From: Ross A. Finlayson (extropy@apexinternetsoftware.com)
Date: Mon Nov 25 2002 - 18:27:48 MST
On Monday, November 25, 2002, at 04:11 PM, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, Lee Daniel Crocker, replying to me wrote:
>
>> Surely (b) is unnecessary for huge advancement in manufacturing.
>
> Unclear, Eric does not casually discard the systems complexity issues --
> in fact IMO he points them out as being a quite significant problem.
> Boeing did not get the 767 or 777 off the ground by simply "wishing"
> them
> into being. (Each of them has several million "parts". Assemblers are
> simpler but I'm not sure how much.) And many of us know what happened
> with the first Arianne 5 launch -- and that was purely a software
> problem.
> Complexity can sink your ship.
>
>> If you can design macro-scale materials out of repeated segments of
>> small numbers of atoms, and use even crudely-positioned disassembly
>> tools to "carve" them into sub-micron-accurate shapes, and produce
>> nano-"joinery" mechanisms in a similar way, that alone will be miles
>> beyond anything we can do with traditional manufacturing but not
>> require anything as complex as a car to be designed down to the
>> molecular level.
>
> True. But the devil may be in the details. I think there was a
> a recent Nature article on super-strong copper that they mananaged
> to get by cold-rolling it in LN2. They managed to get a combination
> of large and small grain sizes in the metal that you could not get
> through
> normal processing methods. (So they got a very strong but ductile
> material.)
>
> The "carve away" and "nano-joinery" approaches will certainly have
> interesting properties -- likely better than existing materials today.
> (For example one can imagine a car assembled from nano-legos.)
> But these objects will be a far cry from what you can get with
> true nanoassembly.
>
> Robert
>
>
>
I think that would be mostly organic in terms of being DNA/protein based
until basically a completely alien life form is built from scratch. At
the molecular level an assembler resembles life chemistry, for it to
carry its own instructions or interpret them from isoscale environmental
features.
I read one of the new Greg Bear books, I guess it was called "Vitals".
It posits that mitochondria are pre-multi-cellular parasites, or rather,
symbiotes. The science was kind of interesting, the story was
terrible. Heh, "Swiftly Tilting Planet". Also I read a Philip Jose
Farmer book recently, of "Hadon of Ancient Opar", in the vein of the
Edgar Rice Burroughs "Tarzan" books. I read Niven's "Rainbow Mars", it
is in the vein of Burrough's Barsoomian Mars, another Mars inspired
book. I haven't read those in a long time. Anyways the Bear book has
targeted and scattershot biological mind-control agents as a plot agent.
About using nanotech in manufacturing, it is about the logical extension
of micro-scale manufacturing. It will be possible to grow flawless
baseball diamonds from seed, a pure diamond scaffold. Hopefully people
will be too busy turning lead into gold. That's about the same level of
technology as anti-gravity.
Ross
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