparing humans with apes, dolphins, etc. -- their brain scales (and thought capacities) are relatively similar but the argument rapidly loses merit as the intelligence scale differences increase.
The advanced civilization might just get in touch to be nice. "Gosh, it really sucked when we were so primative and thought we were alone in the universe, let's say hi to the silly monkey men, it's cheer them up."
Why make the effort? They (us apes) cannot understand an advanced civilization, we cannot contribute in a way that might offset the energy expenditure they need to contact us, there is no concept of "charity" (advanced civilizations have long since realized there is no God and the Universe is probably pretty unforgiving). You have to provide a rational argument (rather than an emotional one) that contact may be useful in some way. Civilizations that master the survival game (and therefore dominate the sentient population in the galaxy) should be acting in their own self-interest. Playing around with children (really sub-sub-sub children) has limited self-survival benefits.
Finally, who says we're looking for an advanced civilization? Maybe we'll find a civilization at roughly the same technological level as we are now (or at least was at that level when the signals were generated). [snip]
The lifetime of civilizations at our level is very short in terms of galactic timescales -- look at our advancement over the last 400 or even 100 years. In another 100 years we will have evolved into a Jupiter Brain or a Matrioshka Brain or if we choose to remain as individuals we will be colonizing the galaxy. In the last case there is a significant probability we will be sending out AI probes -- *not* radio signals. That is because the data content of and what the probes can be accomplish is far greater.
GO DO THE NUMBERS! Determine the maximum distance at which our current detectors could detect a civilization emitting at energies and frequencies that our civilization emits. I've read the papers and the numbers are not promising. Then compute the probability that a civilization is at our level of development within the range of what we can detect. The numbers get worse. Part of the problem is that advanced civilizations will not radiate RF energy -- it is wasteful -- they will have switched to something like fiber optics and as a result will have gone dark. The only thing you will be able to detect is their heat signature.
Your attack is just mean spirited and not very convincing.
I do not think my points can be considered mean spirited if I am attempting to get people to educate themselves and think in a rational way about the allocation of their energ
But since at the rate Nano@Home has been developing it may be several more years before there is something the average individual can use, my current interests can be considered somewhat more altruistic. I run Folding@Home on my Linux machine and regularly promote becoming involved in F@H to others.
I support the BOINC work because it may allow users to tune the allocation of their spare CPU cycles to some combination of what may best benefit humanity. For me, that would probably mean some combination of Folding@Home, Nano@Home and perhaps NEO-Search@Home (if such is ever developed). One also, I believe, currently has something like climate-prediction@Home and perhaps someday earthquake-prediction@Home. In the recent U.S. East Coast hurricane situation I would have reallocated all of my CPU cycles to the climate activities because my brother lives in Virginia.
So I have a vested interest in seeing users move from programs that I believe have a low return on
investment (I believe SETI@Home and GIMPS fall into this category) to programs that are more likely to directly benefit humanity. Otherwise the CPU cycles are probably contributing to global warming which may cause increased human deaths more than they may be contributing to activities that may save human lives.
I have biased beliefs in which distributed computing projects may help more than they hurt. But I'm reasonably well informed in the various topics and can most probably justify my positions if people choose to question them. I fully recognize that the resource allocation priorities of people with relatives that smoke, have genetic defects, live in San Francisco or Hokkaido may have different preferences from myself. The reason to support the BOINC efforts is to allow them to act on those preferences.
Reasonable points. And so the question one has to ask is whether it is more probable that there are nearby civilizations sending out TV signals or broadcasting from Arecibo type dishes or whther it is more probable that civilizations around the galaxy may have long since passed that stage and the only detectable signals that they produce are heat radiation?
Charley Lineweaver -- a card carrying astrophysicist from New Zealand has estimated that approximately 70% of the "Earths" in the galaxy are older than ours -- much older. Why would a million year old civilization (certainly capable of sending signals across a galaxy) want to communicate with a 5000 year old civilization?
And Charley's estimates indicate there might be billion year old civilizations. It seems more likely that their perspective would be -- "If you are worth speaking with you would have the abilities to allow you to detect us and open a communication channel. If you can't detect us then you aren't worth talking with."
The traditional SETI premise is based on the idea that advanced individuals would waste their time talking to sub-babies. I personally just don't buy it. A rational advanced civilization is going to expend its energy determining if there is a way to defeat the heat-death of the universe or how to create new universes and tunnel themselves into them. Broadcasting radio energy into space unless you know it is directed towards a significantly more advanced civilization is a waste of effort.
