[extropy-chat] Nanotech educations

[Chris Phoenix]

Eugen Leitl wrote in several messages:
 >Adrien Tymes wrote:
 >> One could possibly build MNT systems around a very
 >> very limited library of mechanosynthesis reactions.
 >
 > Indeed, but we don't even have that very limited mechanosynthesis
 > reaction.  It's all 95% vapor at this point.

What about Freitas and Merkle's work with dimer deposition?

> Still, I see no movement at all on open source nanotechnology. The open
> source hackers don't understand the science and the challenge, the people who
> do are too few, and they apparently don't have the skills, or the time.

What about Nano-Hive?  http://www.nano-hive.org/

> By the time we have to deal with systems taking mole number of atoms, we will
> have computers with mole number of switches. There are already commercial
> packages with handle mesoscale without involving full atomic detail. 
> 
> Imo, this is not something we should focus on right now.

If all we had to do was handle atoms, I'd agree.  But you can't do 
multi-level design that way.  And you can't learn to do design that way.

If I handed you a Merkle assembler with no software and no one trained 
to do nanoproduct design, it would be years before you could start 
replacing the oil infrastructure or building useful medical devices. 
That would be a massive humanitarian and environmental tragedy.  Plus, I 
think it would guarantee that weapon-building would be the first use to 
develop.

> Right now molecular manufacturing is languishing in a ghetto similiar to how
> cryobiologists are regarding cryonics. Unless there is a way to break out of
> that ghetto, the mainstream will completely envelop and encapsulate this,
> leaving even not memory behind.

It would take the mainstream several decades to catch up to even 
Nanosystems-level performance.  Long before then, someone in some 
military will have realized that they can build products decades ahead 
of the curve by pursuing this.

Why are we in that ghetto, anyway?  It's not because the science was 
bad.  It's because we tried to talk to the scientists.  And the 
scientists, being conservative skeptical stick-in-the-muds, said "This 
doesn't look like anything I recognize, so it must not be science."

No, it's not even that.  Drexler did talk to the scientists, starting 
with his 1981 PNAS paper.  But then he talked to the government.  And 
the government talked to the bureaucrats.  And the bureaucrats made a 
very sly decision: to define "nanotechnology" so as to achieve 
short-term success in several fields that were about to cross the 100-nm 
line.  And the bureaucrats funded the scientists.  And then the 
scientists turned against us, because they had funding to defend.

Drexler also talked to the public.  He spent about 400 words in Engines 
talking about gray goo, and about 1300 talking about oppressive 
governance.  But gray goo is unfortunately close to the archetype of 
"bug," making it quite scary (this was obvious only in hindsight); so 
the idea self-replicated, mutated, and took over the whole discussion.

So how do we climb out of that ghetto?  Not by doing good science, 
because the science has always been good.  Not by taking baby steps; 
that will take too long, and won't lead to policy discussion until right 
before the breakthrough.  Maybe just by starting new organizations with 
new people, new messages, and new methods until one of them turns out to 
be a good nucleus for sane-but-speculative interest in molecular 
manufacturing to coalesce around.  I'll keep trying with CRN; but it's 
been a year and a half, and if someone wants to create a new 
organization on a new plan, I think that'd be a great idea.

Chris

-- 
Chris Phoenix                                  cphoenix at CRNano.org
Director of Research
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology          http://CRNano.org