From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Jan 25 1999 - 15:45:11 MST
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.
My suggestion for inertial confinement fusion wasn't intended as a
"nanofusion" power source, but as a method of constructing fusion
weapons without carrying around a lot of uranium. I specifically
originated the suggestion when someone purported to prove that
nanotechnological attacks would be less powerful than modern weaponry,
which is absurd.
I also wanted to demonstrate that war nano can easily use nuclear
weapons against an "active shield", as part of my generalized thesis
that nanowar tilts the attack/defense balance even farther towards
attack than the existing nuclear weapons standoff.
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.
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