Point granted -- but once you have the genome sequence and the complete protein structures of nematodes(we have the first and some of the second) combined with sufficient computing capactity one can simulate a worm as much as you find it to be interesting. Once one has done a complete simulation and verified it experimentally once or twice it becomes entirely uninteresting (IMO). How many times do you want to verify something before it becomes so boring you pick watching soap operas as a primary entertainment selection? (sarcasm intended).
Nematodes are hermaphrodites, so they can cross fertilize or fertilize themselves when necessary.
I disagree with Adam Beberg's (Duncan3)comments regarding BOINC as being somewhat outdated. In contrast I view it as being potentially very usefull in allowing users to allocate their spare CPU resources to the most useful projects. [Adam I believe was a significant contributer to the Folding@Home project, so he can be considered an informed source with regard to the perspective of the distribution of "work-units".]
However, the promotion of SETI@Home by anyone demonstrates they have not looked at the problem in detail.
There is reasonably extensive documentation on the probable intelligence of advanced civilizations (for example see papers by Dr. Anders Sandberg (here) or
myself (here). As I have pointed out at conferences and in papers the difference between an advanced civilization and the human civilization is ~10^24 Ops. The difference between a single human and and a nematode worm is ~10^15 Ops. We don't talk to worms and advanced civilizations don't talk to us!
Furthermore the entire SETI effort does not take into account the information content of an advanced civilization. By my estimates this is of the order of 10^50 bits (probably more). One cannot communicate even an extremely small fraction of that information content across interstellar space using radio waves. They simply lack the information carrying capacity. So the SETI Institute, Drake, Tarter, Shostak, et al have sold millions of computer users (as well as Paul Allen) a "bill of goods" without having done
their fundamental homework on the limits of evolution of civilizations. Why on earth would one attempt to communicate with a civilization that is fundamentally less sophisticated than a nematode worm and with whom it is impossible to exchange a significant amount of information that one has at ones disposal?
In contrast Marvin Minsky (probably one of the leading AI experts in the world) and Freeman Dyson (a brilliant mathematician/physicist who should have won a Nobel Prize for his contribution to the Tomonaga/Schwinger/Feynman contribution to quantum electrodynamics were it not for the Prize limits of 3 individuals) had this worked out in 1971 at the conference between Russian and foreign scientists at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory.
Direct quote from the proceedings edited by Sagan:
MINSKY: Since radiation at any temperature above 3 deg. K is wasteful and a squandering of natural
resources, the higher the civilization, the lower the infrared radiation. We should look for extended sources of 4 deg. K radiation. There should be very few natural such sources.
DYSON: I don't quite go along with this but to some extent you are right.
Minsky obtaining a concession from Dyson is significant. It has been ignored by the "radio waves from aliens" camp. They *will not* be trying to talk to us. But we *might* be able to observe them in the IR detection region. (Unfortunately IR detection is difficult to do from ground based telescopes.)
So the bottom line -- reallocate your spare computer resources to projects like folding or in the future to Nano@Home. SETI@Home is never going to succeed. It is based on outdated fantasies. Telescopes like the failed WIRE mission or the recently launched SIRTF *may* be able to detect alien civilizations but efforts such as SETI@Home are pointless until such time as the supporters make the case that advanced civilizations would want to waste their time communicating with sub-worm civilizations.
Adam, I'm not convinced your argument holds water. I'm unfamiliar with OGSA/web-services/etc. but it would appear to me that they have nothing to do with the problem of allocating computing resources on a personal preference basis. Right now I dedicate spare cycles to folding. But in the future I would most likely want to allocate some or most of them to nano@Home. That has little to do with distributed communication protocols or Grid computing. It has to do entirely with an underutilized resource allocation problem.
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In the long run one would like to be able to get such simulations from the 10,000 atom level up to the billion-to-trillion (or more) atom level so you could simulate significant fractions of the volume of cells. Between now and then molecular biologists, geneticists, bioinformaticians, etc. would be happy if we could just get to the level of accurate folding (Folding@Home is working on this from a distributed standpoint) and eventually to be able to model protein-protein interactions so we can figure out how things like DNA repair -- which involves 130+ proteins cooperating in very complex ways -- operate so we can better understand the causes of cancer and aging.
