To the best of my knowledge Javascript is not a standard language approved by a "standards" making body (e.g. ANSI, ISO, etc.). It will also routinely crash or cause errors in Netscape browsers and/or suck up CPU time better devoted to distributed computing projects. The reasonable thing for an intelligent user to do is to browse the web with Javascript disabled. Who knows what security holes may lurk in Javascript code? More information on why not to use Javascript and how to write code that makes the clients happy (i.e. it downloads fast) is here.
It is worth noting that the SIRTF SWIRE survey may be able to detect solar system sized supercomputers, aka Matrioshka Brains. For discussion see the thread starting here and navigate using the icons in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
Almost all, if not all, people currently donating organs are doing so in a state that cannot be described as "informed consent". There should be a greater awareness of the option of whole body or head only cryonic suspension within our society. If people elect whole body cryonic suspension then their organs should not be removed under any circumstances. If people only elect for head only cryonic suspension then one might harvest the organs for further use.
And if you are thinking about replying to this along the lines of "cryonic suspension is a fantasy" go read the facts first, e.g. The Molecular Repair of the Brain.
You don't have to get Congress to OK funding (in fact its probably even a bad idea to let them know that you are planning to disassemble planets). All you have to do is design the nanobots to do the heavy lifting tasks (and throw in a fair amount of systems administration engineering to keep them all coordinated) and throw them at the project.
Actually, by star-lifting [1] one can decrease size of the sun to that of a smaller star. The diminished gravity slows the rate of hydrogen consumption and extends the lifespan to potentially trillions of years. And that doesn't consider what would happen if you gradually fed the sun hydrogen harvested from nearby planets (e.g. Jupiter) or perhaps more distant brown dwarfs or even hydrogen gas clouds. Predictions of a natural course of evolution seriously underestimate the capabilities of advanced technological civilizations. For example see [2].
1. D. R. Criswell, "Solar System Industrialization: Implications for Interstellar Migrations", Chapter 4 in Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, Ben R. Finney and Eric M. Jones, (eds.), University of California Press, (1985), pp 50-87.
2. Bradbury, R. J., "Planetary Disassembly" (http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/MatrioshkaBrains/PlntDssmbly.html) (circa 1998).
Nanodangers are *not* far-future scenarios. This is because most people do not understand that biotech *is* nanotech. Self-replicating nanotech is feasible -- in case you haven't noticed the beer, wine and yogurt industries (among others) are based on it.
Re: "without self-replicating nanomachines, most of the other really big nano-dangers (and many of the nanodreams) become nigh on imnpossible". My only suggestion would be that you tell that to the SARS virus. (And a virus is not inherently self-replicating -- it steals self-replication machinery from the host it infects.)
The SARS virus seems perfectly capable of producing the "obscene number of nanomachines" required to both kill the host entity and expand out into the world.
Biotech is *not* very different from nanotech.
Biotech *is* nanotech. And until people understand that we are all at risk.
As I pointed out at the Foresight conference -- I have the genome sequence for the SARS virus -- I have access to the machines and materials necessary to recreate its genome. There is little that would prevent me from infecting all of the attendees of the conference next year with SARS. People are living in a fantasy world that seems to be preventing them from taking bioterrorism (and eventually nanoterrorism) seriously. There are solutions to these problems -- but they are not being dealt with seriously by current government or regulatory organization activities.
An interesting comment. While there isn't yet a direct tie between a defective nuclear membrane and an increased rate of DNA damage defects it seems a reasonable hypothesis. That oxidative stress that doesn't get repaired quickly enough has some merit but doesn't go far enough. It appears that that would lead to an increased number of DNA double strand breaks and that may be the real source of the problem. That is because a significant fraction of double strand breaks are repaired by a process called non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) and that process may actually delete DNA in the process of doing the repair. (For the technical people, this is because the repair process uses exonucleases such as the Artemis protein or the Werner's syndrome protein.)
So, for the programmers on/., its a really simple perspective -- over time the code becomes corrupted.
