[extropy-chat] Nanotech research (was Re: Nanotech educations)

[Chris Phoenix]

Adrian Tymes wrote:

 > Chris Phoenix wrote:
 >> Sorry, I misspoke.  MNT _research_ is not
 >> technology-limited.  If we
 >> wanted to start a crash nanofactory program today,
 >> we could write useful
 >> software without waiting for any lab results.  And
 >> by the time the
 >> software was done, the lab results could be
 >> achieved too.
 >
 > That is what I understood (the hardware part, anyway),
 > and disagree with.  The state of the art in hardware
 > is, itself, limiting the research, and thus the lab
 > results.  Which is not to say there aren't problems
 > to solve on the software side too, just that they
 > aren't that dominant.

I agree that lab results are limited by hardware.  That's always true. 
What I'm claiming is that a combination of targeted hardware 
improvement, and being smart about how the hardware is used, could 
achieve fabrication of mechanosynthetic mechanisms sufficient to rapidly 
bootstrap a nanofactory in as little as five years.

And I'm saying that, for this one purpose (nanofactory levels of MNT), 
it's likely that a program starting even today will find that useful 
software is the gating factor.

 > This is ebeam of masks, actually.  I've heard DPN can
 > get down to about 15-30 for complex shapes; 5 is for
 > straight lines, which by themselves aren't that
 > useful.

Line width of 15 nm, placement precision of 5.  So you can make 
unwritten voids with 5 nm precision and some constraints on shape.

 > (That may also be what you've heard about
 > ebeam.  I've seen individual dots made with ebeam that
 > have better resolution, but the processes involved
 > were not useful for anything but making small dots,
 > and specifically not for constructing useful systems.)

EBID can get down to 20 nm features.  Including 3D shapes.  And can 
deposit a wide range of materials.

What's the problem with small ebeam dots?  Throughput?

 >> Does "significant volume" mean ten nm^3, or 1
 >> micron^3?
 >
 > mm^3 and above, where one can start applying nanoscale
 > properties to macroscale objects (like space
 > elevators, or enough nanobots to hunt down all the
 > cancer cells in an average adult human body).

Well, no surprise there!  No one is proposing to make complicated 
eutactic mm^3 structures by anything other than exponential 
manufacturing.  Maybe the self-assembly people, but they'll have major 
problems getting enough complexity and spatial heterogeneity.

 >> MNT is not just eutactic manufacturing.  It's
 >> exponential manufacturing.
 >
 > Only if the assemblers make the assemblers.  Like I
 > said, once you have a device that can assemble things
 > at the atomic level, you have a device that can
 > assemble things at the atomic level.  Building more
 > assemblers may take a (lot of) resources and time,

Eh?  I thought we were talking all along about the assemblers making the 
assemblers.  At least I've been trying to.  It's not very hard, if you 
pick the right chemical family and don't get sidetracked by biomimesis.

Why would assemblers building assemblers require lots of resources and 
time?

 > which is why some people are proposing ways to make
 > assemblers other than just relying on the assemblers
 > to self-replicate (which works until the volume of
 > assemblers available can exceed the manufacturing
 > throughput of these other methods).  This is likely to
 > shrink the time to rapid deployment to less than the
 > time to develop it (measured from, say, publication of
 > Nanosystems).

Yes, deployment should be very rapid.  Starting with one Merkle-type 
assembler and a lot of predesign, it should be possible to bootstrap to 
a tabletop nanofactory in about a month.

 >> most researchers are quite uninformed about the
 >> goals or the
 >> implications.
 >
 > This I'll agree with, if you add "long term" in front
 > of "goals and implications".  But it's the same way
 > that, say, those researching better ways of achieving
 > LEO are uninformed as to the details of lunar
 > colonization: the data's there, and has possibly come
 > in front of their eyes more than once, but it makes
 > little immediate difference to them, so they ignore it
 > for now.  When it's closer to reality, expect more to
 > start paying attention.

NASA's human spaceflight has been focused on LEO for decades, and how 
far has it gotten us?  It's gotten us to LEO.  And I don't think the 
long-term implications of NASA extend even to a moonbase.

This is not the best way to achieve big results.  Maybe, in our current 
political/economic system, it's the only way to achieve any results. 
But if that's true, the Chinese are going to eat our lunch in a decade 
or so, unless the Japanese, Indians, or Brazilians get there first.

Chris

-- 
Chris Phoenix                                  cphoenix at CRNano.org
Director of Research
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology          http://CRNano.org