As I pointed out in another comment, Drexler pointed out these idea that one could look to Nature for micromachines as much as 20 years ago.
I agree that one can use antibodies as an analogy for a diagnostic laboratory. This is how I think of the "tips" of the molecular sorters that are discussed in Nanosystems and Nanomedicine. However I must disagree with the idea that our white blood cells do not wipe out cancer. This was an unresolved question when I took immunology 8+ years ago. I strongly suspect in people that have the right combination of MHC alleles that they can display the fragments of mutated proteins such as p53 (mutated in over half of all cancers). For some individuals their immune system may quite be quite able to recognize and kill those cells. But those dastardly cancer cells are tricky. It has been shown that cancer cells will mutate to the point where they display a protein known as the FAS ligand which they can use to instruct the immune system cells to commit suicide (apoptosis).
To get around this you will really need much more sensing capability and programmability packed into the nanobots so they can learn to recognize the many disguises the cancer cells may adopt. Freitas has proposed in Nanomedicine that the nanobots may actually be able to measure the milli-kelvin temperature differences one would find around the more active cancer cells. They would also be able to detect the low oxygen conditions that exist in small tumors before they active the angiogenisis genes to get an increased blood supply. There are lots of things we will be able to do once we have the technology.
What may have been reproduced is an excess production of heat in the experiments. I know of no peer reviewed papers that demonstrate that cold fusion really exists. I wouldn't care if Fleischman and Pons were geologists if their proposal didn't violate generally accepted concepts in physics. If you want to violate generally accepted laws you probably need both extraordinary evidence and a good explanation for it.
The cold fusion debate is different from the nanotechnology debate. Nobody has made a reasonable case (in over 20-40 years) for why it violates any laws of physics. Whitesides gets the whole nanobot-brownian motion discussion wrong because he picks the wrong size for nanobots. They aren't 100 nm in size they are much closer to 1 micron in size. He also clearly hasn't read Nanomedicine, which discusses a number of means for nanobots to navigate. For his argument to hold water he would have to negate all of the navigational strategies discussed there. He is simply uninformed.
People need to stop viewing biotechnology as separate from nanotechnology. Biotechnology is nanotechnology, its simply not "molecular nanotechnology" as envisioned by Drexler. The reason for that is that the assembly methods do not exist in nature to assemble very complex molecules (with molecular weights greater than ~3000 daltons) where the precise location and bonding of each atom is controlled. What Drexler is proposing is the assembly of molecules of much greater size with much greater precision than chemists or molecular biologists can manage to perform at this time. They object to the vision because it will be hard, not because it is impossible.
Drexler does go into chemical specifics. Chapter 8, pgs 191-249 of Nanosystems is all about such specifics. He also points out the fact that devices in Nature can be used as existance proofs for these ideas. From is 1981 paper, "The existence of this range of components in nature indicates that power-driven mechanical systems can be constructed on a molecular scale."
There are two problems the chemists have. First, they haven't read the material. Second, Drexler is proposing to precisely assemble millions to billions of atoms and the chemists think that is infeasible. That is why programmers can accept nanotechnology to a greater degree than chemists -- manipulating a million or a billion "bits" is something they regularly have to deal with. For chemists the idea is nightmare.
I'd urge readers to educate themselves with regard to the material before they comment on it. If we have to spend all of our time attempting to erase malformed memes we will never get a chance to work on developing new ones.
If you did a small amount of investigation you would know that the atomic composition of currently designed nanoparts (here) is mostly C followed by H/N/O and to a much lesser extent S/Si/P/F. With the possible exception of F (diatoms in the ocean use Si) all of these elements are used by Nature.
So the statement that "nanotechnology seeks to use the rest of the periodic table" is incorrect. A better statement would be that "nanotechnology seeks to explore the assembly of atoms in ways that, to date, have been unexplored by nature".
Current efforts in nanotechnology are not directed towards making "analogs" of things "found in nature with elements not commonly used in nature". Current efforts are directed towards using the laws of physics and chemistry to explore regions of the phase space for atomic structures that are by and large unexplored by nature. Zyvex wants to assemble diamondoid materials -- that isn't a different element, its a different way of putting carbon atoms together than that commonly used by nature. Nature primarily assembles polymers
(DNA, RNA & Proteins) which involve creating 2 covalent bonds -- molecular nanotechnology seeks to create more rigid, stronger materials by controlling the creation of 3-4 covalent bonds.
The development of nanotechnology is likely because of the "existance proofs" provided by nature. The development of "picotechnology" is highly speculative, as documented by Hans Moravec in Harvard Doesn't Publish Science Fiction.
It would be nice if people really knew something about a topic before they commented on it.
I'm not going to go through EOC to see if the quote is correct. My guess is that 150 million atoms is more like the requirements for an assembler system or perhaps even a self-replicating system. Assembler arms as proposed by Drexler (in Nanosystems) or Merkle (the Stewart platform based assembler) have been estimated to require 4,000,000 and 3,000,000 atoms respectively.
If we are going to discuss nanotechnology we need to be precise.:-)
Before the ink was dry on the Whitesides article I had sent a letter sent to the editors of Scientific American. The Whitesides article contains clear errors as well as misleading statements.
You may find an expanded copy of my letter to the editors here.
