[extropy-chat] When will the equity risk premium flip?

[Robert Bradbury]

On 2/26/06, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> Do you want terrorists to get a nanofactory? [snip]


You seem to be operating under the assumption that building these will be
difficult...  I will freely admit that mining tons of uranium or building
and operating hundreds or thousands of high speed centrifuges is somewhat
difficult.

However, nanofactories are a different story...

For example:
"POSaM: a fast, flexible, open-source, inkjet oligonucleotide synthesizer
and microarrayer", Genome Biology 2004 5:R58
http://genomebiology.com/2004/5/8/R58

I've got an inkjet printer sitting on the desk next to me as I type this.
It might take a few years to turn it into something like a POSaM but this
isn't beyond anyone with a reasonable amount of technical skill.  See the
pictures for example:
http://genomebiology.com/2004/5/8/r58/figure/F1

Governments are going to have a very difficult time preventing anyone who
really wants to produce designer nanorobots (a.k.a. bacteria) from doing so
once they can synthesize the DNA source code.  Those designs are ultimately
going to be limited largely by the creativity of the people doing the work
*not* by big brother.

Ask yourself this... What components can one extract from a typical home
computer to use for the construction of a 3-axis AFM?  And if the procedures
for doing this "conversion" become "open source" -- what government in the
world is going to be able to stop teenagers from building them in their
basements?

Robert
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