From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Sun Jun 16 2002 - 05:09:29 MDT
On Sat, 15 Jun 2002, Brian Atkins wrote:
> As for nano think about it like this: we don't really have anything
> really to worry about there until we get the fully fledged final stage
> of it ("drextech"). What comes before that is a long string of
Actually, if you have full (sequential, structural, and interaction)
information on the human genome and that of several pathogens you could
cook up some really neat plagues. It's okay if you can afford a realtime
adaptive molecular therapy, but latter is a lot more complicated and more
expensive to develop and to run.
> intermediate stage technologies which will have many spinoffs,
> including- you guessed it- extremely powerful computer technologies.
> We'll get massively powerful computer hardware well before drextech.
That much seems certain. Polymer inkjet scales into nanolithoprinter
range, not to mention self-assembly of (stacked) 2d crystals of molecular
units (no longer necessarily biological) in Langmuir-Blodgett coated
wafers. If your nanolithoprinter can deposit structural/machine parts
here's your path to small-unit partial or full closure self-rep.
If fabbing units and batch sizes (it takes forever to fill up a pipeline
and burn in a process) become small and cheap enough to be rented or owned
by less than giant design houses the diversity will soar. This also allows
you to tailor your hardware to your particular approach, resulting in much
improved performance from the same amount of circuitry.
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