Whitesides is a chemist and while he has made huge contributions to that field, particularly with his nano-imprint lithography, for which he won a Foresight Prize several years ago, he is not, unfortunately, someone who understands molecular nanotechnology. For that you have to read Drexler's take from the same issue which is here.
Readers of scientific literature must do "reputation" analysis. Would you trust a life-time COBOL programmer to comment on whether or not your JAVA code was well written or crap? I think not. One should judge the Whitesides article from the same perspective.
"We show that the physical and electrical structure and hence the inversion charge for crystalline
oxides on semiconductors can be understood and systematically manipulated at the atomic level.
Heterojunction band offset and alignment are adjusted by atomic-level structural and chemical
changes, resulting in the demonstration of an electrical interface between a polar oxide and a
semiconductor free of interface charge. In a broader sense, we take the metal oxide semiconductor
device to a new and prominent position in the solid-state electronics timeline. It can now be
extensively developed using an entirely new physical system: the crystalline
oxides-on-semiconductors interface."
My summary:
Oak Ridge National Lab scientsts demonstrate "crystalline oxide semiconductors", that are a combination of Ba-SrO and SrTiO3 on Silicon or BaTiO3 on Germanium. The cool thing is it looks like this will enable germanium field effect transistors that could switch faster than the 210 GHz Si-Ge transistors that IBM can now produce.
The problem isn't with the Justice Department, the problem is with the law. The solution would be to get the Movie & Music industries to notice we are fed up with the DMCA. Simply stop buying CD's or going to movies for a year. The companies will find their profits drying up, the stockholders will want to know why and the executives will have to come up with better models for selling things to the public instead of sneaking laws like the DMCA under the fence. Enroll your family & friends -- just say no to movies & music. Patronize your library or a used book store instead.
It will not free Sklyarov now, but it will make people think twice about pulling something like this in the future. ADOBE still remains on my "do not purchase list", perhaps forever.
Also, organize concerted efforts to let your local radio and television stations know about this. Have several friends call their "news tips" desk. Point out how the U.S. is volating Sklyarov's rights and creating an international incident all because the record & movie companies want to make you pay every time you listen to, or view, one of their products. The Supreme Court has said if you own it you can use it any way you want.
SETI (really CETI) searches will fail
on
Optical SETI
·
· Score: 1
SETI with an emphasis on CETI (where the emphasis is on the expectation of 'communication' transmissions) is based on assumptions, fundamentally flawed IMO, that advanced civilizations will not evolve to the limits imposed by physical laws. If they do, then solar systems should contain in excess of 10^50 bits. You cannot communicate even a small fraction of 10^50 bits across interstellar distances (several l.y.) in the age of the universe even if you use all the bandwidth from radio to UV-radiation.
Advanced technological civilizations do not communicate across interstellar distances because you can never get off the first page of Encyclopedia Galactica. This discussed more in my paper from the OSETI III conference, Life at the limits of physical laws which is part of the Matrioshka Brains papers.
We can conduct "SETI" (where the emphasis is searching for 'signs' of advanced technological civilizations) but it requires gravitational microlensing studies, infrared and occultation astronomy -- not listening for radio or optical transmissions.
The fact that we are accelerating towards the Vinge Singularity is ignored. Kurzweil is extensively documenting this at KurzweilAI.net (unavailable today). Various estimates place this between 2020 and 2050. Once we have autonomous self-replicating systems (nanobots), we can dismantle the planets and turn it into computronium. We will come very close to the limits of the computational capacity allowed within our solar system within this century. Even if this fast ramp is not realized, you underestimate the progress that will be made in extending the human lifespan. We have the genome now, we will rapidly decode much of it over the next decade and begin to design and implement anti-aging therapies. Unless you are over 50 years old or will reject the use of such technologies, the probability that you will make it to 200 is quite high. Sorry, you have to face the problem.:-)
You need to go study this topic in much more detail. Read some of the papers by Michael Frank, he is one of the world's experts in this area. Then go study some of the original work by Charles Bennett.
You do need to save the intermediate state information. That is why Frank's design for the ultimate reversible computer is so big (see my other post on this topic). You should keep in mind that you can compute for "free" (if you do it slowly), its erasing bits that costs you money (generates entropy as heat). Logical AND operations erase information such that you cannot run the calculation backwards. You have to design the hardware such that it has no such information destroying operations.
The problem I have with this discussion is that it involves computing at the sub-atomic level. We are getting better at this kind of thing -- for example measuring the spin state of a single atom (Nanodot discussion is here). But because we have lots of examples of what can be done using atomic-scale engineering (Nature provides many examples of this), and we have no examples of sub-atomic scale engineering, I deeply doubt we will have robust computers operating at sub-atomic size scales anytime soon.
Now, what we will be able to engineer in this century, using diamondoid molecular nanotechnology, is solar system sized nested layer Dyson shell supercomputers. This is a unique architecture that I have named a Matrioshka Brain. It will allow us to most efficiently use the entire power output of the sun and compute somewhere in the range of 10^42 to 10^52 ops per second.