Though the mutations are very very rare, parents would presumably pay not to have a child which would suffer from them. Since in the not so distant future one would presume that all of these genetic tests will be done using chip based technology, having an additional test on the chip for Progeria isn't going to increase the cost significantly. There is obviously a market for a test set for the most "severe" genetic defects which cause birth defects, kill a child prematurely, cause developmental problems, etc. One could consider that it might be a form of cruel punishment or torture to allow a child who would suffer from these conditions to be born.
It is going to be a sticky issue in society to deal with this knowledge.
The logical therapy process is to first isolate the gene, then figure out what it does and/or what goes wrong with it. This may involve determining its 3-D structure. After that one can pursue either computer aided drug design to correct the "function" of the gene, or gene therapy to offset malfunctions or even replace the gene with its normal versions.
One of the real problems with this is that we do not currently have reliable methods for removing the broken genetic code and replacing it with corrected genetic code. But the drug therapy approach may function as an intermediate stopgap measure.
In addition, knowing the gene allows for genetic testing for such defects, so the number of individuals plagued by the disease may decrease in the future.
The ETC group is a very luddite/anti-tech organization and one should view anything they fund/publish with a very raised eyebrow.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize how the tobacco industry "spun" its perspective. One only has to read "The Big Down" to know how anti-technology they are. So one should not trust any other publications more than one trusts the claims of the average television commercial.
The largest integrated space structure size (that I've encountered) would be a highly evolved Matrioshka Brain which is a multi-layer Dyson Sphere constructed using molecular nanotechnology. This is significantly larger and a heck of a lot more intelligant than a Magog Worldship. There is not normally enough enough material outside of the star in a single solar system to construct one however, so it would require an extended harvesting process within a large gas cloud or perhaps an extensive process of star-lifting [1] to accomplish this. The maximum size of a Matrioshka Brain depends on the size of the star used as a power source and/or the size to which it is reduced. But a diameter of several light years is not unreasonable. This is determined by the heat radiation limits as specified by Stefan's Law. Unlike Niven's Ringworld or a Magog Worldship which may have significant problems with the laws of physics (holding them together is problematic), Matrioshka Brains do seem feasible.
Interestingly, when you navigate a Matrioshka Brain one has to take the star with you -- so changing course or speed does take a rather long time.
1. D. R. Criswell, "Solar System Industrialization: Implications for Interstellar Migrations", Chapter 4 in Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, Ben R. Finney and Eric M. Jones, (eds.), University of California Press, (1985), pp 50-87.
I do agree with this. While DC projects in general may have been boosted by SETI@HOME it is based on an ill-founded concept that advanced alien civilizations would want to communicate with those much more primitive than they are.
Lets take the cycles and reallocate them to something that living human beings can actually benefit from!
We don't have a fuel resource problem at this time. There is plenty of material in Russia that could be repackaged and used as reactor fuel for many years.
What you need is inexpensive molecular isotope separation capability. And that requires moderately advanced bionanotechnology or robust molecular nanotechnology. For example, the problem with the cleanup of Hanford isn't so much worries about proliferation but the simple quantity of a variety of radioactive isotopes mixed in with non-radioactive materials that have no useful purpose with respect to breeding more nuclear fuel.
Ultimately one wants very small local reprocessing facilities. By keeping them local one avoids the risks of transporting radioactive materials and concentrates the areas that need to be defended against terrorist activities. By continually recycling the radioactive isotopes to be bred back into non-radioactive isotopes one completely eliminates the waste problem. Unfortunately, we just don't have the technology to do this cost effectively yet.
The problem with implementing capabilities like this is that it allows an seed AI to hack their network and gain access to a large amount of computing that can be used to bootstrap itself to higher levels of intelligence. There is no guarantee that fledgling-AIs must be "friendly AI's. They could be AI's in the service of terrorist organizations. In that case hacking into BDE's network would give them rapid access to just about a petaflop of computing power (according to this message). So a lot of people could wake up the next morning and find out their computer is a lot smarter than they are. They could also be a lot poorer if they kept any financal data on the computer. Even if its encrypted with a petaflop of power at your disposal the codes get cracked pretty darn fast.
This is something to be very afraid of if people who are not fans of Western culture manage to develop it first.
Interestingly, it looks like you could purchase access to this much computing power by buying out BDE for a mere $6 million.
