Billy Brown wrote:
>
> It still wouldn't make them possible. To get power out of the reaction you
> have to be able to capture the radiation produced by the fusion reaction,
> and convert it into a useful form of energy. To do that you need a barrier
> of fairly dense matter at least a few inches thick. A nanoscale reactor
> would simply irradiate the area - there would be no way for the nanobots to
> capture a significant amount of energy from the reaction.
If I really wanted to be speculative, with respect to "nanofusion", I would ask why you couldn't focus nuclear reactions so as to catch individual neutrons, or perhaps arrange materials so that a solid barrier of neutron-catchers existed instead of a haphazard crystal. I'd expect nuclear reactions to be considerably more efficient once we start working close to that scale.
-- sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html http://pobox.com/~sentience/sing_analysis.html Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you everything I think I know.