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There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it

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Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it

#41

Post by jimbokun »

krschultz wrote: post #27
zeteo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"we even have really simple mechanical objects (like cantilevers) on the 100nm scale now." Interesting. Do you have a link or paper name for that?

Most of this stuff comes out of Sandia, I just googles for some quick MEMS pictures and found this link. http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~database/MEMS/sma_mems/mems.h...

These are labeled micro-machines, and seem to be the same things that the author calls "millitech" (both cite tiny accelerometers as an example).

So it seems there are some terminology differences to sort out.

Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it

#42

Post by jimbokun »

spot wrote: post #39
jimbokun wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Figure another 50 to 100 years or so?" 5 to 10 years? 500 to 1000 years? 5000 to 10000 years? 5 to 10 months? What are we basing our estimates on? That is the author's real point. If we don't have a good enough handle on the principles necessary to make this into an engineering problem, there just isn't any sense in trying to guess when these technologies will arrive. Unless you have some facts or data you're keepin…

is that the author's real point? i didn't see him say it anywhere.

"It also depends on what your time scale is. I’m willing to bet, at some nebulous point in the future, long after Drexler and I are dead, someone may eventually develop a technology sort of vaguely like what he imagines."

This is the point I was paraphrasing.

Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it

#43

Post by jimbokun »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #7
fragmede wrote: post #4

The name is all about the funding. There are many 'nano'-technology grants, which focus on devices that are tens of thousands, or even millions of nanometers large. Micro-techology, however, doesn't get the same funding from the NSF et al. MEMS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectromechanical_systems ) has come a long way in a very short time, and, research-dollars willing, will shrink further, so the author is…

For the same reason, it's "machine learning" rather than "non parametric statistics".

http://anyall.org/blog/2008/12/statistics-vs-machine-learnin...

(Note table near start of article, particularly entries for "large grant" and "nice place to have a meeting.")

Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it

#44

Post by cdavid »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #7
fragmede wrote: post #4

The name is all about the funding. There are many 'nano'-technology grants, which focus on devices that are tens of thousands, or even millions of nanometers large. Micro-techology, however, doesn't get the same funding from the NSF et al. MEMS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectromechanical_systems ) has come a long way in a very short time, and, research-dollars willing, will shrink further, so the author is…

For the same reason, it's "machine learning" rather than "non parametric statistics".

a lot of machine learning is parametric statistics...

and while I agree the term is really loaded, ML is different from statistics in its approach and the discoveries it made. For example, ML showed that some techniques are much more effective at scale (large datasets) than suspected by most statisticians, as recognized by "hard core" statisticians like Wasserman.

Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it

#45

Post by paraschopra »

jacquesm wrote: post #14

For those that are skeptical about nano machinery, google 'ribosome' and be amazed. Nano machinery is real, it exists, it powers the world, it's called biology. The problem is that we seem to have a hard time translating our hard won knowledge of mechanical engineering to the nano scale, I expect some time will pass before the SF visions will become a reality but I think eventually we will get there. Figure another 5…

Evolution took billions of years to engineer the ribosome (and more importantly to engineer the whole supporting ecosystem where ribosome can do what it needs to do). I doubt humans will be able to do that in next 100 years.

Granted a similar argument can be made for many other comparisons (such as camera or airplanes) but at nano-scales physics of environment plays a tremendous role. The beauty of evolution was that it is an inside-out distributed process so the physics of environment actually helped engineering ribosome.

I wonder if humans will fall back to mechanisms such as guided evolution to create other "nano-machines". Lots of effort has started being put into that direction. Just google "artificial enzymes"

Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it

#46

Post by jacquesm »

jimbokun wrote: post #35
jacquesm wrote: post #14

For those that are skeptical about nano machinery, google 'ribosome' and be amazed. Nano machinery is real, it exists, it powers the world, it's called biology. The problem is that we seem to have a hard time translating our hard won knowledge of mechanical engineering to the nano scale, I expect some time will pass before the SF visions will become a reality but I think eventually we will get there. Figure another 5…

"Figure another 50 to 100 years or so?" 5 to 10 years? 500 to 1000 years? 5000 to 10000 years? 5 to 10 months? What are we basing our estimates on? That is the author's real point. If we don't have a good enough handle on the principles necessary to make this into an engineering problem, there just isn't any sense in trying to guess when these technologies will arrive. Unless you have some facts or data you're keepin…

Based on the slow progress of the last 30 year in 'hard nanotech' and the quite amazing strides in the last couple of years in our understanding of and our ability to synthesize 3 dimensional structures at the nano scale (including DNA), and to harness biological components to do different work.

The two fields are complementary I think, one is pushing from the top down trying to make our existing structures smaller (with all the trouble inherent in that, for instance, at the nanoscale there is no such thing as 'smooth', imagine making a bearing out of sandpaper or whatever you can come up with as the nearest equivalent) the other is coming from the bottom up as we learn how our biological structures are formed and what mechanisms are available both as tools and as a working example to study.

Sooner or later (but most likely a little later) there will be a meeting of minds, where new structures will be produced by re-using or adapting the tools that biology has already given us.

I think initially that will be a purely materials science oriented endeavor, mostly concentrating on the medical applications, or a direct application of synthetic molecules (such as artificial DNA) but it's possible there will be more 'mechanically interesting' applications as well.

Nanotech is a lot more than just moving parts, plenty of it would be classed as 'structural engineering'.

The biological part is the one that is moving fastest at the moment, I think at the present speed that two fields will meet and spawn a third field within a very short time, if that hasn't already happened.

For now this meeting place of technology and biology has been named 'synthetic biology' and there is very good progress there, I expect true nanomachinery to be a spin-off of this new field.

Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it

#48

Post by bbgm »

jacquesm wrote: post #26
bbgm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been accused of being too much of a stickler on this, but while the ribosome and other biological machinery are at the nanoscale, but they are NOT nanotechnology. If you use the Drexlerian definition, nanotech much be engineered, which ribosome is definitely not. We can certainly learn from natural systems, but that doesn't make them nanotech. Also, nanosystems fundamentally are at a scale when quantum propertie…

The ribosome is nano machinery , not nano technology . Subtle difference there, I did not call it nano tech. And if you re-engineered even a simpler version of a ribosome I'd definitely call that nano technology.

No disagreement on those points. I've just spent too much time in the field with people suddenly claiming that protein folding was nanotech.

Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it

#50

Post by jacquesm »

paraschopra wrote: post #45
jacquesm wrote: post #14

For those that are skeptical about nano machinery, google 'ribosome' and be amazed. Nano machinery is real, it exists, it powers the world, it's called biology. The problem is that we seem to have a hard time translating our hard won knowledge of mechanical engineering to the nano scale, I expect some time will pass before the SF visions will become a reality but I think eventually we will get there. Figure another 5…

Evolution took billions of years to engineer the ribosome (and more importantly to engineer the whole supporting ecosystem where ribosome can do what it needs to do). I doubt humans will be able to do that in next 100 years. Granted a similar argument can be made for many other comparisons (such as camera or airplanes) but at nano-scales physics of environment plays a tremendous role. The beauty of evolution was that…

> I wonder if humans will fall back to mechanisms such as guided evolution to create other "nano-machines".

That is exactly what I expect to happen, see much longer comment above.

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