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Nano-nonsense: 25 years of charlatanry (2010)

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Re: Nano-nonsense: 25 years of charlatanry (2010)

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that the case against Drexler’s concept does not collapse because of this one mistake.

Right, which I already acknowledged.

Well, you did indeed nominally acknowledge that this is only one detail, but then you continued by using this one technical error to cast doubt on the article as a whole! What were we supposed to make of that? There are cases where one apparently small issue is devastating (“who shaves the barber?”) but this is not one of them.

Re: Nano-nonsense: 25 years of charlatanry (2010)

#62
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but the human engineering you are looking for is mostly called biotech. I think the argument is that there just isn’t a novel field here. Drexler tried to carve one out where none exists to make himself and his followers look like they invented something when they did not. Nanotech is really just gloss on biology, materials engineering, or chemistry, all of which are well aware of quantum scale effects and use t…

Biology has a pretty limited set of building blocks to work with. Drexler specifically wanted assemblers that could work with aluminum and that could do some extra stuff with carbon that biology can't do.

> Biology has a pretty limited set of building blocks to work with.

Not that small: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Periodic-representations...

Proteins can bind and use all kinds of other elements and the combinatorial space is enormous.

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