One reason for this is if it takes you 3 or 5 billion years to get all the information back from many light years away there may be a significant possibility that you or the message transports will be exposed to a Gamma Ray Burst that wipes a significant fraction memory. The second reason is that you can't have a significant "conversation" across millions of light years -- the chances are significant that you will have computed the answer yourself by the time you send a probe a million light years away and get a response back from some colonized system. Finally we have know for the last ~25 years (since the Project Daedalus study that you can't send probes out, matter based messages back, etc. at anything close to the speed of light. The energy released when you strike a piece of space dust or even particles from interstellar solar winds is going to erode the ship. Proj. Daedalus solved this by building a big shield on the front of the ship. But if you do that you are going to need a lot more energy to accelerate ships or message transports to higher velocities. Many of these problems are discussed in the Matrioshka Brain papers.
I would suggest that Krauss & Starkman may be very good physicsts & astronomers but I would think twice about putting them on an engineering project.
Robert
I would suggest that the article doesn't have a reasonable frame of reference. I and another talented programmer produced a system that emulated a PDP-10 (mainframe) on a PDP 11/70 (minicomputer) with about a couple of months worth of work in the late 1970s. (I.e. we had program that ran on a PDP 11/70 that executed programs that were compiled to run on a PDP-10.) [For those of you not well versed in computer history -- a PDP 11/70 is a 16 bit minicomputer while a PDP-10 is a 36 bit mainframe. The instruction sets were quite distinct.]
So friggen what if Adobe decides to desupport a platform? Just build an emulator for what they decide to support. The computers are sufficiently fast now-a-days that you aren't going to notice the delay time involved in an emulator (at least if you did a reasonably decent job on it).
So even if humans are leaving behind perhaps 10% of their energy intake in their waste products it would appear that you are going to need something like the waste of 10 humans to power even a single 100W light bulb *if* you can get 100% conversion efficiencies (doubtful). It would seem that you would need a houseful of people lined up outside the bathrooms if you wanted to power the house using human waste products. Of course it would be nice to see a detailed thermodynamic analysis of these topics but that doesn't appear to be forthcoming from the popular press.
This seems to be a case of "hype" over "substance".
Diamond has a very high heat conductivity -- perhaps the highest of any material. So you could remove the heat at much higher rates from diamond than you could from silicon. So though the melting point for diamond is lower than that of silicon it is much easier to keep diamond based chips cool.
We are entering the era when the paste between your chip and your heat sink may not be "silver paste" but "diamond paste" (or the heat sinks themselves may be made out of diamonds).
Diamond is also normally an insulator, just like the sapphire used in SOI chips, unlike silicon which is a semiconductor, so chips based on diamond have very interesting properties relative to chips based on silicon for the control of electron loss via leakage as well as heat removal.
Robert
So the question must be raised *what* would the Universe look like if /.ers had had a billion or more years to work on it? Yes, I know that many of you will argue that it should not look much different but you have not run the numbers as I have on planetary disassembly times. Nor do you understand the limits of nanotechnology to the extent that I do.
I've tried to explore and address some of these questions in my papers about Matrioshka Brains as has Dr. Sandberg in his exploration of the various types of Jupiter Brains.
These are not new concepts -- they have been discussed on the Extropians list for perhaps a decade. There are a few good astronmers and astrophysicists who discuss these ideas but to a large extent mainstream science seems stuck in the paradigm that the universe simply must be dead.
Until we deal with whether or not that is a fundamental misconception we may be plagued by concepts like Dark Matter and Dark Energy that could be resting on very questionable evidence.
Robert
Current estimates by Robert Freitas suggest that it is going to require at least a trillion nanorobots in place within the brain and most probably the installation of an extensive fiber optic network to handle the required bandwidth to provide a matrix-like interface (either for real time full bandwidth human-computer interfaces or for brain/mind uploading into a computer). This may be documented to a limited extent in Ray Kurzweil's forthcoming book The Singularity is Near (est. publication early 2005) and perhaps to a greater extent in several years when Nanomedicine Volume III is published.
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2) Disable Java;
3) Disable CSS
Individuals or firms who require such tools to distribute information have way overengineered their sites. They are going for bells and whistles rather than reliability and trust relationships. (There may be exceptions to such assertions but they are few and far between. I can read
I've followed these policies fairly closely for the last 3-4 years and have not had any problems. Sure I still get SPAM but I heavily filter it using both spambouncer and spamprobe and I read it entirely in PINE using CRT (a telnet application) to the Linux server that receives the mail. I.e. there is no HTML or other attachment processing etc. that takes place on the email that is being read on the Windows 2K machine. And I *don't* require virus/spy/ad ware scanners.