It'd take considerably longer than 100 years to terraform either planet.
That statement is only correct if you assume molecular nanotechnology is not feasible. If it is feasible you can completely dismantle Venus or Mars in less than 100 years (Ref here). If you can completely dismantle them, I would argue its highly probable that you could terraform them as well. But it makes no sense to leave the material at the bottom of gravity wells when you could use it for advanced satellites as I discuss here for example.
Because primitive "life" seems to have begun on Earth very early in its history and that life induces atmospheric changes that can be detected remotely, it does seem reasonable for scientists to develop methods to look for planets capable of supporting such life. The work by the OGLE team and telescopes being planned such as the Kepler Mission will identify planetary systems that more advanced telescopes, such as the Darwin Mission will be able to study for smaller planets that might show signs of primitive life. Simulations suggest that it is feasible for the gas giant planets to migrate into the near-stellar orbits being detected by the OGLE team without disrupting the orbits of planets in the habitable zone at least some of the time. It isn't unreasonable to look for life similar to that found on Earth because the elements on which it is based CHON are the most abundant in the galaxy. There is a much lower probability for life based on alternative chemistries. Given this perspective I think it is perfectly reasonable for scientists to attempt to put hard numbers on the f_p, n_e and f_l parameters of the Drake Equation.
If assume that we understand most of the basic laws of physics and there isn't any possibility for "magic physics" such as subatomic engineering or faster-than-light travel, then one can predict what "advanced" intelligent technological civilizations may look like. At least some of them seem likely to be Matrioshka Brains. These would be very difficult to detect using our current technology because they radiate heat at close to the cosmic microwave background temperature. To look for signs of advanced technological civilizations we will need to do infrared surveys, something that was suggested by Freeman Dyson more than 40 years ago.
Another form they might take would be bacteria sized hive minds constructed using advanced molecular nanotechnology. In which case they could be all around us on Earth and we would never notice them. To look for those we need to start a program to develop highly parallel air, water and soil samplers that can detect micron and submicron sized bits of "technology".
One of the things that continually disappoints me about/. is the degree to which people will comment on things without slightest knowledge of the subject under discussion. One of the things that I find appealing is when someone who actually knows something provides a useful interpretation that abstracts useful data for people who aren't particularly well informed in an arcane knowledge base.
I'm speaking here as founder and president of what was the 2nd largest biotechnology company in the U.S. focused on the molecular biology of aging during the mid-'90s. So we will assume for the sake of improving the discussion I'm moderately well informed in this arcane branch of knowledge.
Point #1:If you read something scientific or technical in the "popular" press, never assume that they managed to interpret it properly. If reporters don't have an education in a particular discipline, they are not likely to understand the subtleties of what is being discussed. Always go back to the most scientific sources you can get access to. Most of the readers are presumably qualified to evaluate arguments on technical merits (this is the/. forum!). Learn the jargon and if you don't understand something find an expert and ask questions (or post to the forum -- you never know when an expert might be lurking).
Point #2:Never assume a/. poster knows what they are talking about (or has verified what they may have copied or concluded from popular press). Case in point: "aging in mice seems to be the byproduct of the chemicals that prevent cancer". The material under discussion is a mutant p53 protein which is the byproduct of a modified p53 gene. It is not by anyone familiar with discussions in this field a "chemical". The p53 protein weighs tens of thousands of daltons and has multiple "active" functions -- most molecules considered "chemicals" weigh less than a few thousand daltons and have few, if any, "active" functions.
From the Naturenews report: "they created mice with a chunk missing from one copy of the gene".
Translating this into "programmer" terms -- this is in effect replacing 1 of 2 instantiations of
an essential subroutine in an ~30,000 subroutine system with a subroutine that has had some of its lines deleted. How do you draw conclusions as to what is going on in that situation? Unless you know what lines were deleted and what the purpose of those lines was you have relatively little hope of drawing conclusions that would allow you to debug the system (at least IMHO). You certainly cannot discuss what the situation means in any intelligent fashion.
