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[bjlong]

Yeah, I forgot we were talking about crysis-style suits.

I'd still say they're quite some time off. Manufacturing things in the nanoscale requires significant noise reduction, which is helped greatly by having a bulky apparatus. Developments in biotech will help, but, ultimately, as long we're using the manufacturing techniques we know now, we won't be able to make nanoscale stuffs with anything smaller than your torso. (Not counting the stuff you could get for free with huge quantities of assemblies, like tables with pistons for legs.)

IWM: The bullet stuff is more realistic than the armor stuff.

[Baughn]

Agreed. Bullets are simpler.

I don't think noise is as much of a problem as you do, at least not with diamondoid/eutactic hard nanotechnology. By the calculations I've seen, thermal noise would become a real problem only at above four-five hundred degrees kelvin, and of course it'd be quite reasonable to chill a nanofactory with liquid nitrogen or something. It'd still be valuable.

More to the point, of course, nature manages just fine with much worse building materials, higher temperatures (than boiling nitrogen) and a far noisier environment.

IndonesiaWM: It's not magic, but by current standards it's pretty damn close.

Look at it this way: Biology is nanotech, modulo the "tech" bit. It's hard to say how long it'll take to develop, but by the time we've got mature nanotechnology it should be able to do everything biology can, and then some; biology missed a lot of tricks, like using electronics, fiber-optics, large-scale electrostatic motors, diamondoid... the list goes on. Simple stuff. There will, of course, be a lot of complex things that nature never figured out either, but we will; that's just less predictable.

tl;dr: Evolution, being a local optimization process, misses most of the chances for global optimization. Intelligent design doesn't.

[bjlong]

I started writing a post, but after doing some reading to make sure I knew what I was talking about, I decided we have different views of nanotech. I see nanotech as using nanomaterials to perform an action on the nanoscale that ends up being useful to us in a human scale. You see nanotech as anything that incorporates nanomaterials.

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamantane

The simplest diamondoid has been made easily manufacturable.

[Baughn]

I see nanotech as anything with exact atom-sized features. Whether it's on the human scale or not is irrelevant, though obviously it's more useful if it is.

I do not see most current "nanomaterials" as nanotech, as their features, while often atom-sized, are not at all precise and they're made using bulk methods.

Something like carbon nanotubes, however, would count. Those are relatively predictable.

Of course, this means it's a sliding scale. When I'm talking about nanofactories or mature nanotechnology, I'm referring to the Drexlerian vision. And that's going to take a while, yes.

[Virex]

You guys seem to be thinking about nanotechnology in a mechanic fashion. That is, you're thinking of making nanostructures by having nanomachines build up the structure atom by atom. It is possible, but I think that cehmistry based nanotechnology at least deserves an equal amount of consideration. It's quite possible to use chemistry to make a molecule with a very precise shape and functional groups that react exactly as you'd like it. Finding the exact syntethic methodes takes time and that's what slows the development down.

A good example would be high grade ceramics. In theory ceramics like titania, silica and titanium nitrite are so hard and have such a high resistancer to heat and chemicals that it;s downright creepy. But you can only get those qualities if you maange to get a homogenous material down to the sub-millimeter scale. With our current techniques we can't do that, because we're always introducing wild variations in density and porosity across the material. However, if you could make the precursor for your material in sucha  way that it's possible to create materials with uniform qualities, for example by using nanoparticles with just the right shape and size as the precursor, then you have acces to some of the strongest materials possible.

[eerr]

For the minister,
nanomachines: small machines
replicate: to make a copy of

self-replicating nanomachines seem incredibly dangerous/powerful.
If they can do just one thing, like make bullets, digest the earth, or infect people like a germ, then they have massive power.

but we can't do any of that for a very very long time, and even if we do manage it, you'll see a prototype first that isn't half as scary as it sounds first.

[Virex]

Stopping a self-replicating nano-goo isn't all that hard. It'll need some form of energy, and probably quite a lot since it's ditching huge amounts of entropy and probably making some bonds that require exothermic reactions. So you'd either need to put it in the dark or cool it well and it'll stop. Alternatively, confine it in a glass or teflon container (or if it's realy agressive, use something coated with gold or platinum) and it'll run out of resources soon enough.

Also, forming new bonds out of silica is HARD, so it'll probably use carbon instead. Heat it well in an oxygen rich environement and you're burning it

[Baughn]

I'm not worried about grey goo (much), but that's for other reasons. Your suggestions are, frankly, insane.

Contain it? Scoop it in a bottle? We're talking about bacteria-sized bots here...

You might be able to "contain" it by nuking the area, but you certainly won't prevent the bots from escaping any other way. And even nukes run the risk of some of them escaping into the environment.

