[extropy-chat] Nanotech research (was Re: Nanotech educations)

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Chris Phoenix <cphoenix at CRNano.org> wrote:
> What I'm claiming is that a combination of targeted
> hardware 
> improvement, and being smart about how the hardware
> is used, could 
> achieve fabrication of mechanosynthetic mechanisms
> sufficient to rapidly 
> bootstrap a nanofactory in as little as five years.

Okay.  That I can go along with - so long as one can
come up with a very specific list of hardware targets.
I have yet to see such a list, and I wonder if a good
enough list could be created at this time, without
better understanding of the hardware.

> And I'm saying that, for this one purpose
> (nanofactory levels of MNT), 
> it's likely that a program starting even today will
> find that useful 
> software is the gating factor.

That may be the case, depending on the hardware list.
(That is, one could possibly come up with a hardware
list such that the hardware itself would take but a
year or two, but would be useless without software for
the controllers and sensors that would take longer
than that to develop.)

> Line width of 15 nm, placement precision of 5.  So
> you can make 
> unwritten voids with 5 nm precision and some
> constraints on shape.

Some fairly major constraints on shape, namely that
it has to be parallel lines.  Not even crossed lines.

I tried that, when I was first getting into nanotech.
The people who came up with this told me they can not
do shapes.  I believe them, since they might otherwise
have had business (and therefore money) from me.

> What's the problem with small ebeam dots? 
> Throughput?

Getting anything else in close proximity to the dots.
A dot, by itself, isn't very interesting.

> Well, no surprise there!  No one is proposing to
> make complicated 
> eutactic mm^3 structures by anything other than
> exponential 
> manufacturing.

How about the ones that propose to use another
procedure to, say, cover a 4 inch (~100 millimeter
diameter circle) silicon wafer with assemblers, and
go exponential from there?  (Not by self-assembly,
but by top-down manufacture.)

> Eh?  I thought we were talking all along about the
> assemblers making the 
> assemblers.  At least I've been trying to.  It's not
> very hard, if you 
> pick the right chemical family and don't get
> sidetracked by biomimesis.

Well, you do have to start by having something else
make the first assemblers.  There are no assemblers
at this time.  That process will be able to output
assemblers at a certain rate.  This rate will not
necessarily increase as fast as the assemblers'
combined construction rate.  At a certain point, you
can maybe switch over to pure assemblers...but what is
that point?

> Why would assemblers building assemblers require
> lots of resources and 
> time?

How many atoms comprise an assembler?  How many atoms
per time unit can an assembler move?  Depending on
the architecture, the first may be large and the
second may be slow, which adds up to a lot of time to
build another assembler.  Also, does the assembler
waste resources while building other assemblers?  If
so, any waste would scale with the construction rate:
exponentially.

> Yes, deployment should be very rapid.  Starting with
> one Merkle-type 
> assembler and a lot of predesign, it should be
> possible to bootstrap to 
> a tabletop nanofactory in about a month.

That calculation is based on...?

>  >> most researchers are quite uninformed about the
>  >> goals or the
>  >> implications.
>  >
>  > This I'll agree with, if you add "long term" in
> front
>  > of "goals and implications".  But it's the same
> way
>  > that, say, those researching better ways of
> achieving
>  > LEO are uninformed as to the details of lunar
>  > colonization: the data's there, and has possibly
> come
>  > in front of their eyes more than once, but it
> makes
>  > little immediate difference to them, so they
> ignore it
>  > for now.  When it's closer to reality, expect
> more to
>  > start paying attention.
> 
> NASA's human spaceflight

I said "those researching better ways of achieving
LEO".  I should have specified that I meant those
seriously researching it, in ways that get any
results - which, unfortunately, excludes NASA
entirely.  I meant more like SpaceShipOne.