From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu May 20 1999 - 06:25:41 MDT
>Anders Sandberg
>>Nobody is suggesting that we abandon nuclear chemistry, but it doesn't
>>seem likely to produce the same benefits that molecular nanotechnology
>>promises and appears to be less easy to achieve.
Rudy Rucker's next book SAUCER WISDOM, a fictionalised popular science
treatment of various futurist notions he's already included in sf plus some
new ideas, projects a quark femtotechnology. (The book will be from Forge,
a division of Tor, and will be out in July.)
Here's his (handwaving, but provocative) description of nuclear chemistry,
the basis of his *alla* - the device nanotech enthusiasts foresee one level
up as a `black box' matter compiler:
< `What's quark-flipping? A proton is a quark-bag holding two up quarks
and one down quark, while a neutron is [blah]. ...you need to get into the
bag and flip the one quark.'
< [...] `We use a chaotic cascade to fuse all the nucleons' quark-bags into
a quark-gluon plasma that we're free to flip, shuffle, and regroup. The
process will be directed by high-level user-request patterns made via a
custom-designed radiotelepathic [communicator] that incorporates low-level
implementation instructions for a few thousand basic substances.' >
Easy, when you know how... :)
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:03:45 MST