All of that being said, I'll provide my "spin" on the results. The normal p53 protein is a "gatekeeper" protein. Its purpose is to determine whether or not DNA damage is present (i.e. whether your program has been corrupted). If too much damage is present it induces cells to commit apoptosis (cellular suicide). If less damage is present, it delays cellular replication (copying) until the damage that is present can be repaired (calling the ECC subroutines). So it acts as a brake on the replication of mutated/damaged DNA and an executioner for cells that are so far beyond the error-correction subroutines that they represent a threat to the entire organism. In larger organisms (which have more cells and are therefore at greater risk of developing a "mutant" program and therefore cancer [which is unregulated cellular replication]) it is important to constrain replication. So humans, in contrast to mice may have a p53 which strongly constrains cellular replication. { Alternatively they may have "redundant" subroutines like telomere shortening (mice have very long telomeres, humans do not) which function as "backup" programs that function to limit cellular division and therefore the development of cancer. (This is based on the concept that short telomeres inform cells to "stop dividing" just as "damaged DNA" [through the p53 protein] cause cells to stop dividing.) } The extent to which short telomeres may resemble "damaged" DNA (and therefore activate the p53 "subroutines") is unclear (to me) at this point. [This is a fairly hot topic of scientific debate.]
If we view cancer and aging as complementary ends of the see-saw -- allow too much cellular replication and one gets cancer -- allow too little cellular replication and those parts that wear out are not replaced, resulting in aging, and one may be able to interpret the results of this study. The part of the p53 gene that was deleted probably served to function to "remove" the block against replication or "enable" the replication function. So what may be occuring is that the mutant p53 gene may be detecting damage, blocking replication, but then when the damage is repaired the defective p53 may not be allowing replication to proceed. Thus you have very effective anti-cancer properties but as one gets older there are fewer and fewer cells available to replace those that are lost. Net result: accelerated aging.
Now, this result need not be pessimistic. As Tom Kirkwood, one of the world's leading gerontologists pointed out in the Nature article,
"We could be able to pick a path through the molecular mechanisms of ageing without making cells more tumour-prone. 'There's no reason why you shouldn't get greater defence against cancer and greater longevity.'"
As a once upon a time programmer -- I encourage people in the software industry -- "View genomes as programs -- lets figure out where the bugs are and then lets go fix them."
As others point out, even ballistic conduction doesn't get you past the speed-of-light limits. You are also going to have to cool the computers down to close to absolute zero if you want ballistic conduction over very long length scales (otherwise atomic vibrations will disrupt the flow of the electrons).
The limits on power consumption have relatively little to do with electrical resistance and a great deal to do with erasing bits. As Landauer and Bennett have shown, you can compute for essentially free but you have to pay a price of generating entropy (heat) when you erase bits. To achieve the really significant increases we have to move from non-reversible architectures (all current commercial computers) to reversible architectures that minimize the number of bits erased. Michael Frank is one of the leading people working in this area.
As Drexler discusses in Nanosystems, using reversible rod-logic nanocomputers, one should be able to get from our current 10^9 ops/sec chips to 10^21 ops/sec in 1 cm^3 before one hits the heat removal limits. So the anticipated throughput increase is ~10^12 ops which a trillion vs. your estimate(?) of 90 billion. But it isn't going to run on a single battery. Its consuming (and radiating) 100,000W. Interestingly enough, since such a nanocomputer has ~10^3-10^5 times the processing capacity of the human brain in 10^-3 times the volume such a computer is probably worth a million or more human brains (if we can figure out how to program it...).
Interestingly enough, people at both Bell Labs and IBM are working on these issues. Here is a URL for the discussion of the Bell Labs progress on Nanodot
You need to study a bit more molecular biology. Ribosomes can turn out the protein components of ribosomes, but you will need RNA polymerase to turn out the RNA subcomponents of the ribosomes.
While ribosomes are indeed nano-assemblers they are limited to assembling proteins with the 20 natural amino acids. Scientists are working on extending the genetic code but its going to be a rough road. The problem with DNA or protein based wires is getting them to self-assemble into functional systems. Nadrian Seeman, one of the few scientists who has actually built stuff, out of DNA has said that one of the problems is that when you throw a few million long molecules equipped with self-assembly properties into a test tube the problem is keeping them from assembling into a tangled ball of strings.