Robert
Whoever moderated this up to "Insightful" doesn't know what they are talking about.
Nanomachinery certainly could be powered by batteries as the energy storage capacity of batteries will be greater using nanotechnology. However, chemical energy storage may be denser still. For example in Nanomedicine Volume I (its online) has nanorobots being powered by glucose (just as the nanomachinery in cells now is). Alternatively one could have nanoscale fuel cells being powered by methanol, ethanol, methane, etc. Finally as Freitas points out in Nanomedicine Volume I one could have them powered by nuclear reactions, specifically he selected Gandolinium-148 as a good choice.
"Grey goo" has nothing to do with submerging nanotechnology in its own fuel. It has to do with self-replicating nanosystems that contain their own source code (as much of the "green goo" spread all over the planet does today). Nanotechnologists have proposed solving this problem by what is known as the "broadcast architecture" (i.e. whatever is replicating never has its own source code). So the "mutation" problem never arises or can be dealt with with a sufficient amount of error-correction-code just as certain biological machines and computers deal with errors now. With respect to "how would you monitor that?" the answer is simple -- heat sensors -- nanotech that replicates fast runs hot and can easily be detected. Nanotech that replicates slowly can run cool but one can obviously use sensors like those we currently have to detect chemical or biological weapons to detect its spread.
With respect to "large scale" nanotech that is a problem of parallism and systems engineering. Both of these are discussed in Nanosystems. For example there is a study done by Josh Hall on a nanotechnology enabled air car design that has thousands (or more) of micro-scale, nanotechnology based engines to power it.
Robert
Note the statement: "is a technology reporter" and "from his perspective". Since when has a reporter ever been able to judge the scientific or engineering feasibility of something? Then when you have a reporter talking to scientists one has to ask whether or not they are *really* informed about the topic. In this case one has to ask whether or not the scientists have read Drexler's papers as well as his PhD thesis (recast as Nanosystems)? If they have not done that they cannot be considered informed sources and so their opinions may be useful but hardly authoritative. Its like going to the leading hitter in baseball and asking him for advice on how to throw an great pass in football.
Drexler, Merkle and Freitas (as well as some scientists at Caltech like Goddard and the nanotech group at NASA Ames) are the authorities in this area. Anything anybody else says should be subjected to intense scrutiny with a raised eyebrow.
Robert
I agree with much of what is said by ghutchis. Organic chemistry is a very messy business and there is a lot that is still unknown (also will admit that my organic chemistry experience is limited to several quarters of education so there is much I may be unaware of).
What I think will happen is that chemists working on things like mechanosynthesis with AFMs or similar devices will develop simple reactions that they are comfortable with that are known to work (just as perhaps organic chemistry developed). At the same time biologists and biochemists will understand an increasing set of reactions that are accomplished by enzymes as the structures and mechanisms are worked out. This will eventually lead to the design (or perhaps directed evolution) of enzymes that work with different substrates, elements, etc. The combination of these will ultimately provide the toolkit that is needed to begin something like the assembly of a nanogear. I am hopeful that it will not take a few hundred years because companies that demonstrate robust nanoassembly abilities are likely to be very successful so there is a fairly large financial benefit to those who figure out how to do this.
Well, we have a claim of knowledge from "authority". Not too much different from the claims that Smalley seems to make. I would ask the questions of (a) what fractions of molecules that can be created by retrosynthetic chemistry programs actually fail during the synthesis process? and (b) are the "failures" of the form that the desired chemical reactions do not take place or simply that they do not take place in quantities required to make the production process efficient? Because one has the problem -- if one can produce even a single molecular assembler and if it is able to produce a wide variety of products with a precise moleculular structure (something I will admit is open to debate) then your objections would seem to be on swampy ground. So this transitions from a chemistry problem (low efficiency of the reaction) to a biological problem (how can I select the precise molecular product which fits the design specifications -- something antibodies are very good at).
In general it sounds as if you are unfamiliar with the topic and the methods required to solve the problems involved.
Robert
Obviously the positional assembly argument is ca-ca. Lets see -- you take a bunch of carbon atoms, bond them into some type of graphite sheet and then random motion causes them to curl up into a ball or a tube (where the free ends are in reasonable proximity) and voila you end up with a completely bonded buckyball or buckytube. The work for which Smalley won a Nobel prize would not have been possible if atoms in proper positions with respect to one another did not form bonds!
