[extropy-chat] Dark matter and ET

The Avantguardian avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com
Wed Jul 20 09:59:01 UTC 2005



--- Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> 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.

Ok, but that is like comparing the space shuttle to
some wrenches and saying that the space shuttle is
wasteful because it is bigger than the wrenches. None
of the "nanoparts" shown do 5% of what the virus does.

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

The bases of DNA stack at approx 3.4 Angstrom (.34
nanometers) from one another. Each base is two bits.
(dibit?) 

> 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. 

True but won't your bilayer need some form of I/O Bus
to compute? RNA/DNA by itself is more like a harddrive
than a whole computer and pretty useless without the
rest. But why is that less efficient than a bilayer?

The Avantguardian 
is 
Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that they haven't attempted to contact us." 
-Bill Watterson

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