From: Avatar Polymorph (avatarpolymorph@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Nov 25 2002 - 17:42:42 MST
Ramez notes:
Making a car through nanotech could be like pruning a tree to control its
shape. I merely note we breed trees and now we genetically restructure them.
When I was a child we had just discovered dna. When my mother was a child
antibiotics weren't around. When her mother was a child the internal
combustion engine was discovered. Yet modern-human alike persons have been
around for at least 5,000 generations, arguable 75,000 generations (if you
count fire, hut-building, tools and talking).
You cannot predict future change in the fashion you are doing. Close
predictive mechanisms such as you describe only arise immediately before the
event. It's like trying to say "we can't predict battleship design in 20
years until we have a blueprint and working model". Generic prediction is
based on rough models over millenia and measuring wide patterns. The
limitations you have been talking about ARE real to be sure and cause
problems NOW but you are not talking chemical impossibilities, just
difficulties... exactly what Drexler admitted. Indeed, this is the standard
objection. We heard similar arguments when mapping the human genome. These
arguments where overcome by increasing computing power and automation.
Similar events are now taking place with proteomics and quantum modelling.
Ramez: "At the current rate of computing power increase, by 2050 we'll
have roughly 10 more orders of magnitude of computing power."
The conservative view of Intel's chairman emiritus in 1997 is for example:
Intel chairman emeritus told an audience at the Intel Developer Forum today
that the industry's ability to shrink a microprocessor through improved
manufacturing processes is going to start butting up against the finite size
of atomic particles. Barring a radical shift in microprocessor science, this
means that the ability of the industry to double the computing power of a
chip every 18 months (known as Moore's Law) may slow.
Moore in fact showed an electromagnetic image of a microprocessor made under
Intel's currently cutting-edge ".25 micron" chip production technology, in
which the individual atomic layers could be counted and identified.
"Some time in the next several years we get to some finite limits, but not
before we get through five generations," Moore said. According to one study,
the physical limitations could be reached by 2017.
"That's well beyond my shift," he quipped. "So someone else can do it."
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