Atoms in the proper state which are positioned properly with respect to each other will form bonds. Its the entire basis behind chemistry.
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.
With regard to the hemoglobin molecule example this is precisely the problem that Smalley has -- a lack of knowledge. There are at least 3 other examples of a porphyrin ring carrying an atom other than iron known in nature. So it seems perfectly reasonable to structure alternative carriers. Yes, all possible tool tips will not work as expected. But the that does not mean that all possible tool tips will fail as well. The notion that mechanosynthesis will not work seems to contradict current chemical methods where chemical reactions occur by random interactions between atoms/molecules. If these aren't random mechanical interactions then I must misunderstand chemistry.
You are not up-to-date on the literature. The questions you pose are addressed by Robert Freitas in the ever expanding body of literature on Nanomedicine. Specificially the recently published Nanomedicine V. IIA deals with biosafety issues and the 4 year old Nanomedicine V. I deals with things like power delivery and movement. If you want to educate yourself and contribute to real molecular nanotechnology, or as Drexler has recently suggested zettotech progress, (rather than simple nanomaterials which is much of what people talk about today) feel free to come on over to the Nano@Home project. We could use a few good developers.
Ca-ca. I'm completely willing to allow for the fact that the Earth is infested with a nanoscale ET lifeform that we haven't bothered to look for. We could easily be under observation on a continual basis (on-world or off-world) but be completely unable to verify that. The majority of the current SETI searches depend on the fact that advanced civilizations are going to "talk" to worms. The scientists conducting the searches are the ones invoking improbabilities -- not I.
Second, you assume that an advanced civilization would be willing to speak to such a lowly race as ourselves. Why not? If I thought nematode worms were sentient I'd strongly support studying and interacting with them. [snip]
You just don't get it (and I'd advise you read some of my papers before you reply to this). You have to assert that a species with 10^15 times less thought capacity (yes, I mean all 6+ billion humans combined) can be considered "sentient". I don't know about you, but I'd consider things at that primitive level of development to be grains of sand. Your argument is reasonable when one is comparing humans with apes, dolphins, etc. -- their brain scales (and thought capacities) are relatively similar but the argument rapidly loses merit as the intelligence scale differences increase.
The advanced civilization might just get in touch to be nice. "Gosh, it really sucked when we were so primative and thought we were alone in the universe, let's say hi to the silly monkey men, it's cheer them up."
Why make the effort? They (us apes) cannot understand an advanced civilization, we cannot contribute in a way that might offset the energy expenditure they need to contact us, there is no concept of "charity" (advanced civilizations have long since realized there is no God and the Universe is probably pretty unforgiving). You have to provide a rational argument (rather than an emotional one) that contact may be useful in some way. Civilizations that master the survival game (and therefore dominate the sentient population in the galaxy) should be acting in their own self-interest. Playing around with children (really sub-sub-sub children) has limited self-survival benefits.
Finally, who says we're looking for an advanced civilization? Maybe we'll find a civilization at roughly the same technological level as we are now (or at least was at that level when the signals were generated). [snip]
The lifetime of civilizations at our level is very short in terms of galactic timescales -- look at our advancement over the last 400 or even 100 years. In another 100 years we will have evolved into a Jupiter Brain or a Matrioshka Brain or if we choose to remain as individuals we will be colonizing the galaxy. In the last case there is a significant probability we will be sending out AI probes -- *not* radio signals. That is because the data content of and what the probes can be accomplish is far greater.
GO DO THE NUMBERS! Determine the maximum distance at which our current detectors could detect a civilization emitting at energies and frequencies that our civilization emits. I've read the papers and the numbers are not promising. Then compute the probability that a civilization is at our level of development within the range of what we can detect. The numbers get worse. Part of the problem is that advanced civilizations will not radiate RF energy -- it is wasteful -- they will have switched to something like fiber optics and as a result will have gone dark. The only thing you will be able to detect is their heat signature.
Your attack is just mean spirited and not very convincing.
I do not think my points can be considered mean spirited if I am attempting to get people to educate themselves and think in a rational way about the allocation of their energ
But since at the rate Nano@Home has been developing it may be several more years before there is something the average individual can use, my current interests can be considered somewhat more altruistic. I run Folding@Home on my Linux machine and regularly promote becoming involved in F@H to others.
