[extropy-chat] Smalley, Drexler and the monster in Lake Michigan

[John K Clark]

"Brett Paatsch" <bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au>

>  it is impossible to  prove that something does not exist.

That's not quite true; you can prove that the largest prime number does not
exist for example. A perpetual motion machine can not exist either if the
law of conservation of energy is true and to deny that would put one
squarely in the junk science camp. Likewise if it could be shown that for
Drexler's assemblers to work you'd need to move faster than light, violate
the conservation of momentum law,  place things with more precision than
Heisenberg allows, or violate the second law of thermodynamics then it would
be safe to dismiss the entire idea as nonsense; but nobody has come close to
doing that.  I also disagree that life is not a pretty good existence proof
of the idea, it's true Drexler's machines can do more but that's what you'd
expect, all else being equal intelligent design will always beat random
mutation and natural selection. Of course we will not know with absolute
certainty that Drexler was correct until an assembler is actually built, and
that should be about 20 minutes before the singularity.

  John K Clark     jonkc at att.net