[extropy-chat] Dark matter and ET

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 12:11:24PM -0700, The Avantguardian wrote:

> But why re-invent wheel when you can just make
> improvements on the design?

I'm not sure you realize how necessarily wasteful biological
systems are. Look at http://moleculardevices.org/howbig.htm
(Flash required). Zoom down to the smallest scale. The 20 nm
size bar refers to the virus capsid below, rendered with various
speculative (for the sake of illustration) diamondoid nanoparts,
and a fragment of a hydrated bilayer.

It is pretty obvious that a functional, addressable 1-bit computational 
element can be constructed roughly within the cubic hydrated bilayer 
volume. 

The storage density of RNA within the virus capsid is sure considerably
denser, but it can't compute on its own. It needs ridiculously large volumes of 
water with biomachinery to even unfold. 

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.leitl.org
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