Interestingly enough, Michael Franks has a paper "Reversibility in optimally scalable computer architectures" which postulates a solar system sized reversible architecture that would out-compute any non-reversible architecture. This too would be using atomic-scale engineering. Unfortunately it requires the power output of an A or B class star (~50,000 suns) and requires an amount of silicon equal to the mass of Saturn (our solar system doesn't even come close to having that unless we mine the sun for it). After we have developed machines of these architectures, our development comes to a slow halt unless our ability to do sub-atomic engineering can be developed. I'll be quite happy with what we can get out of atomic-scale engineering -- it supplies enough computronium for roughly a trillion-trillion human minds for those who choose to upload.
It is most unfortunate that yet another individual wasn't prepared for a premature death. Someone with this his education and technical awareness should certainly have been signed up for cryonics. For readers who want to call that crazy, don't hit the submit key until you have read the the detailed commentary by Ralph Merkle on how molecular nanotechnology may be used to repair the damage caused by freezing. Be informed and be prepared or be dead. Its pretty simple logic. It is very sad that Douglas Adams wasn't informed enough and smart enough to follow this path. Until Mind Uploading becomes feasible, cryonics is the only viable option we have available defeating death.
By knowing the process by which elements are created in stars, the ratios of stable isotopes and the time it takes for the radioactive isotopes to decay, scientists can get a pretty clear picture of where the materials come from, what kind of star was involved, how long ago it may have dispersed the elements, etc. Its complex science but its very real. Becuase mass spectrometer machines are very sensitive, you can measure all of the abundances very accurately, then using a lot of computer time you can work your way back to the starting conditions.
In answer to the question, you have to ask where are you going to get a lot of He/Ar (old stars) where carbon is abundant at a high enough density to create the Buckyballs, at a low enough temperature that it isn't destroyed in the stellar atmosphere, and mass outflow from the star to cause it to end up in comets -- q.e.d. Carbon stars.
Sequencing the fugu is a logical next step. As pointed out by others, the genome is fairly dense so the return on investment is high. The current genome sequencing capacity at the major genome centers (JGI, Washington U, MIT, the Sanger Center, Celera, TIGR, Incyte, etc.) can sequence a human sized genome (~3 GBp) every 6 months or so. The costs are still pretty high, perhaps $50-200 million per genome would be my guesstimate. However as more and more genomes are sequenced, the costs to sequence each genome will decline because you do not have to sequence with as much redundancy. The 5-10 fold redundancy currently typical, is needed to guarantee that you reassemble the genome from the fragments properly. As you have more templates onto which you can place similar sequences, that required redundancy should decline.
My suspicion would be that after the human, mouse & fugu are finalized that the next genome to sequenced will be the Chimpanzee.
Then the question is -- what genomes do you sequence after those? I've argued that since aging is the disease that everyone has, that genomes of non- or slowly aging organisms would provide a great deal of information about what improvements need to be made to the human genome to allow us to live indefinately (longvity limited by our accident rates). The genomes that would provide interesting insights include elephants, whales, tortises, lobsters, giant clams, bats and parrots or maccaws. The genomes of all of these species have been tuned for extended longevity, perhaps in quite different ways. The genomes of species such as geckos, starfish, crabs and other animals that have the ability to regrow limbs would provide us with information on how nature has organized genetic programs to regrow complex tissues (something humans lack). Those who would like to push the NIH in this direction should send letters about this
to the Office of the Director of the NHCGR.
See this link.
For those interested, I maintain a page with a semi-current status of many of the genome projects
here.
While it is great to have the versions of the Bible online, my first question is always, "What language is it in?" When I first went to church everything was in Latin, then things got switched to English. The first Bibles however, had to be written in Hebrew, Arameic (sp?) or Greek. Then into Latin, then into German, French, English, etc. How much gets lost in the translation? How much gets lost in the context (time) specific words or grammar?
What I would like to see online is line-by-line translations of various editions of the Bible with scholarly commentary regarding word meanings or context specific grammars. Then we might have a fighting chance of getting back to what was said
by Jesus (if he existed) or his diciples (several hundred years after the period).
I don't believe there is a technical definition for nanites. If someone has a source for its first use, please post it.
Nanobots, have been fairly well defined and well described. See for example, the respirocytes paper from the Nanomedicine page at the Foresight Institute. The operating parameters for diamondoid nanobots are described in depth in Nanomedicine, Volume I. A dozen or more types of nanobots are described in the current and future volumes of Nanomedicine.
Biobots, is a term that I personally have used at several conferences to describe what chainsaw1 refers to as "nanites". However they do not have many of the qualities he attributes to them. They might make you somewhat stronger, but your ultimate strength is limited by your bone strength . People who abuse steroids can become so strong they snap their bones. It will be difficult to construct biobots/nanites that create stronger bones because you need a stronger structural material. The only possible material that currently exists, for which we have manufacturing systems in nature, would be very strong sea shells (e.g. abalone shells). But your body would probably have an immune reaction if you loaded them up with biobots that augmented your natural bone with the proteins that are used to strengthen the shells. Biobots, could perhaps do things like influence whether your muscle fibers are fast twitch or slow twitch, which would change you from a sprinter into a marathoner and back. Biobots could also produce erythropoetin, causing you to make more red blood cells, increasing your oxygen capacity, and perhaps at the same time your risk for forming blood clots or overloading your heart due to increased blood viscosity. Biobots could also give you the skin of a cameleon or octopus (color changing). Biobots will not have significant communications capabilities because it would have to be encoded chemically and there is no system in nature for "writing" new information into DNA (all it does is erroneously copy old information) or writing a variety of chemical molecules that would be required for communicating any volume of information.
