Actually, I dont think they will be "organic" molecules, but molecular scale "hard" materials. Organic implies biology, and biology has nothing to do with nanoscale engineered components.
I'm sorry, but you dont have any idea of what you are talking about. "To each by need, from each by skill" does not a philosophy make. Communism has never existed on this planet. Ever. How can it, when there is a global economy? If you knew anything about communism you would know that it has never existed. Stalinism is simply a madmans psychotic paranoid view of politics. It has nothing to do with communism. What exactly is "large scale" communism? Communism has no scale. Its a global philosophy for all socio-economic interacton between people. Try actually READING something about the subject someday.
30 years is a hell of a long time for technology to advance, especially with Moore's law applying to nanocomputers. 5 years is unrealistic. 30 years is entirely feasible. It wont be right away, but look at the advances in medical knowledge in the last 30 years. Not in 5 or 10 years, but 30? Why not? To cure cancer, why in the world would it take 30 years to discover how to identify and kill a cancerous cell? Or to know the fingerprint of HIV and hunt it down and kill it? That would seem a pretty simple use of this technology, as opposed to a whole new engineering paradigm of how to design spacecraft as solid state assemblies of nanostructures. 30 years is a pretty long time. In 100 years we went from riding around on horses to sending probes to mars.
Change Christina to Christine
on
Geeks in Suits
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· Score: 1
I know I personally have bought many cd's after first hearing a song or two on MP3. I think MP3's are helping much more then hindering the music industry. Now, I can download a song and see if it appeals to me, instead of laying down 15 bucks for a cd I *might* like. I'd say 25-40% of my cd purchases are based on exposure to new stuff via MP3. Yeah, the MP3's I downloaded were pirated from copyrighted material. But in the end, it benefitted the producer and made them money.
Re:Blinded by mindless Limbaugh-ism...
on
China Enters Space
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· Score: 1
What are you so upset about? Isn't the red menace what made the republican party so great? Wasn't living in fear of imminent death the best thing to ever happen to america? Lets start another paranoid demented stage in america's history.
God the story doesn't even make sense to me. Its more like a dream then any kind of actual story. I thought it was lame, I would have given it a C if I were this kids teacher, and that just for turning in the paper.
Re:What about self-replication?
on
Nanosystems
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· Score: 1
Self replication becomes very easy when its just a molecular structure. What does the assmebler care if its a diamond lattice or if its another assembler? If an assembler can create any 3 dimensional precise molecular structure, then self-replication is a given. Macro technology has nothing to do with it, given that there must be processed raw materials, etc. that go into self-replication. I'm sure it could be done on the macro scale, but since a machine contains plastics, metal alloys, computer chips, etc. etc. you would have to duplicate every single one of these items from the raw resource on up. Not an easy task. But with nanotechnology, the raw resource is the basic building block. And you are right, all living things are nanotech. If a whale can be constructed from a single fertilized cell, its definitely a self-replicating nanotech creation.
Re:Clueless in California
on
Nanosystems
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· Score: 1
There are multiple paths to take here. First of all, the nanomachine will simply be following instructions on how to copy itself. The assembler itself will be a very simple device, much like RNA, simply taking instructions and following them. Whether those instructions are a tape for building another assembler, or for building larger special purpose devices that, for instance, repair a heart valve, is inconsequential. A machine that can repair a heart valve would mostly likely consist of many different types of machines, all of them much more complicated then a simple assembler. I would suspect you could simply have a vat of assemblers that are instructed to produce the heart valve repair machines, and then inject these machines into your body. One molecular structure building a copy of itself is not that complicated. One that has knowledge of biology is MUCH more complicated. The copy functionality would actually be the most basic function of an assembler. The highly complex instructions for large medical devices would be a more time consuming task for it to process. And the medical devices themselves would be an order of magnitude more complex then an assembler. In fact they might have assemblers working within them, millions of assemblers, repairing and modifying functionality. Something that repairs heart valves might be the size of a human blood cell, which is itself a huge environment filled with many many specialized nano-machines. A nano device such as this would have a power plant, repair assemblers, a computer, input and output devices, sensors, a chemistry lab, a factory for producing appendages, etc. etc. An assembler just has a few tiny arms that grasp atoms and create chemical bonds to build molecular structures.
Re:I met this guy at Caltech
on
Nanosystems
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· Score: 2
Have you or your professors read Nanosystems? The purpose of that book was to explain some of these questions. Drexler gets very specific about how to possibly achieve highly reactional chemistry in a controlled manner. And remember, Nanosystems was written many years ago, its not the current state of the art. But its the first, and only, book that attempts to deal with the actual practicalities of nanotechnology instead of just saying "some day we will be able to..." it says "here is how we might be able to achieve this.." Drexler and Merkle spent a lot of time researching the hows of possible nanotechnology.
