From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Sat Nov 14 1998 - 11:02:44 MST
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com>
>I heard someone pointing out the flaw in a commonly-used
>analogy. If the maximum size for assemblers is smaller than the minimum size
>for chemically powered cells, the analogy is invalid and that's that.
Cells are huge, cells are conglomerates containing thousands of factories, but who said anything
about cells? Drexler made an analogy between nano machines and something that was the same
size, Ribosomes. Ribosomes are machines that input digital information (messenger RNA) and
raw materials (amino acids) and output a finished product (a protein). The analogy isn't perfect,
a ribosome can't make anything, but it's not bad because it can make any protein and there are
a hell of a lot of them.
A full rod logic nanocomputer with the power of a modern mainframe would be far larger than a
ribosome of course, it would need to have about 150 billion atoms, a cube 1000 nanometers on
an edge would do it, that's about as big as another machine, a mitochondria. A complete cell is
about 20,000 nanometers in diameter and has 8000 times the volume.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.5.5
iQA/AwUBNk3FxN+WG5eri0QzEQLk2gCfWHA4fsXmDQx89C2S6PWy04xZ5jwAn16S
nKu1ZJFXDAypHYjKWiPCPChW
=YOVb
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:49:46 MST