Biobots do have uses however. I came to the conclusion in watching the movie X-men, that about 1/3 of the capabilities in the movie, you could do with biobots, 1/3 the capabilities would require diamondoid nanobots and the final 1/3 would probably require changing the laws of physics or "tricks" using microelectronics.
It is worth noting, that the term biobots is overloaded, because it is used in some contexts to describe small insect-like robots that have neural-net control systems.
If you think nature is "static", you should look at how many people it kills every year due to various new creations. Nature itself is filled with self-replicating, mutating, DNA sharing organisms. And in case you haven't noticed it, most of them view you as LUNCH. Yes, you do have defenses, but those defenses fail every year for millions of people.
Multi-tip AFMs have been discussed for quite some time. It isn't that difficult a problem, except perhaps if you want to get the tips really close to each other. There might be other minor problems relating to inter-tip interference if they are operated simultaneously. The problem is that you have no current use for parallel AFMs because lithography doesn't need atomic scale devices yet (all the devices would need to be redesigned anyway). The real problem is that there only exist 3! nanoscale machine parts. While not AFMs per se, as I mention in my
Nano@Home proposal, Hong and Mirkin at Northwestern, have demonstrated parallel nanoscale "writing" with an 8-pen device. I believe Stanford and some Japanese groups were working on a multi-tip AFMs for a while, but don't know the status of these projects. Until we address the lack of parts problem (which is what my proposal attempts to do), it is doubtful that instrument companies will see a use for parallel tip AFMs and actually design and market them.
Unfortunately, WolfWithoutAClause, argues from the perspective of "current" technology but proposes actions that require "future" technology to be done cost effectively.
We have two space habitats now, MIR and the International Space Station. The history of the development of space habitats shows that, using current technology, we produce very high cost habitats that are dependent upon the Earth. O'Neill in his promotion of real space habitats makes it clear that to be built cost effectively, the material for their construction must come from someplace other than the Earth. That requires future technology.
Given current habitat dependence on earth, a civilization destroying asteroid, would presumably doom the crews on the station(s) as well. If the impact is not too large (sufficiently large to vaporize the oceans), then we should expect crews in submerged nuclear submarines to survive. Because they have long life power sources and extensive food stores, they would presumably be able to emerge someplace where even longer term energy resources are available (e.g. the Middle East). This would potentially allow them to construct green houses that could support a small population until the dust clears from the atmosphere. There are possible locations (deep valleys, underground facilities, etc.) that could survive the impact as well. Collectively, these would form the seeds of a new civilization. There are of course problems such as how do you identify locations where there are likely to be preserved the seeds, power sources, light sources, etc. in relative proximity that would allow you to maintain an agricultural base. But I think people could figure this out. It would be interesting to start a project that created a number of protected "humanity shelters" around the world that were widely know about just to be able to know we had a solution to the most probable doomsday scenarios.
Now, with regard to moving extensive numbers of people into space habitats or colonizing other planets with self-sustaining groups. This is going to require nanotechnology to be done cost effectively. If you have self-replicating systems based on nanotechnology (discussed by Josh Hall in this paper), then you can rapidly move people off the planet. You can also dissassemble a planet or two and build in the vicinity of ~100 billion telescopes the diameter of the moon. This array of telescopes would fill most of the inner solar system out to the orbit of Jupiter. At that point we would certainly be able to identify all of the Oort Cloud objects. Nanoprobes would then be launched to these objects using mass drivers. Once they arrive at these objects, they can be disasssembled into useful construction material and reoriented on orbits to deliver that material to useful locations. If objects were found that were on killer trajectories that could not be reformatted/redirected in time by the nanoengineers, then the mass drivers could also be used to deliver high velocity projectiles into the oncoming path of the object to deflect or vaporize it.
So the answer, as it is with most things, is we need molecular nanotechnology and self-replicating engineering systems. The last time I looked at some of the sites suggested, they did not include nanotechnology in their habitat development strategies. Without nanotechnology, the costs are likely to be so high that serious people can only consider them fantasies.
The links are password protected due to the problem that many of them are under copyright protection. If people contact me personally on a case by case I can either forward articles to them or provide them with passwords.
The problem is this skates along the knife edge of "fair use" and copyright law. I'm working on alternate solutions but would like to keep myself on the good side of publishers in the hope that eventually permission may be obtained for granting full access.
The bottom line is this -- nanotechnology enables the transition from pre-Kardashev-Type-I civilizations (us) to post-KT-II civilizations in decades. Such civilizations are resistant to almost all hazards on galactic scales and will thus be the dominant form of life in galaxies. If we are typical, it only takes a few hundred years to evolve from the discovery of the laws of physics to reach KT-II levels. KT-II civilizations survive for trillions of years. Unless the evolution of intelligent life is very, very difficult our galaxy should be dominiated by KT-II civilizations (Dyson shell supercomputers, a.k.a. Matrioshka Brains) with thought capacities in excess of a trillion trillion times the human mind.