Reproduction is not required for life. Life can be defined completely on the basis of metabolism. Both mutation and selection are required for evolution. The problem is you have to have relatively intelligent life to figure out how to engineer metabolic components so they do not wear with time (you can avoid wear entirely at the molecular level). If you can replace or repair damaged components, one need not have any requirement for reproduction and any evolution desired can be entirely self-directed. The fundamental problem with molecular nanocomputers is radiation damage. Decay of radioactive elements and cosmic rays provide enough energy to break molecular bonds. As a result you need a fair amount of redundency and majority logic to have molecular computers with reasonable lifetimes. Drexler has covered this extensively on pgs. 154-160 of Nanosystems
Unfortunately for Mr. Maroney, Dr. Smalley doesn't know what he is talking about. Everything that one sees in nature, including Mr. Marony & Dr. Smalley, is assembled atom by atom or small molecule by small molecule. The ribosome found in bacteria and eukaryotic cells IS an assembler. We don't have semi-autonomous microbots yet because computers with sufficient capacity to operate one aren't yet small enough to fit in them. However when the computers are built using molecular electronics, we will certainly be able to build 1-10 micron scale autonomous machines. I would urge Mr. Maroney and others who disbelieve the Drexlerian perspective to read the detailed responses to the Smalley & Whitesides articles in Scientific American at A Debate About Assemblers.
I've recently finished a detailed analysis of what is required to achieve the full vision of molecular nanotechnology via the wet (biotechnology enabled) path (in contrast to the dry path being pursued by Zyvex). It will require significant improvements in both computer capacity and tools for the computer-assisted, and eventually automated, design of enzymes. Currently our abilities to design enzymes is limited, but we can expect these capabilities to increase significantly within the current decade. Within the period from 2010-2020, the costs for the design of assembly lines for nanoscale parts should fall low enough that the design and assembly of nanorobots should become feasible. So Drexler's estimates may yet prove to be right on the money.
I'll grant the point that chemists work with lots of molecules. That doesn't however mean that you can approach Drexler's vision because you potentially have a big problem with chemical reactions yielding nonspecific products.
Drexler's vision is very clear, you want to get almost all of the atoms precisely positioned and bonded in 3D space developing machine parts on the nanoscale from 50-500 nm. Thats millions to billions of atoms. The largest specific structures chemists build contain only a few hundred atoms. And getting there isn't easy -- consider it took around 30 years from the discovery of Taxol until we figured out how to synthesize it.
And assemblers need not be slow. See this paper by JoSH Hall. A properly designed nanotech assembly line can reproduce its weight in nanoparts every millisecond! However its good that you are interested in this. I'll be publishing a paper soon that will I hope will shorten the path and decrease the cost to achieving real molecular nanotechnology. And it uses organic chemistry synthesis as its foundation.
You can get the energy by running glucose through a nano-fuel cell. You can also carry an onboard diamond pellets that you burn... (C + O2 = CO2 + free energy)
You could have diamondoid tanks containing compressed hydrogen at 1000 atm (2H2 + O2 = 2H2O + free energy). Finally, and I like this one the best you can have nanobot nuclear reactors powered by Gandolinium 148 (See Nanomedicine, pg 158).
There are ways to provide external power as well, you can lie on an ultrasonic couch and the Nanobots can harvest the ultrasonic energy it supplies. Nanomedicine was published in Oct. 1999, so Whitesides would have had plenty of time to investigate this if he had really wanted to give the topic fair treatment.
Slashdot Mirror
To the best of my knowledge Javascript is not a standard language approved by a "standards" making body (e.g. ANSI, ISO, etc.). It will also routinely crash or cause errors in Netscape browsers and/or suck up CPU time better devoted to distributed computing projects. The reasonable thing for an intelligent user to do is to browse the web with Javascript disabled. Who knows what security holes may lurk in Javascript code? More information on why not to use Javascript and how to write code that makes the clients happy (i.e. it downloads fast) is here.
It is worth noting that the SIRTF SWIRE survey may be able to detect solar system sized supercomputers, aka Matrioshka Brains. For discussion see the thread starting here and navigate using the icons in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
And if you are thinking about replying to this along the lines of "cryonic suspension is a fantasy" go read the facts first, e.g. The Molecular Repair of the Brain.