I support the BOINC work because it may allow users to tune the allocation of their spare CPU cycles to some combination of what may best benefit humanity. For me, that would probably mean some combination of Folding@Home, Nano@Home and perhaps NEO-Search@Home (if such is ever developed). One also, I believe, currently has something like climate-prediction@Home and perhaps someday earthquake-prediction@Home. In the recent U.S. East Coast hurricane situation I would have reallocated all of my CPU cycles to the climate activities because my brother lives in Virginia.
So I have a vested interest in seeing users move from programs that I believe have a low return on investment (I believe SETI@Home and GIMPS fall into this category) to programs that are more likely to directly benefit humanity. Otherwise the CPU cycles are probably contributing to global warming which may cause increased human deaths more than they may be contributing to activities that may save human lives.
I have biased beliefs in which distributed computing projects may help more than they hurt. But I'm reasonably well informed in the various topics and can most probably justify my positions if people choose to question them. I fully recognize that the resource allocation priorities of people with relatives that smoke, have genetic defects, live in San Francisco or Hokkaido may have different preferences from myself. The reason to support the BOINC efforts is to allow them to act on those preferences.
Robert
Charley Lineweaver -- a card carrying astrophysicist from New Zealand has estimated that approximately 70% of the "Earths" in the galaxy are older than ours -- much older. Why would a million year old civilization (certainly capable of sending signals across a galaxy) want to communicate with a 5000 year old civilization? And Charley's estimates indicate there might be billion year old civilizations. It seems more likely that their perspective would be -- "If you are worth speaking with you would have the abilities to allow you to detect us and open a communication channel. If you can't detect us then you aren't worth talking with."
The traditional SETI premise is based on the idea that advanced individuals would waste their time talking to sub-babies. I personally just don't buy it. A rational advanced civilization is going to expend its energy determining if there is a way to defeat the heat-death of the universe or how to create new universes and tunnel themselves into them. Broadcasting radio energy into space unless you know it is directed towards a significantly more advanced civilization is a waste of effort.
Robert
Nematodes are hermaphrodites, so they can cross fertilize or fertilize themselves when necessary.
Robert
However, the promotion of SETI@Home by anyone demonstrates they have not looked at the problem in detail.
There is reasonably extensive documentation on the probable intelligence of advanced civilizations (for example see papers by Dr. Anders Sandberg (here) or myself (here). As I have pointed out at conferences and in papers the difference between an advanced civilization and the human civilization is ~10^24 Ops. The difference between a single human and and a nematode worm is ~10^15 Ops. We don't talk to worms and advanced civilizations don't talk to us!
Furthermore the entire SETI effort does not take into account the information content of an advanced civilization. By my estimates this is of the order of 10^50 bits (probably more). One cannot communicate even an extremely small fraction of that information content across interstellar space using radio waves. They simply lack the information carrying capacity. So the SETI Institute, Drake, Tarter, Shostak, et al have sold millions of computer users (as well as Paul Allen) a "bill of goods" without having done their fundamental homework on the limits of evolution of civilizations. Why on earth would one attempt to communicate with a civilization that is fundamentally less sophisticated than a nematode worm and with whom it is impossible to exchange a significant amount of information that one has at ones disposal?
In contrast Marvin Minsky (probably one of the leading AI experts in the world) and Freeman Dyson (a brilliant mathematician/physicist who should have won a Nobel Prize for his contribution to the Tomonaga/Schwinger/Feynman contribution to quantum electrodynamics were it not for the Prize limits of 3 individuals) had this worked out in 1971 at the conference between Russian and foreign scientists at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory. Direct quote from the proceedings edited by Sagan:
MINSKY: Since radiation at any temperature above 3 deg. K is wasteful and a squandering of natural resources, the higher the civilization, the lower the infrared radiation. We should look for extended sources of 4 deg. K radiation. There should be very few natural such sources.
DYSON: I don't quite go along with this but to some extent you are right.
Minsky obtaining a concession from Dyson is significant. It has been ignored by the "radio waves from aliens" camp. They *will not* be trying to talk to us. But we *might* be able to observe them in the IR detection region. (Unfortunately IR detection is difficult to do from ground based telescopes.)
So the bottom line -- reallocate your spare computer resources to projects like folding or in the future to Nano@Home. SETI@Home is never going to succeed. It is based on outdated fantasies. Telescopes like the failed WIRE mission or the recently launched SIRTF *may* be able to detect alien civilizations but efforts such as SETI@Home are pointless until such time as the supporters make the case that advanced civilizations would want to waste their time communicating with sub-worm civilizations.
Robert
Robert
If you were discussing the planetary dismantlement paper, that problem is now corrected.