From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon May 17 1999 - 17:04:17 MDT
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:
> I know of at least two instances of sub-molecular technology. (1)
> artificial atoms; (2) sculpted quantum states. (Unfortunately my links
> appear to be broken - sorry, guys! (1) is changing the shape of a
> single atom's wavefunction, and (2) is doing some kind of custom stuff
> on probability distributions, I think. Anyone have a valid link?)
The fun part is that sculpting electron clouds like the recent
theoretical ideas suggest could even be useful - lots of potential for
odd chemistry, atomic manipulation, quantum computation and
everything. It doesn't have to involve the nucleus to be interesting.
> What the heck does he - does *any* race with that kind of technology -
> want with gold, anyway?
Nice conductor. One of the few metals where you can see relativistic
effects visibly (I seem to recall; it was a while since I read up on
why gold and copper look like they do, I might be wrong here).
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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