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

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 05:09:36PM +1000, Alejandro Dubrovsky wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-12-08 at 05:38, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> > SYNTHETIC CHEMISTRY: it isn't sophisticated enough yet and the computational
> > capacity isn't up to the job.  The largest synthetic molecules that have
> > been made are things like Vitamin B-12, vancomycin and maitotoxin.  They
> > have atomic sizes ranging from ~200-500 atoms.  Even for the fine motion

Counting atoms is a useless metric. You can't make strained caged compounds
of this complexity. The yield is not only close to zero, the yield is
precisely zero.

The fine motion controller http://jmol.sourceforge.net/demo/nanotech/
is unattainable by classical synthetic chemistry.

> > controller which is 2600 atoms in size but probably only 1/500th to 1/1000th
> > of an 4,000,000 atom assembler arm design (not counting the motors and
> > computer interface you might need to control it).

The control logic can be macroscale, if this is bootstrap.
 
> Current synthetic molecules can be a bit bigger than the ones you
> pointed out:
> http://www.umich.edu/~urecord/9293/Apr05_93/11.htm shows synthesis of a
> pure hydrocarbon sphere of 1134 carbon atoms (2.2k atoms overall).

Counting atoms is useless. "Synthesized from 94 units of a carbon-based
building block called phenylacetylene, the molecule branches off in an
unusual repeating, fractal pattern linked by strong triple bonds."

Noticed something?
 
> http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=24856 shows
> total chemical synthesis of a 238 amino-acid chain.  (This last one is
> from 1998, don't know if this has been bettered).

Stiff, strained cages with a nonrepetitive shape are very different
from linear biopolymers.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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