Robert
For more see the Matrioshka Brain Home Page
1. D. R. Criswell, "Solar System Industrialization: Implications for Interstellar Migrations", Chapter 4 in Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, Ben R. Finney and Eric M. Jones, (eds.), University of California Press, (1985), pp 50-87.s /PlntDssmbly.html) (circa 1998).
2. Bradbury, R. J., "Planetary Disassembly" (http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/MatrioshkaBrain
Re: "without self-replicating nanomachines, most of the other really big nano-dangers (and many of the nanodreams) become nigh on imnpossible". My only suggestion would be that you tell that to the SARS virus. (And a virus is not inherently self-replicating -- it steals self-replication machinery from the host it infects.)
The SARS virus seems perfectly capable of producing the "obscene number of nanomachines" required to both kill the host entity and expand out into the world.
Biotech is *not* very different from nanotech. Biotech *is* nanotech. And until people understand that we are all at risk.
As I pointed out at the Foresight conference -- I have the genome sequence for the SARS virus -- I have access to the machines and materials necessary to recreate its genome. There is little that would prevent me from infecting all of the attendees of the conference next year with SARS. People are living in a fantasy world that seems to be preventing them from taking bioterrorism (and eventually nanoterrorism) seriously. There are solutions to these problems -- but they are not being dealt with seriously by current government or regulatory organization activities.
So, for the programmers on /., its a really simple perspective -- over time the code becomes corrupted.
It is going to be a sticky issue in society to deal with this knowledge.
One of the real problems with this is that we do not currently have reliable methods for removing the broken genetic code and replacing it with corrected genetic code. But the drug therapy approach may function as an intermediate stopgap measure.
In addition, knowing the gene allows for genetic testing for such defects, so the number of individuals plagued by the disease may decrease in the future.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize how the tobacco industry "spun" its perspective. One only has to read "The Big Down" to know how anti-technology they are. So one should not trust any other publications more than one trusts the claims of the average television commercial.
Interestingly, when you navigate a Matrioshka Brain one has to take the star with you -- so changing course or speed does take a rather long time.
1. D. R. Criswell, "Solar System Industrialization: Implications for Interstellar Migrations", Chapter 4 in Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, Ben R. Finney and Eric M. Jones, (eds.), University of California Press, (1985), pp 50-87.
Lets take the cycles and reallocate them to something that living human beings can actually benefit from!
We don't have a fuel resource problem at this time. There is plenty of material in Russia that could be repackaged and used as reactor fuel for many years.
What you need is inexpensive molecular isotope separation capability. And that requires moderately advanced bionanotechnology or robust molecular nanotechnology. For example, the problem with the cleanup of Hanford isn't so much worries about proliferation but the simple quantity of a variety of radioactive isotopes mixed in with non-radioactive materials that have no useful purpose with respect to breeding more nuclear fuel.
Ultimately one wants very small local reprocessing facilities. By keeping them local one avoids the risks of transporting radioactive materials and concentrates the areas that need to be defended against terrorist activities. By continually recycling the radioactive isotopes to be bred back into non-radioactive isotopes one completely eliminates the waste problem. Unfortunately, we just don't have the technology to do this cost effectively yet.
A much smaller and more general explanation for a seed AI is here at the Singularity Institute.
This is something to be very afraid of if people who are not fans of Western culture manage to develop it first.
Interestingly, it looks like you could purchase access to this much computing power by buying out BDE for a mere $6 million.
That statement is only correct if you assume molecular nanotechnology is not feasible. If it is feasible you can completely dismantle Venus or Mars in less than 100 years (Ref here). If you can completely dismantle them, I would argue its highly probable that you could terraform them as well. But it makes no sense to leave the material at the bottom of gravity wells when you could use it for advanced satellites as I discuss here for example.
If assume that we understand most of the basic laws of physics and there isn't any possibility for "magic physics" such as subatomic engineering or faster-than-light travel, then one can predict what "advanced" intelligent technological civilizations may look like. At least some of them seem likely to be Matrioshka Brains. These would be very difficult to detect using our current technology because they radiate heat at close to the cosmic microwave background temperature. To look for signs of advanced technological civilizations we will need to do infrared surveys, something that was suggested by Freeman Dyson more than 40 years ago.
