[ExI] marksmanship

[spike at rainier66.com]

> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] marksmanship

 

Nothing is more complicated than my field.  Much, perhaps most of what we think we know might be wrong.  Now for something completely different:

 

I am re-reading some of Faynman's popular works.  One is There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom.

 

'It would be very easy to make an analysis of any complicated chemical substance;  All one would have to do would be to look at it and see where the atoms are.  The only trouble is that the electron microscope is one hundred times too poor.'

 

Now if I am not mistaken I saw in the news the other day that for the first time scientists have been able to look at a single atom.  (Took a long time, didn't it?)

 

Now why have I not seen scientists ecstatic about it if it is as revolutionary as Feynman says it will be?

 

bill w

 

Scientists were most ecstatic when it was first done in 1989.

 

Here’s an 11 yr old article about moving atoms one at a time:

 

https://www.wired.com/2009/09/gallery-atomic-science/

 

We haven’t figured out how to build replicating assemblers.  This is a good thing, for as soon as we do of course, then the planet turns to gray goo, ending all life:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo

 

The gray goo scenario has been suggested as a plausible explanation of Fermi Paradox: the notion is that every intelligent species eventually advances in technology sufficiently to discover nuclear weapons, which are generally survivable because it takes many people working together to make a nuke.  But any mad scientist anywhere could theoretically figure out how to make a replicating assembler, which then devours everything to turn it into copies of itself, converting the top surface of the planet to gray goo.

 

My fondest hope is that intelligence is really not a fatally maladaptive evolutionary trait.  But at times I fear that this explanation of the silence of the cosmos is most disturbing in its plausibility.

 

spike

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200629/21d5e005/attachment.htm>