Re: Design-ahead (was: Re: the economics of transition to nanotech)

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Jan 11 2000 - 21:00:50 MST


At 03:51 PM 11/01/00 -0500, Joseph Sterlynne <vxs@mailandnews.com>
 wrote:

>So we must ask now:
>
>- How do we begin serious design-ahead now?
>- How do we encourage development (on an open-source basis)?
>- How do we guide and organize the design-ahead results? (Ad-hoc
> organization, Web site, institute?)

Well, of course, Drexler and Merkle and others at Foresight have been doing
this, bit by bit, for years. The odd thing is the way their efforts still
appear to be despised by those in the `regular' or canonical-science/tech
authorised nano community. One scientist who read THE SPIKE declared flatly
that Eric was a flake (he'd seen him talking at a Foresight conference),
and that my book should have extirpated all reference to Foresight and
dealt solely with, you know, scanning microscopes and buckytube tips and
like that. *Real* science. Even though Drexler and pals were there years in
advance of these recent discoveries; even though their projections and
design-aheads seem (to me, in my comparative ignorance) fully consistent
with what's coming out of the labs. Maybe it's priority envy. Maybe it's
green monkeys again.

Damien Broderick



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