Another form they might take would be bacteria sized hive minds constructed using advanced molecular nanotechnology. In which case they could be all around us on Earth and we would never notice them. To look for those we need to start a program to develop highly parallel air, water and soil samplers that can detect micron and submicron sized bits of "technology".
Free your mind -- the rest will follow.
I'm speaking here as founder and president of what was the 2nd largest biotechnology company in the U.S. focused on the molecular biology of aging during the mid-'90s. So we will assume for the sake of improving the discussion I'm moderately well informed in this arcane branch of knowledge.
Point #1: If you read something scientific or technical in the "popular" press, never assume that they managed to interpret it properly. If reporters don't have an education in a particular discipline, they are not likely to understand the subtleties of what is being discussed. Always go back to the most scientific sources you can get access to. Most of the readers are presumably qualified to evaluate arguments on technical merits (this is the /. forum!). Learn the jargon and if you don't understand something find an expert and ask questions (or post to the forum -- you never know when an expert might be lurking).
Point #2: Never assume a /. poster knows what they are talking about (or has verified what they may have copied or concluded from popular press). Case in point: "aging in mice seems to be the byproduct of the chemicals that prevent cancer". The material under discussion is a mutant p53 protein which is the byproduct of a modified p53 gene. It is not by anyone familiar with discussions in this field a "chemical". The p53 protein weighs tens of thousands of daltons and has multiple "active" functions -- most molecules considered "chemicals" weigh less than a few thousand daltons and have few, if any, "active" functions.
From the Nature news report: "they created mice with a chunk missing from one copy of the gene". Translating this into "programmer" terms -- this is in effect replacing 1 of 2 instantiations of an essential subroutine in an ~30,000 subroutine system with a subroutine that has had some of its lines deleted. How do you draw conclusions as to what is going on in that situation? Unless you know what lines were deleted and what the purpose of those lines was you have relatively little hope of drawing conclusions that would allow you to debug the system (at least IMHO). You certainly cannot discuss what the situation means in any intelligent fashion.
All of that being said, I'll provide my "spin" on the results. The normal p53 protein is a "gatekeeper" protein. Its purpose is to determine whether or not DNA damage is present (i.e. whether your program has been corrupted). If too much damage is present it induces cells to commit apoptosis (cellular suicide). If less damage is present, it delays cellular replication (copying) until the damage that is present can be repaired (calling the ECC subroutines). So it acts as a brake on the replication of mutated/damaged DNA and an executioner for cells that are so far beyond the error-correction subroutines that they represent a threat to the entire organism. In larger organisms (which have more cells and are therefore at greater risk of developing a "mutant" program and therefore cancer [which is unregulated cellular replication]) it is important to constrain replication. So humans, in contrast to mice may have a p53 which strongly constrains cellular replication. { Alternatively they may have "redundant" subroutines like telomere shortening (mice have very long telomeres, humans do not) which function as "backup" programs that function to limit cellular division and therefore the development of cancer. (This is based on the concept that short telomeres inform cells to "stop dividing" just as "damaged DNA" [through the p53 protein] cause cells to stop dividing.) } The extent to which short telomeres may resemble "damaged" DNA (and therefore activate the p53 "subroutines") is unclear (to me) at this point. [This is a fairly hot topic of scientific debate.]
If we view cancer and aging as complementary ends of the see-saw -- allow too much cellular replication and one gets cancer -- allow too little cellular replication and those parts that wear out are not replaced, resulting in aging, and one may be able to interpret the results of this study. The part of the p53 gene that was deleted probably served to function to "remove" the block against replication or "enable" the replication function. So what may be occuring is that the mutant p53 gene may be detecting damage, blocking replication, but then when the damage is repaired the defective p53 may not be allowing replication to proceed. Thus you have very effective anti-cancer properties but as one gets older there are fewer and fewer cells available to replace those that are lost. Net result: accelerated aging.
