[ExI] marksmanship

[William Flynn Wallace]

I am pretty sure I saw something about an advance in microscopy, but I
guess I didn't see what I thought I saw.

You are pulling my leg a bit about replicating assemblers, eh?  If they did
what you say they do, why would anyone try to build one?  bill w

On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 6:16 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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> > *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] marksmanship
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> Nothing is more complicated than my field.  Much, perhaps most of what we
> think we know might be wrong.  Now for something completely different:
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> I am re-reading some of Faynman's popular works.  One is There is Plenty
> of Room at the Bottom.
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> '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.'
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> 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?)
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> Now why have I not seen scientists ecstatic about it if it is as
> revolutionary as Feynman says it will be?
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> bill w
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> Scientists were most ecstatic when it was first done in 1989.
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> Here’s an 11 yr old article about moving atoms one at a time:
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> https://www.wired.com/2009/09/gallery-atomic-science/
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> 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:
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> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> spike
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