http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke’s_three_laws
This seems to cover the topic...
There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
61–70 of 117 posts
Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
#62Earlier 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...
Just skimming through those pictures, but most of the fairly complex mechanical parts, at least the ones which have scales, seem to be of the order of 10-100um. Not sure what would actually constitute nanotech there, but certainly the minimum feature size (spacing of teeth on a gear, etc) is probably <1um, which would count in my book.
Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How would you feel about protein folding if it was at the direction of a completely artificial genome creating proteins that do not normally occur in nature to exact specifications?
Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's actually huge problem around the whole 'nanotech' sphere.
Everybody seems to have a different definition for everything, usually the definitions tend to absurdity depending on whether the person is a skeptic or a 'true believer'.
It's very boring because in the end the terminology should be secondary to the goals and how we go about achieving them.
Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
#65Why don't we have anything that can manipulate objects at the nano-scale? Couldn't we use atomic force microscopes to push some atoms together and at least make some interesting molecules (even if this process couldn't be scaled up)? Also what ever happened to Feynman's idea of building half size remote controlled arms, which we then use to build half sized of that remote controlled arms, all the way down to a very s…
When I was a child, I read a SciFi story about one guy, who built such an arm. Then using this arm under the microscope he built a set of microscopic tools, etc.
Later in the story he fighting with bacteria and viruses, but because of the feedback of his microscopic arm, he was injured and almost killed by these tiny creatures.
Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
#66Flying cars have long been a symbol of the possible technological height of human transportation. But we're not exactly surprised by their absence. Similarly, can't Drexler's '90s idealism be regarded as the possible peak of nanotech? Does the fact we don't have tiny toasters in our bloodstream really negate the acheivement of nanotechnology in medicine and materials science? Personally, I don't think so. This articl…
Flying cars are possible today, but not economically viable.
I know at least one startup building a flying emergency vehicle for urban areas. But this one just looking like a van, but actually has many things common with helicopters.
Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
#67For 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…
Artificial carbon nanotechnology has been used by man since we had fire. It's called "soot". We still don't understand all of the physics of soot formation. The vagaries of burning and soot formation can result in some incredibly tiny particles. This is why smoke is so often used as a drug delivery method and why smoking fish and meat works so well: soot particles can get small enough to work their way between and sometimes through cell membranes.
We recently discovered structures in soot we now call "Buckyballs" and "Buckytubes".
Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
#68For 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
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 purposes) manage to write a Shakespearean work, but Shakespeare did.
100 years ago we barely had phones. Almost no one had a car. There were no televisions and movies didn't have sound. Human flight was relegated to hot air balloons. On the other hand, total Internet bandwidth has increased from about 10 terabytes a month to 10,000,000 terabytes a month in the last 15 years. Trying to guess the limits of what we'll be able to do in the next 100 years is unfathomable to me.
Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
you are right, i missed the weasel words. so really, this guy agrees that it's happening, but he disagrees with the timeline. but he didn't actually provide any information or argument about the rate of progress of miniaturization.
I wasn't too keen on the pessimism in his article; I can agree, in principle, with what he was saying but the point of emergent fields is in how unpredictable they are - this may lead to unrealistic expectations (which can often times drive innovation in the long run, TBH).
Re: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
#70Earlier 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…
> The biological forms that have come out of that are completely random.
That's not strictly speaking true in the sense that we normally use 'random'.