Re:Which direction will nanotech go?
on
Nanosystems
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· Score: 1
Nanotech machines dont have to be "small" but even a truck will have nanoscale devices. Its simply the scale at which the basic level of work gets carried out. But why have trucks driving around when you could just have big thick umbilicals with trillions of tiny robotic arms moving material a particle at a time. Large modern pumps do a good job at pumping everything from water to sand and peanut butter. A nano pump could haul material very fast and very efficiently, distributing it where it needs to go for raw materials or where ever. Modern machinery will probably not have very many equivilants in a nano world, since there are much more far out and efficient devices that could be constructed. But of course there will be large "machines" however, they will have nano-scale devices doing the low down dirty work, even if its just constant repair of the machine itself.
An Assembler is the basic unit of nanotechnology. Its quite simply nothing more then a little robot that takes atoms and places them into molecular structures in a precicely defined way. Assemblers can make more assemblers, and billions of assemblers will make larger structures such as food, computers, houses, whatever.
Electrical impulses will not be the most efficient method on a computer that consists of only a few thousand atoms. These type of cpu's will probably be simple mechanical computers vibrating at the frequency of the atom (or something like that.) Ie. Drexlers "rod logic." Since quantum effects will make electrical devices that small very difficult.
Yeah, makes the book unreadable
on
Darwin's Radio
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· Score: 1
Sheesh. Its just an acronym, which many times are made to actually have some kind of meaning. MADD, DARE, whatever. Who really cares, its a book. How could you be so irritated by something so trivial?
Nanotech is precisely about little robots with little cpu's. Its the economy of scale. Feynman just spoke of the potential but was way to early to envision how it would manifest itself. Nanotechnology is nothing like how we create ANYTHING today, except in biology. And enzymes, are extremely crude and you can't get one to make diamond or a bicycle. It depends on what you consider "nanotech" since there are the nanoassemblers, and then there are the products these assemblers create. Without one, we can't have the other. Little robots with little arms and tiny 8-bit cpus... Thats *exactly* what nano is.
By the time it becomes economical to reach uranus, or any of the outer planets, we will have the technology to produce diamonds from dirt (or anything else that contains carbon.) Nanotech would provide the means to easily reach the outer planets, and also provide the means to make diamond cheaply. So its really just a "gee wiz" scientific curiousity and doesn't have any bearing on the value of diamond or that we have found a large supply of the gem that could actually be useful. Anyway, just my 2 cents.
Hi, So I wonder what this means for the OpenDWG project? OpenDWG (http://www.opendwg.org) is a project headed by Visio to open Autodesk's Autocad DWG file format for use as a general standard. The libraries that access the DWG file format are based on reverse engineering the DWG file, which Autodesk is vehemently against. Autodesk and Microsoft are closely tied, so I wonder what Microsoft will do to the OpenDWG project now that Visio is owned by MS. Hmmmmmmm....
This isn't flame bait, its just that to marketing types, spam simply works. Its a sad truth, but there are millions and millions of people on the net and if only.001% of them respond, then free spam has paid off big. As long as it keeps working, they'll keep doing it.
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Actually, I dont think they will be "organic" molecules, but molecular scale "hard" materials. Organic implies biology, and biology has nothing to do with nanoscale engineered components.
I'm sorry, but you dont have any idea of what you are talking about. "To each by need, from each by skill" does not a philosophy make. Communism has never existed on this planet. Ever. How can it, when there is a global economy? If you knew anything about communism you would know that it has never existed. Stalinism is simply a madmans psychotic paranoid view of politics. It has nothing to do with communism. What exactly is "large scale" communism? Communism has no scale. Its a global philosophy for all socio-economic interacton between people. Try actually READING something about the subject someday.
30 years is a hell of a long time for technology to advance, especially with Moore's law applying to nanocomputers. 5 years is unrealistic. 30 years is entirely feasible. It wont be right away, but look at the advances in medical knowledge in the last 30 years. Not in 5 or 10 years, but 30? Why not? To cure cancer, why in the world would it take 30 years to discover how to identify and kill a cancerous cell? Or to know the fingerprint of HIV and hunt it down and kill it? That would seem a pretty simple use of this technology, as opposed to a whole new engineering paradigm of how to design spacecraft as solid state assemblies of nanostructures. 30 years is a pretty long time. In 100 years we went from riding around on horses to sending probes to mars.
thats why the links are broken.
I know I personally have bought many cd's after first hearing a song or two on MP3. I think MP3's are helping much more then hindering the music industry. Now, I can download a song and see if it appeals to me, instead of laying down 15 bucks for a cd I *might* like. I'd say 25-40% of my cd purchases are based on exposure to new stuff via MP3. Yeah, the MP3's I downloaded were pirated from copyrighted material. But in the end, it benefitted the producer and made them money.
What are you so upset about? Isn't the red menace what made the republican party so great? Wasn't living in fear of imminent death the best thing to ever happen to america? Lets start another paranoid demented stage in america's history.
God the story doesn't even make sense to me. Its more like a dream then any kind of actual story. I thought it was lame, I would have given it a C if I were this kids teacher, and that just for turning in the paper.