Intentional communications generally occurs between entitites of approximately the same capacity. As we are at the sub-worm level in comparison to KT-II civilizations, they will not be directing communications at us. Non-intended leakage communications could be detected by SETI out to a few dozen light years, but we should be looking in the MHz frequences, not in the GHz frequencies. Therefore SETI@home is a waste of CPU cycles.
Interstellar travel is possible (the British Interplanetary Society Project Daedalus Study showed that). It is however pointless. The speed-of-light delays and communications costs for large volumes of data, mean you get little benefit from colonization. You do not want to become larger, you want to become smaller (or at least work very hard to minimize propagation delays)! The fact that KT-II civilizations can each build billions of lunar diameter telescopes makes rationalizations for interstellar travel difficult (why go "there" when you can "watch" there?). You also don't go very far, because "there", by the time you arrive, may not be there anymore (a closer civilization may have occupied the location). Arguments that we should colonize the galaxy in a few million years fail to understand that the rate of expansion is not limited by the speed-of-light but by the time it takes to dismantle planets, gas giants, brown dwarfs, etc. and turn them into something useful. It isn't the stars that are desirable to KT-II civilizations, it is planets with heavy metal abundances that "happen" to be on courses around the galaxy that these civilizations find attractive.
It is worth noting that the gravitational microlensing results, suggest that our galaxy is surrounded by ~200 billion "objects" of masses around 0.3-0.5 Msun. Astronomers are currently unable to provide an good explanation for what these might be. The best current guess is primordial black holes. (Of course most of the astronomers involved assume the universe is "dead".)
Comments by Verteiron, regarding the use of radio are absolutely correct. Given the capacities of KT-II civilizations, they are going to be able to build very large telescopes that can detect any other KT-II civilizations. If they want to communicate, they will do it using tightly focused lasers, probably in the blue or UV regions. This minimizes photon (energy) loss due to beam spreading and allows the highest data rates.
... then Oracle (or another LJE bootstrapped company) will keep reinventing the NIC over and over and over again, until Windows dies the death it deserves.
Not that I hate windows mind you, I actually use it on most of my machines (in large part because X is such a pain to get running on anything but "known" video cards...), but as Larry has suggested the quality of the software leaves a lot to be desired. Just try running ~4 dozen processes and see what happens to process startups and response time... Microsoft is "working" on this bug as I type...
Do you think the NIC only runs in a constrained video mode because they couldn't figure out how to configure X otherwise...:-)
Seriously though, if it puts the net into the hands of young people it is a big step forward.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that one can use antibodies as an analogy for a diagnostic laboratory. This is how I think of the "tips" of the molecular sorters that are discussed in Nanosystems and Nanomedicine. However I must disagree with the idea that our white blood cells do not wipe out cancer. This was an unresolved question when I took immunology 8+ years ago. I strongly suspect in people that have the right combination of MHC alleles that they can display the fragments of mutated proteins such as p53 (mutated in over half of all cancers). For some individuals their immune system may quite be quite able to recognize and kill those cells. But those dastardly cancer cells are tricky. It has been shown that cancer cells will mutate to the point where they display a protein known as the FAS ligand which they can use to instruct the immune system cells to commit suicide (apoptosis).
To get around this you will really need much more sensing capability and programmability packed into the nanobots so they can learn to recognize the many disguises the cancer cells may adopt. Freitas has proposed in Nanomedicine that the nanobots may actually be able to measure the milli-kelvin temperature differences one would find around the more active cancer cells. They would also be able to detect the low oxygen conditions that exist in small tumors before they active the angiogenisis genes to get an increased blood supply. There are lots of things we will be able to do once we have the technology.
The cold fusion debate is different from the nanotechnology debate. Nobody has made a reasonable case (in over 20-40 years) for why it violates any laws of physics. Whitesides gets the whole nanobot-brownian motion discussion wrong because he picks the wrong size for nanobots. They aren't 100 nm in size they are much closer to 1 micron in size. He also clearly hasn't read Nanomedicine, which discusses a number of means for nanobots to navigate. For his argument to hold water he would have to negate all of the navigational strategies discussed there. He is simply uninformed.
People need to stop viewing biotechnology as separate from nanotechnology. Biotechnology is nanotechnology, its simply not "molecular nanotechnology" as envisioned by Drexler. The reason for that is that the assembly methods do not exist in nature to assemble very complex molecules (with molecular weights greater than ~3000 daltons) where the precise location and bonding of each atom is controlled. What Drexler is proposing is the assembly of molecules of much greater size with much greater precision than chemists or molecular biologists can manage to perform at this time. They object to the vision because it will be hard, not because it is impossible.
There are two problems the chemists have. First, they haven't read the material. Second, Drexler is proposing to precisely assemble millions to billions of atoms and the chemists think that is infeasible. That is why programmers can accept nanotechnology to a greater degree than chemists -- manipulating a million or a billion "bits" is something they regularly have to deal with. For chemists the idea is nightmare.
I'd urge readers to educate themselves with regard to the material before they comment on it. If we have to spend all of our time attempting to erase malformed memes we will never get a chance to work on developing new ones.