Don't worry about big, targetable puddles of grey goo. Worry about a fine dusting of grey goo on everything within a thousand miles.. that then starts eating.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Yeah, the real grey goo scenario involves autonomous nanomachines that create more autonomous nanomachines out of any surrounding materials. It may still be stoppable if it relies on chemical properties of available materials, but if technology advances so that they are able to construct and deconstruct atoms, we're screwed. A superadvanced 'grey goo' will work like strange matter, disassembling everything in its path.

[Siquo]

Stopping a self-replicating nano-goo isn't all that hard. It'll need some form of energy, and probably quite a lot since it's ditching huge amounts of entropy and probably making some bonds that require exothermic reactions. So you'd either need to put it in the dark or cool it well and it'll stop. Alternatively, confine it in a glass or teflon container (or if it's realy agressive, use something coated with gold or platinum) and it'll run out of resources soon enough.

Also, forming new bonds out of silica is HARD, so it'll probably use carbon instead. Heat it well in an oxygen rich environement and you're burning it

Finally someone with some sense.

As I stated before, carbon-based nano-machines that replicate already exist, they are everywhere, and they are eating you as we speak.

As for Diamondoid: "Adamantane is volatile and sublimates even at room temperature."
Yeah, sounds useful. A sublimating armor that smells like camphor. At least your nanomachines smell good

ENERGY people, your uebermagic nanomachines need Lots and Lots of energy to do all the magic stuff you want them to do...

Nanomachines in the future will serve some very specific, short term purposes (Eat the cancer! Build a microchip!), and will probably fail and die once they are outside of their controlled environment. Using them as a "biological weapon" will probably be harder than it is now to use biological weapons (hard to disperse evenly over a large enough area, short-lived, fragile).

As for

autonomous nanomachines that create more autonomous nanomachines out of any surrounding materials

Then what are they made of? Nanomachines entirely made from silica? Oh, they need metal as well. Might as well put them in a glass container then, that would stop them

[Baughn]

First off.. Adamantane is a bad example of diamondoid. A better example would be, well, diamond. That definitely doesn't sublimate.

The idea isn't to have small, independent molecules that can waft off into the air. More likely, the entire nanomachine will be a single, giant molecule that on a small scale looks approximately like diamond, but has more structure at slightly larger scales. (Of course, tool-tips for moving atoms and such break that abstraction slightly, and need careful modelling.)

Yes, carbon-based nanomachines exist already. No, they aren't eating me; humans are some of the meanest nanomachines around at the chemical level; more likely I'm eating them.

No, biology isn't as powerful as artificial nanomachines. Biology has hit local maxima it can't get out of, like using proteins instead of three-dimensional diamond-like carbon bonds for armor. Which are only fragile when you make a single, simple giant crystal instead of one with carefully introduced flex and fracture points that prevent damage spreading.

Yes, nanomachines need energy. No, they don't need as much energy as biology; eutactic machinery avoids a lot of the friction inherent in biological chemistry.

But your last point is completely correct. Nanomachines won't be made to do this; even if it's possible, there's no reason to. Nope, we'll have them eat cancer or scoop up poisons or radiation; there's no reason whatsoever to make them self-replicating, when nanofactories can turn them out by the tonne in a much safer manner.

They won't be making microchips either. That's for the nanofactories.

Oh, and elemental needs - carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen mostly. Exactly what we're made of.. huh, what a surprise. Trace metals, yes, for the tooltips.. same as we use them for. Hmm. One wonders why.

[Siquo]

The human body needs iron, manganese, zinc, and a lot of other metals to function well.

Also I had to look up Eutactic machinery:
Eutactic: Characterized by precise molecular order, like that of a perfect crystal, the interior of a protein molecule, or a machine-phase system; contrasted to the disorder of bulk materials, solution environments, or biological structures on a cellular scale.

Still, I fail to see a difference with natural enzymes and proteins there...
The reason for my bickering is that humankind has "defeated nature" a lot of times in the past, but never actually did it. Ever. So I'm very sceptical about the first time that we will actually "beat nature".

[Sean Mirrsen]

Well, we HAVE beat the biological nature with the largest flying machine, largest height and speed achieved, and maybe some others. We've yet to build any sort of autonomous machine that doesn't include any humans in its operation though.

[Baughn]

It's not that the proteins aren't eutactic - your source uses proteins as an example, even - it's that their environment, the interior of a cell, isn't.

The big deal about an eutactic environment for the machines, and mechanically guided chemistry, is that you can pick out useful reactions and molecules based only on the reactions you actually want, instead of having to consider every other possible reaction like biology does.

Also, while self-assembly works well enough on biological timescales, it's still pretty slow; having enzymes wait for their reagents to randomly drop in on them is nowhere near as speedy, or as efficient, as deliberately moving them there.

Biology did pick up on this in some ways, thus we have special organelles like mitochondria or ribosomes that limit the potential reactions (stopping the downright toxic intermediate steps in oxygen chemistry from escaping), and increase their speed by increasing the concentration of reagents. It's nowhere near what could be done, but still, pretty good.

[Muz]

This thread has been derailed. I want to argue about killing things again.