Self replication becomes very easy when its just a molecular structure. What does the assmebler care if its a diamond lattice or if its another assembler? If an assembler can create any 3 dimensional precise molecular structure, then self-replication is a given. Macro technology has nothing to do with it, given that there must be processed raw materials, etc. that go into self-replication. I'm sure it could be done on the macro scale, but since a machine contains plastics, metal alloys, computer chips, etc. etc. you would have to duplicate every single one of these items from the raw resource on up. Not an easy task. But with nanotechnology, the raw resource is the basic building block. And you are right, all living things are nanotech. If a whale can be constructed from a single fertilized cell, its definitely a self-replicating nanotech creation.
There are multiple paths to take here. First of all, the nanomachine will simply be following instructions on how to copy itself. The assembler itself will be a very simple device, much like RNA, simply taking instructions and following them. Whether those instructions are a tape for building another assembler, or for building larger special purpose devices that, for instance, repair a heart valve, is inconsequential. A machine that can repair a heart valve would mostly likely consist of many different types of machines, all of them much more complicated then a simple assembler. I would suspect you could simply have a vat of assemblers that are instructed to produce the heart valve repair machines, and then inject these machines into your body. One molecular structure building a copy of itself is not that complicated. One that has knowledge of biology is MUCH more complicated. The copy functionality would actually be the most basic function of an assembler. The highly complex instructions for large medical devices would be a more time consuming task for it to process. And the medical devices themselves would be an order of magnitude more complex then an assembler. In fact they might have assemblers working within them, millions of assemblers, repairing and modifying functionality. Something that repairs heart valves might be the size of a human blood cell, which is itself a huge environment filled with many many specialized nano-machines. A nano device such as this would have a power plant, repair assemblers, a computer, input and output devices, sensors, a chemistry lab, a factory for producing appendages, etc. etc. An assembler just has a few tiny arms that grasp atoms and create chemical bonds to build molecular structures.
Have you or your professors read Nanosystems? The purpose of that book was to explain some of these questions. Drexler gets very specific about how to possibly achieve highly reactional chemistry in a controlled manner. And remember, Nanosystems was written many years ago, its not the current state of the art. But its the first, and only, book that attempts to deal with the actual practicalities of nanotechnology instead of just saying "some day we will be able to..." it says "here is how we might be able to achieve this.." Drexler and Merkle spent a lot of time researching the hows of possible nanotechnology.
Nanotech machines dont have to be "small" but even a truck will have nanoscale devices. Its simply the scale at which the basic level of work gets carried out. But why have trucks driving around when you could just have big thick umbilicals with trillions of tiny robotic arms moving material a particle at a time. Large modern pumps do a good job at pumping everything from water to sand and peanut butter. A nano pump could haul material very fast and very efficiently, distributing it where it needs to go for raw materials or where ever. Modern machinery will probably not have very many equivilants in a nano world, since there are much more far out and efficient devices that could be constructed. But of course there will be large "machines" however, they will have nano-scale devices doing the low down dirty work, even if its just constant repair of the machine itself.
See Nanosystems by Drexler and Merkle.
An Assembler is the basic unit of nanotechnology. Its quite simply nothing more then a little robot that takes atoms and places them into molecular structures in a precicely defined way. Assemblers can make more assemblers, and billions of assemblers will make larger structures such as food, computers, houses, whatever.
Electrical impulses will not be the most efficient method on a computer that consists of only a few thousand atoms. These type of cpu's will probably be simple mechanical computers vibrating at the frequency of the atom (or something like that.) Ie. Drexlers "rod logic." Since quantum effects will make electrical devices that small very difficult.
Sheesh. Its just an acronym, which many times are made to actually have some kind of meaning. MADD, DARE, whatever. Who really cares, its a book. How could you be so irritated by something so trivial?
Nanotech is precisely about little robots with little cpu's. Its the economy of scale. Feynman just spoke of the potential but was way to early to envision how it would manifest itself. Nanotechnology is nothing like how we create ANYTHING today, except in biology. And enzymes, are extremely crude and you can't get one to make diamond or a bicycle. It depends on what you consider "nanotech" since there are the nanoassemblers, and then there are the products these assemblers create. Without one, we can't have the other. Little robots with little arms and tiny 8-bit cpus... Thats *exactly* what nano is.
By the time it becomes economical to reach uranus, or any of the outer planets, we will have the technology to produce diamonds from dirt (or anything else that contains carbon.) Nanotech would provide the means to easily reach the outer planets, and also provide the means to make diamond cheaply. So its really just a "gee wiz" scientific curiousity and doesn't have any bearing on the value of diamond or that we have found a large supply of the gem that could actually be useful. Anyway, just my 2 cents.
Hi, So I wonder what this means for the OpenDWG project? OpenDWG (http://www.opendwg.org) is a project headed by Visio to open Autodesk's Autocad DWG file format for use as a general standard. The libraries that access the DWG file format are based on reverse engineering the DWG file, which Autodesk is vehemently against. Autodesk and Microsoft are closely tied, so I wonder what Microsoft will do to the OpenDWG project now that Visio is owned by MS. Hmmmmmmm....
This isn't flame bait, its just that to marketing types, spam simply works. Its a sad truth, but there are millions and millions of people on the net and if only .001% of them respond, then free spam has paid off big. As long as it keeps working, they'll keep doing it.