Now, this result need not be pessimistic. As Tom Kirkwood, one of the world's leading gerontologists pointed out in the Nature article, "We could be able to pick a path through the molecular mechanisms of ageing without making cells more tumour-prone. 'There's no reason why you shouldn't get greater defence against cancer and greater longevity.'"
As a once upon a time programmer -- I encourage people in the software industry -- "View genomes as programs -- lets figure out where the bugs are and then lets go fix them."
The limits on power consumption have relatively little to do with electrical resistance and a great deal to do with erasing bits. As Landauer and Bennett have shown, you can compute for essentially free but you have to pay a price of generating entropy (heat) when you erase bits. To achieve the really significant increases we have to move from non-reversible architectures (all current commercial computers) to reversible architectures that minimize the number of bits erased. Michael Frank is one of the leading people working in this area.
As Drexler discusses in Nanosystems, using reversible rod-logic nanocomputers, one should be able to get from our current 10^9 ops/sec chips to 10^21 ops/sec in 1 cm^3 before one hits the heat removal limits. So the anticipated throughput increase is ~10^12 ops which a trillion vs. your estimate(?) of 90 billion. But it isn't going to run on a single battery. Its consuming (and radiating) 100,000W. Interestingly enough, since such a nanocomputer has ~10^3-10^5 times the processing capacity of the human brain in 10^-3 times the volume such a computer is probably worth a million or more human brains (if we can figure out how to program it...).
Interestingly enough, people at both Bell Labs and IBM are working on these issues. Here is a URL for the discussion of the Bell Labs progress on Nanodot
While ribosomes are indeed nano-assemblers they are limited to assembling proteins with the 20 natural amino acids. Scientists are working on extending the genetic code but its going to be a rough road. The problem with DNA or protein based wires is getting them to self-assemble into functional systems. Nadrian Seeman, one of the few scientists who has actually built stuff, out of DNA has said that one of the problems is that when you throw a few million long molecules equipped with self-assembly properties into a test tube the problem is keeping them from assembling into a tangled ball of strings.
Reproduction is not required for life. Life can be defined completely on the basis of metabolism. Both mutation and selection are required for evolution. The problem is you have to have relatively intelligent life to figure out how to engineer metabolic components so they do not wear with time (you can avoid wear entirely at the molecular level). If you can replace or repair damaged components, one need not have any requirement for reproduction and any evolution desired can be entirely self-directed. The fundamental problem with molecular nanocomputers is radiation damage. Decay of radioactive elements and cosmic rays provide enough energy to break molecular bonds. As a result you need a fair amount of redundency and majority logic to have molecular computers with reasonable lifetimes. Drexler has covered this extensively on pgs. 154-160 of Nanosystems
I've recently finished a detailed analysis of what is required to achieve the full vision of molecular nanotechnology via the wet (biotechnology enabled) path (in contrast to the dry path being pursued by Zyvex). It will require significant improvements in both computer capacity and tools for the computer-assisted, and eventually automated, design of enzymes. Currently our abilities to design enzymes is limited, but we can expect these capabilities to increase significantly within the current decade. Within the period from 2010-2020, the costs for the design of assembly lines for nanoscale parts should fall low enough that the design and assembly of nanorobots should become feasible. So Drexler's estimates may yet prove to be right on the money.
Drexler's vision is very clear, you want to get almost all of the atoms precisely positioned and bonded in 3D space developing machine parts on the nanoscale from 50-500 nm. Thats millions to billions of atoms. The largest specific structures chemists build contain only a few hundred atoms. And getting there isn't easy -- consider it took around 30 years from the discovery of Taxol until we figured out how to synthesize it.
And assemblers need not be slow. See this paper by JoSH Hall. A properly designed nanotech assembly line can reproduce its weight in nanoparts every millisecond! However its good that you are interested in this. I'll be publishing a paper soon that will I hope will shorten the path and decrease the cost to achieving real molecular nanotechnology. And it uses organic chemistry synthesis as its foundation.
There are ways to provide external power as well, you can lie on an ultrasonic couch and the Nanobots can harvest the ultrasonic energy it supplies. Nanomedicine was published in Oct. 1999, so Whitesides would have had plenty of time to investigate this if he had really wanted to give the topic fair treatment.