Current efforts in nanotechnology are not directed towards making "analogs" of things "found in nature with elements not commonly used in nature". Current efforts are directed towards using the laws of physics and chemistry to explore regions of the phase space for atomic structures that are by and large unexplored by nature. Zyvex wants to assemble diamondoid materials -- that isn't a different element, its a different way of putting carbon atoms together than that commonly used by nature. Nature primarily assembles polymers (DNA, RNA & Proteins) which involve creating 2 covalent bonds -- molecular nanotechnology seeks to create more rigid, stronger materials by controlling the creation of 3-4 covalent bonds.
The development of nanotechnology is likely because of the "existance proofs" provided by nature. The development of "picotechnology" is highly speculative, as documented by Hans Moravec in Harvard Doesn't Publish Science Fiction.
It would be nice if people really knew something about a topic before they commented on it.
If we are going to discuss nanotechnology we need to be precise. :-)
You may find an expanded copy of my letter to the editors here.
Whitesides is a chemist and while he has made huge contributions to that field, particularly with his nano-imprint lithography, for which he won a Foresight Prize several years ago, he is not, unfortunately, someone who understands molecular nanotechnology. For that you have to read Drexler's take from the same issue which is here.
Readers of scientific literature must do "reputation" analysis. Would you trust a life-time COBOL programmer to comment on whether or not your JAVA code was well written or crap? I think not. One should judge the Whitesides article from the same perspective.
"We show that the physical and electrical structure and hence the inversion charge for crystalline oxides on semiconductors can be understood and systematically manipulated at the atomic level. Heterojunction band offset and alignment are adjusted by atomic-level structural and chemical changes, resulting in the demonstration of an electrical interface between a polar oxide and a semiconductor free of interface charge. In a broader sense, we take the metal oxide semiconductor device to a new and prominent position in the solid-state electronics timeline. It can now be extensively developed using an entirely new physical system: the crystalline oxides-on-semiconductors interface."
URLs Abstract and article (subscription may be required...)
My summary:
Oak Ridge National Lab scientsts demonstrate "crystalline oxide semiconductors", that are a combination of Ba-SrO and SrTiO3 on Silicon or BaTiO3 on Germanium. The cool thing is it looks like this will enable germanium field effect transistors that could switch faster than the 210 GHz Si-Ge transistors that IBM can now produce.
It will not free Sklyarov now, but it will make people think twice about pulling something like this in the future. ADOBE still remains on my "do not purchase list", perhaps forever.
Also, organize concerted efforts to let your local radio and television stations know about this. Have several friends call their "news tips" desk. Point out how the U.S. is volating Sklyarov's rights and creating an international incident all because the record & movie companies want to make you pay every time you listen to, or view, one of their products. The Supreme Court has said if you own it you can use it any way you want.
Advanced technological civilizations do not communicate across interstellar distances because you can never get off the first page of Encyclopedia Galactica. This discussed more in my paper from the OSETI III conference, Life at the limits of physical laws which is part of the Matrioshka Brains papers.
We can conduct "SETI" (where the emphasis is searching for 'signs' of advanced technological civilizations) but it requires gravitational microlensing studies, infrared and occultation astronomy -- not listening for radio or optical transmissions.
The fact that we are accelerating towards the Vinge Singularity is ignored. Kurzweil is extensively documenting this at KurzweilAI.net (unavailable today). Various estimates place this between 2020 and 2050. Once we have autonomous self-replicating systems (nanobots), we can dismantle the planets and turn it into computronium. We will come very close to the limits of the computational capacity allowed within our solar system within this century. Even if this fast ramp is not realized, you underestimate the progress that will be made in extending the human lifespan. We have the genome now, we will rapidly decode much of it over the next decade and begin to design and implement anti-aging therapies. Unless you are over 50 years old or will reject the use of such technologies, the probability that you will make it to 200 is quite high. Sorry, you have to face the problem. :-)
You do need to save the intermediate state information. That is why Frank's design for the ultimate reversible computer is so big (see my other post on this topic). You should keep in mind that you can compute for "free" (if you do it slowly), its erasing bits that costs you money (generates entropy as heat). Logical AND operations erase information such that you cannot run the calculation backwards. You have to design the hardware such that it has no such information destroying operations.
It is worth noting that Lloyd's thought experiments in these areas were preceded by similar speculations over 4 years ago in Anders Sandberg's paper The Physics of Information Processing Superobjects: Daily Life Among the Jupiter Brains. Lloyd has extended them a bit by bringing Black Holes into the picture.
Now, what we will be able to engineer in this century, using diamondoid molecular nanotechnology, is solar system sized nested layer Dyson shell supercomputers. This is a unique architecture that I have named a Matrioshka Brain. It will allow us to most efficiently use the entire power output of the sun and compute somewhere in the range of 10^42 to 10^52 ops per second.
Interestingly enough, Michael Franks has a paper "Reversibility in optimally scalable computer architectures" which postulates a solar system sized reversible architecture that would out-compute any non-reversible architecture. This too would be using atomic-scale engineering. Unfortunately it requires the power output of an A or B class star (~50,000 suns) and requires an amount of silicon equal to the mass of Saturn (our solar system doesn't even come close to having that unless we mine the sun for it). After we have developed machines of these architectures, our development comes to a slow halt unless our ability to do sub-atomic engineering can be developed. I'll be quite happy with what we can get out of atomic-scale engineering -- it supplies enough computronium for roughly a trillion-trillion human minds for those who choose to upload.
