[extropy-chat] from Robert Bradbury (2)

[Damien Broderick]

I'm annoyed as hell that I can't seem to figure out how to post this to
the list
(perhaps my alternate email address hasn't been approved yet).

At any rate.

Hal's points are pretty much correct with respect to (#2 and #3).  I
wrote
a paper discussing the problems in detail -- "Protein Based Assembly of
Nanoscale Parts" which included a look at the both the design and cost
problems (you may find this in the Google cache but not on the net until

perhaps next week due to my access provider's ineptitude).

And Hal is right that the cost (now) is too expensive.  Billions
to Trillions by my estimates.  Too much for even DARPA to think
about.  *But* those costs *will* come down.  My estimates at
least for the wet path would put us in the 2015-2020 time frame.

I think we could solve the complexity problem and that is in part what
I am trying to do with Nano at Home.  It could also be solved with
a few dozen people of the intelligence of Ralph and Eric confined
with Ralph and Eric for a couple of years (R&E designed the fine
motion controller in a couple of months -- one has to scale up the
design of 2600 atoms to ~8 million atoms).  *But* I don't think
that has a high probability of happening.

There is very serious progress on the wet path -- at least tens of
millions of dollars have been invested.  Most of the CEOs don't
have an awareness of where their technologies are leading -- but
that is simply an education problem that can easily be resolved
in the future.

Robert