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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

#91

Post by dasil003 »

physcab wrote: post #73
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…

I don't know why, but there's a fascination with everyone outside the materials science/chemistry/physics world that nanotechnoloy is only about little tiny moving things inside a larger system. Yes, there are bio-molecular robots that are supposed to be used for things like drug delivery and whatnot. But nanotechnology encompasses such a broad array of other disciplines that are primarily concerned with operating at…

I think the movie Innerspace is to blame.

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

#92

Post by dasil003 »

mortenjorck wrote: post #53

I hate to complain about headlines, but I feel this needs saying: Headlines such as the one this author has chosen strike me as unpleasantly Digg-like. Exhortations to "stop talking about it and start laughing at it" are anti-intellectual; it's a call to glib derision rather than reasoned rejection.

Yeah it's just like the whole "Fail" meme. It's indicative of how demanding people are becoming that they no longer can be bothered to write a sentence or even conjugate a verb to express their disgust with some flaw that catches their attention for a microsecond.

I think Louis C.K. captured the essence better than anyone (http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1885790,00.html)

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

#93

Post by onedognight »

Tichy wrote: post #51
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…

There is now a technology to print DNA from a computer data file and inject it into a cell. That seems to be a good start for tinkering.

Realize that a plasmid (what they are creating and injecting) is usually a loop of ~4000 base pairs while your DNA consists of ~3 billion base pairs. That's not much shell code, especially when we haven't found a shell to run.

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

#94

Post by anigbrowl »

jacquesm wrote: post #28
listic wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please link to the evidence of progress in the direction of 'genetic synthesis' meeting 'nano technology'

At your service: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7245/abs/nature08...

A pdf for those without a nature sub: http://www.shawndouglas.com/publications/19458720.pdf

Figure 4 is the takeaway: assembly of simple components into complex structures.

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

#95

Post by billswift »

plato wrote: post #18
Symmetry wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really true, we self-replicate all the time (thanks mom and dad). What we don't know how to do is design things that self-replicate from scratch, but we do already have plenty of existence proofs. Also, self-replication is actually easier at the molecular level because all the parts are perfectly regular.

And we can think too, and you can see where is AI in that moment. :) And ducks can fly with flexible wings. And the Sun is a thermonuclear reactor. You can find demonstrations of this type of things everywhere, that doesn't means that we can make them work with our materials, techniques and knowledge. Nanotech seems to my like AI, always there, at just two steps... that's the type of problems that smell to vaporware…

Somebody said that the reason there is no progress in AI is that once a problem domain is understood well enough that there are working applications in it, nobody calls it AI any longer.

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

#96

Post by chbarts »

akshayubhat wrote: post #81
yummyfajitas wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

well you could argue that Theory of CS is same as Mathematics of Computation. or Biology is just Chemistry and Chemistry is just Physics. Traditionally statistics is more geared towards hypothesis testing and analytics. While Machine Learning is about making prediction.

> Theory of CS is same as Mathematics of Computation

And Mathematics is the same as Logic, and Logic is a branch of Philosophy, which is ultimately concerned with English (and other natural languages), so the only things you can study are literature and stamp collecting.

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

#97

Post by jerf »

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…

In the billions of years since life began, evolution never took a life form, put it on the moon, and brought it back. I doubt mankind can do it "before this decade is out".

Practical nanotech will inevitably harness the forces of life that already exist; why wouldn't it? Saying it's not real Drexlerian nanotech may be true, but it will also be a very uninteresting thing to say. Who cares? What's happening and what's real is what matters, and what's really happening has definitely started and isn't stopping anytime soon.

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

#98

Post by Qz »

BrandonM wrote: post #68
paraschopra wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Evolution took billions of years to engineer the ribosome I see this argument a lot, but it doesn't really hold water. Evolution wasn't trying to engineer the ribosome. In fact, the only thing evolution tries to do is replicate. The biological forms that have come out of that are completely random. Humans, on the other hand, consciously make efforts at engineering. Thousands of monkeys will never (for all practical…

Thousands of monkeys will never (for all practical purposes) manage to write a Shakespearean work, but Shakespeare did.

I always wonder why people choose monkeys for that analogy, seeing as we're more or less descended from a recent ancestor. At some point there were only thousands of that ancestor, but they managed to produce something capable of writing Shakespeare within a few million years! Maybe a better animal to choose would be octopi...

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

#99

Post by InclinedPlane »

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…

"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)."

This isn't supported by observational evidence. Every known life-form on Earth, even the Archaea, makes use of the same fundamental nucleotide transcription machinery (which includes the ribosome). Every indication is that the ribosome is one of the oldest cellular structures, which pegs the upper limit for the amount of time it took to arise via evolution at a few hundred million years.

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

#100

Post by InclinedPlane »

Qz wrote: post #98
BrandonM wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Evolution took billions of years to engineer the ribosome I see this argument a lot, but it doesn't really hold water. Evolution wasn't trying to engineer the ribosome. In fact, the only thing evolution tries to do is replicate. The biological forms that have come out of that are completely random. Humans, on the other hand, consciously make efforts at engineering. Thousands of monkeys will never (for all practical…

Thousands of monkeys will never (for all practical purposes) manage to write a Shakespearean work, but Shakespeare did. I always wonder why people choose monkeys for that analogy, seeing as we're more or less descended from a recent ancestor. At some point there were only thousands of that ancestor, but they managed to produce something capable of writing Shakespeare within a few million years! Maybe a better animal…

It's a false analogy with regard to evolution. Purely random input is extraordinarily unlikely to match any specific output. But if you bring in inheritance, mutation, and environmental pressures then you can produce just about anything, given sufficient time.
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