It is most unfortunate that yet another individual wasn't prepared for a premature death. Someone with this his education and technical awareness should certainly have been signed up for cryonics. For readers who want to call that crazy, don't hit the submit key until you have read the the detailed commentary by Ralph Merkle on how molecular nanotechnology may be used to repair the damage caused by freezing. Be informed and be prepared or be dead. Its pretty simple logic. It is very sad that Douglas Adams wasn't informed enough and smart enough to follow this path. Until Mind Uploading becomes feasible, cryonics is the only viable option we have available defeating death.
In answer to the question, you have to ask where are you going to get a lot of He/Ar (old stars) where carbon is abundant at a high enough density to create the Buckyballs, at a low enough temperature that it isn't destroyed in the stellar atmosphere, and mass outflow from the star to cause it to end up in comets -- q.e.d. Carbon stars.
My suspicion would be that after the human, mouse & fugu are finalized that the next genome to sequenced will be the Chimpanzee. Then the question is -- what genomes do you sequence after those? I've argued that since aging is the disease that everyone has, that genomes of non- or slowly aging organisms would provide a great deal of information about what improvements need to be made to the human genome to allow us to live indefinately (longvity limited by our accident rates). The genomes that would provide interesting insights include elephants, whales, tortises, lobsters, giant clams, bats and parrots or maccaws. The genomes of all of these species have been tuned for extended longevity, perhaps in quite different ways. The genomes of species such as geckos, starfish, crabs and other animals that have the ability to regrow limbs would provide us with information on how nature has organized genetic programs to regrow complex tissues (something humans lack). Those who would like to push the NIH in this direction should send letters about this to the Office of the Director of the NHCGR. See this link.
For those interested, I maintain a page with a semi-current status of many of the genome projects here.
What I would like to see online is line-by-line translations of various editions of the Bible with scholarly commentary regarding word meanings or context specific grammars. Then we might have a fighting chance of getting back to what was said
by Jesus (if he existed) or his diciples (several hundred years after the period).
Trust (believe?) but verify!
Nanobots, have been fairly well defined and well described. See for example, the respirocytes paper from the Nanomedicine page at the Foresight Institute. The operating parameters for diamondoid nanobots are described in depth in Nanomedicine, Volume I . A dozen or more types of nanobots are described in the current and future volumes of Nanomedicine.
Biobots, is a term that I personally have used at several conferences to describe what chainsaw1 refers to as "nanites". However they do not have many of the qualities he attributes to them. They might make you somewhat stronger, but your ultimate strength is limited by your bone strength . People who abuse steroids can become so strong they snap their bones. It will be difficult to construct biobots/nanites that create stronger bones because you need a stronger structural material. The only possible material that currently exists, for which we have manufacturing systems in nature, would be very strong sea shells (e.g. abalone shells). But your body would probably have an immune reaction if you loaded them up with biobots that augmented your natural bone with the proteins that are used to strengthen the shells. Biobots, could perhaps do things like influence whether your muscle fibers are fast twitch or slow twitch, which would change you from a sprinter into a marathoner and back. Biobots could also produce erythropoetin, causing you to make more red blood cells, increasing your oxygen capacity, and perhaps at the same time your risk for forming blood clots or overloading your heart due to increased blood viscosity. Biobots could also give you the skin of a cameleon or octopus (color changing). Biobots will not have significant communications capabilities because it would have to be encoded chemically and there is no system in nature for "writing" new information into DNA (all it does is erroneously copy old information) or writing a variety of chemical molecules that would be required for communicating any volume of information.
Biobots do have uses however. I came to the conclusion in watching the movie X-men, that about 1/3 of the capabilities in the movie, you could do with biobots, 1/3 the capabilities would require diamondoid nanobots and the final 1/3 would probably require changing the laws of physics or "tricks" using microelectronics.
It is worth noting, that the term biobots is overloaded, because it is used in some contexts to describe small insect-like robots that have neural-net control systems.
If you think nature is "static", you should look at how many people it kills every year due to various new creations. Nature itself is filled with self-replicating, mutating, DNA sharing organisms. And in case you haven't noticed it, most of them view you as LUNCH. Yes, you do have defenses, but those defenses fail every year for millions of people.
For more info, see my post regarding "Ye Are Gods", from the Sept. 24, 2000 Extropy Institute archives.
The Hong and Mirkin reference is:
S. Hong and C. A. Mirkin, "A Nanoplotter with Both Parallel and Serial Writing Capabilities", Science 288(5472):1808-11 (9 Jun 2000).
See: www.nanodot.org.
We have two space habitats now, MIR and the International Space Station. The history of the development of space habitats shows that, using current technology, we produce very high cost habitats that are dependent upon the Earth. O'Neill in his promotion of real space habitats makes it clear that to be built cost effectively, the material for their construction must come from someplace other than the Earth. That requires future technology.
