[extropy-chat] Intro

[Robert Bradbury]

It is worth noting that one of the biggest blocks to manifesting a
nano-santa world (other than the synthesis and assembly problems) is the
simple lack of nanopart designs.  Anything one could do on the
math+programming side of the equation to speed up their development would
have really large downstream impacts.

Just to get a feel for the size of the problem... I believe scientists at
TIGR have reported that for every new genome (typically bacterial) that they
do they discover 5-10 "novel" genes.  Now there are probably tens of
millions of geneomes which can be sequenced (right now the methods exist to
do a single bacterial genome using a single machine in an afternoon).  So
that gives one a phase space of perhaps order of 10^5-10^6 nanoparts in
nature (the number is likely to be on the low end since the number of
"novel" reactions nature requires to support life is limited so the
discovery of novel genes should diminish as more genomes are sequenced).  In
contrast, as Drexler points out in Nanosystems (Ch. 9 Sec. 5), the number of
possible nanopart designs is a much much larger (he uses numbers like 10^75
to 10^148 structures in volumes much smaller than that consumed by most
proteins).  So there is a very large gap between the phase space of
molecular structures that Nature has explored and those which can eventually
be explored.  Anything which can be done using algorithmic, heuristic, or
brute force approaches to increase the rate of improving the existing
designs (protein design) or developing novel designs is likely to be highly
useful in the future.

Mind you -- *most* people (even many well informed scientists) have very
little awarenes of the minute fraction of the phase space of molecular
structures currently explored by the material currently "organized" in our
solar system (be they those generated by physical processes, natural
evolution or human directed manufacture).

Robert
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