Given current habitat dependence on earth, a civilization destroying asteroid, would presumably doom the crews on the station(s) as well. If the impact is not too large (sufficiently large to vaporize the oceans), then we should expect crews in submerged nuclear submarines to survive. Because they have long life power sources and extensive food stores, they would presumably be able to emerge someplace where even longer term energy resources are available (e.g. the Middle East). This would potentially allow them to construct green houses that could support a small population until the dust clears from the atmosphere. There are possible locations (deep valleys, underground facilities, etc.) that could survive the impact as well. Collectively, these would form the seeds of a new civilization. There are of course problems such as how do you identify locations where there are likely to be preserved the seeds, power sources, light sources, etc. in relative proximity that would allow you to maintain an agricultural base. But I think people could figure this out. It would be interesting to start a project that created a number of protected "humanity shelters" around the world that were widely know about just to be able to know we had a solution to the most probable doomsday scenarios.
Now, with regard to moving extensive numbers of people into space habitats or colonizing other planets with self-sustaining groups. This is going to require nanotechnology to be done cost effectively. If you have self-replicating systems based on nanotechnology (discussed by Josh Hall in this paper), then you can rapidly move people off the planet. You can also dissassemble a planet or two and build in the vicinity of ~100 billion telescopes the diameter of the moon. This array of telescopes would fill most of the inner solar system out to the orbit of Jupiter. At that point we would certainly be able to identify all of the Oort Cloud objects. Nanoprobes would then be launched to these objects using mass drivers. Once they arrive at these objects, they can be disasssembled into useful construction material and reoriented on orbits to deliver that material to useful locations. If objects were found that were on killer trajectories that could not be reformatted/redirected in time by the nanoengineers, then the mass drivers could also be used to deliver high velocity projectiles into the oncoming path of the object to deflect or vaporize it.
So the answer, as it is with most things, is we need molecular nanotechnology and self-replicating engineering systems. The last time I looked at some of the sites suggested, they did not include nanotechnology in their habitat development strategies. Without nanotechnology, the costs are likely to be so high that serious people can only consider them fantasies.
The links are password protected due to the problem that many of them are under copyright protection. If people contact me personally on a case by case I can either forward articles to them or provide them with passwords.
The problem is this skates along the knife edge of "fair use" and copyright law. I'm working on alternate solutions but would like to keep myself on the good side of publishers in the hope that eventually permission may be obtained for granting full access.
See: Misconceptions Regarding SETI, Dyson Spheres and the Fermi Paradox
The bottom line is this -- nanotechnology enables the transition from pre-Kardashev-Type-I civilizations (us) to post-KT-II civilizations in decades. Such civilizations are resistant to almost all hazards on galactic scales and will thus be the dominant form of life in galaxies. If we are typical, it only takes a few hundred years to evolve from the discovery of the laws of physics to reach KT-II levels. KT-II civilizations survive for trillions of years. Unless the evolution of intelligent life is very, very difficult our galaxy should be dominiated by KT-II civilizations (Dyson shell supercomputers, a.k.a. Matrioshka Brains) with thought capacities in excess of a trillion trillion times the human mind.
Intentional communications generally occurs between entitites of approximately the same capacity. As we are at the sub-worm level in comparison to KT-II civilizations, they will not be directing communications at us. Non-intended leakage communications could be detected by SETI out to a few dozen light years, but we should be looking in the MHz frequences, not in the GHz frequencies. Therefore SETI@home is a waste of CPU cycles.
Interstellar travel is possible (the British Interplanetary Society Project Daedalus Study showed that). It is however pointless. The speed-of-light delays and communications costs for large volumes of data, mean you get little benefit from colonization. You do not want to become larger, you want to become smaller (or at least work very hard to minimize propagation delays)! The fact that KT-II civilizations can each build billions of lunar diameter telescopes makes rationalizations for interstellar travel difficult (why go "there" when you can "watch" there?). You also don't go very far, because "there", by the time you arrive, may not be there anymore (a closer civilization may have occupied the location). Arguments that we should colonize the galaxy in a few million years fail to understand that the rate of expansion is not limited by the speed-of-light but by the time it takes to dismantle planets, gas giants, brown dwarfs, etc. and turn them into something useful. It isn't the stars that are desirable to KT-II civilizations, it is planets with heavy metal abundances that "happen" to be on courses around the galaxy that these civilizations find attractive.
It is worth noting that the gravitational microlensing results, suggest that our galaxy is surrounded by ~200 billion "objects" of masses around 0.3-0.5 Msun. Astronomers are currently unable to provide an good explanation for what these might be. The best current guess is primordial black holes. (Of course most of the astronomers involved assume the universe is "dead".)
Comments by Verteiron, regarding the use of radio are absolutely correct. Given the capacities of KT-II civilizations, they are going to be able to build very large telescopes that can detect any other KT-II civilizations. If they want to communicate, they will do it using tightly focused lasers, probably in the blue or UV regions. This minimizes photon (energy) loss due to beam spreading and allows the highest data rates.
... then Oracle (or another LJE bootstrapped company) will keep reinventing the NIC over and over and over again, until Windows dies the death it deserves.
:-)
Not that I hate windows mind you, I actually use it on most of my machines (in large part because X is such a pain to get running on anything but "known" video cards...), but as Larry has suggested the quality of the software leaves a lot to be desired. Just try running ~4 dozen processes and see what happens to process startups and response time... Microsoft is "working" on this bug as I type...
Do you think the NIC only runs in a constrained video mode because they couldn't figure out how to configure X otherwise...
Seriously though, if it puts the net into the hands of young people it is a big step forward.