From: kr%portal@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: sci.nanotech
Subject: Rere:Snowballing tomk
Date: 27 Aug 92 02:27:44 GMT

In <11654.3.728.5 Re: Snowballing tomk>(8/21/92),
sinster@cse.ucsc.edu (Darren Senn) has written:

(excerpts:)
->WHOA!  Isn't this a bit far fetched?  ...

-> ..., but it won't be
->in our lifetimes that we see mass production of common objects through
->atomic or molecular assembly.  ...

This of course depends on how old you are. Even given the uncertainty of
time estimates, it does seem fairly reasonable to assume that within
roughly two decades a well developed nanotechnology will be available
(if the human race succedes in not annihilating itself).

My posting <11654.3.728.2 Snowballing tomk>(8/19/92)
seems to have generated quite a few reverberations. It wasn't clear
enough to me from just reading Kunich's text, that what he meant was
not really questioning that a superb technology can be established
using a fully developed nanotechnology, but that there might not be
enough short-term incentive to migrate from today's industry towards
molecular manufacturing.
On the other hand, some people seem to be actually questioning that
advanced manufacturing might not be possible to the full extent, so let
me please deal with that first.

->When speaking about the potential pollution, consider the automobile.
->Combustion of gasoline in the right conditions produces water vapor,
->carbon dioxide, and heat.  It's not until you try to maintain a
->running internal combustion engine at these optimal conditions that
->you realize it's just not practical.  So we get fumes pouring out of
->our cars dirtying our air.  Great idea, but it doesn't work so well.

Combustion is never a smart idea if you want clean energy conversion.
There is much too much lack of control and so (who is surprised ?):
you get dirty exhaust gases, containing only partially oxydized
carbonaceous molecules and other gunk. If you extract the work that can
be performed by a chemical reaction under tight control molecule by 
molecule under nearly reversible conditions, the result will be clean.
As in many cases, it is helpful to peek into fairly well working
pieces of molecular machinery, which have evolved towards quite
some efficiency in molecular conversions during a period of a few billion
years: in natural organisms that live aerobically, carbon compounds serving
as gasoline are oxydized without any combustion at room temperature under
tight molecular control. And we humans and other creatures don't exhale
oxydized nitrogen and sulfur compounds which contribute to acid rain and smog,
unlike combustion motors which work with the crude twentieth century
bulk technology.

->You mentioned building a skyscraper.  Let's size that down to
->building, say, a two-story townhouse that masses around 10 metric
->tons.  I really don't know how accurate that mass estimate is,
->but it's not too far off.  Suppose your building blocks mass about
->3000 atomic units (that's a pretty sizeable molecule).  So this
->house will need ~2x10^36 building blocks.  If you can connect{
->1 trillion (10^12) building blocks every second, then this
->two-story house will need ~6x10^16 years to be built.  In short,
->the Earth will be swallowed by the sun long before this house
->is built.  So I'd wager that a skyscraper is out of the question. :)

One way of building large macroscopic structures is outlined in EoC
on p.60 using a rocket engine as an example. You essentially build a very
thin scaffold using not a lot of material and then you fill in the rest
of the material in a highly parallel fashion all along the scaffold.
There certainly are other methodologies. You can always build subassemblies
that you combine into larger and larger units in a process that organic
chemists will recognize as convergent synthesis. Of course, as these units
get quite large you will have to use stronger robot arms, etc. At some point
you are essentially putting together macroscopic objects like it happens on
todays skyscraper construction sites. But you can equip these modules with
certain nifty properties, such as letting them recognize that they have been
put in place so that they now can proceed to fuse with and blend into the
rest of the structure in a smooth fashion.
If you are still not convinced that molecular manufacturing of large products
is feasible, then it might again help to look into our multi-billion year
outdoor lab: in nature certainly large structures have been built. Take for
example a large whale. I don't know what the exact size of the seed is with
which a whale starts out, but I assume that the zygote does probably not
contain a lot more initial mass than a human zygote. Likewise, the Californian
Sequoia trees are fairly large, some comparable to skyscrapers. They took
a few hundred years to grow, but certainly not ~6x10^16 years (so your estimate
of 1 trillion (10^12) building blocks every second was way too low; only one
mole of a substance already is ~6x10^23: with one mole of assemblers you will
be able to process a corresponding amount of material; please think as parallel
as you can). But the Sequoias are not designed to take advantage of a zippy
nanotechnology. If we design the construction process according to better
rules, we definitely should be able to beat the hundred years by a large
factor.
By the way, the whale example was again taken from EoC, p.58, in the chapter
entitled "Molecules and Skyscrapers" (quite unexspected, isn't it ? :-). In
EoC, Eric Drexler has answered _a lot_ of questions a long time ago. I really
recommend reading this book _thoroughly_. It's worth it.

<11654.3.728.6 Re: Snowballing tomk>(8/23/92)
by tomk@netcom.com (Thomas H. Kunich):

->   ... Personally I have a hard time believing
->that you can build _anything_ substantial an atom at a time.
->It doesn't take much figuring to see the scale is all to small
->even for nanotechnology -- you can't make atom size magnets. I'm
->not sure that you can make atom sized conductuctors and you
->certainly can't make atom sized smiconductors. Even molecule
->sized stuff probably won't work because of quantum effects.
->
->So the nanotech '486 won't work. ...

Roughly the same arguments apply as to the skyscraper discussion. First you 
construct enough assemblers to get the job done in a reasonable time, and
then you let them do the job. Atom sized magnets are definitely useless
(scaling properties of the magnetic force) so if you really need magnets, you
will construct macroscopic ones. For small motors an electrostatic design
is much better anyway. It might be that the first computational engines
will not be electronic but rather mechanical, using maybe Drexler's
rod logic. They are a lot easier to design (no fussing around with quantum
mechanics).
Please nobody mention the 486 anymore. The first nanocomputers will _not_
be a 486-copy; the architecture of the Intel-processors is much too screwed
up. Sorry for this strong expression, and I guess this is rather a personal
opinion of mine, and I don't want to start here a flame  war on the subject
of Intel vs. Motorola or other architectures. But I would prefer if the 
discussion could be carried on just assuming some powerful, as yet to be
specified, general purpose computer design. In order to take maximum advantage
of the fact that individual CPU's with a couple of GBytes of local memory
can be made so small, one will want to specify a design which is geared
towards massively parallel machines, so that chunking together a billion of
them for your ordinary pocket supercomputer will be no big deal.

->to build, say, an IC.  ...

and in <11654.3.728.3 Re: Snowballing nanotech>(8/21/92)
by mturner@aris.ss.uci.edu (Matthew Turner):

->    1) very strong, thin, and lightweight metal composites
->    2) strong glasses
->    3) wafer-scale integration in microchip manufacture...
->    4) cleaner polymer matrices ... thus stronger plastics.

By the time we have the technological capabilities to produce faultless
materials to atomic specifications, 2-dimensional IC's, glasses, and other
silicon gadgets will likely be totally outdated and obsolete (including
the 486 (sorry for mentioning it again)). As one will be constructing with
carbon, one will want to head directly towards diamond, which, quite true,
is a "stronger plastic".


Let me now come back to the original point of this discussion: is there an
absence of near-term incentives to justify the development of nanotechnology ?

<11654.3.728.5 Re: Snowballing tomk>(8/21/92)
by sinster@cse.ucsc.edu (Darren Senn):

->The first few iterations of the technology are going to have
->spend a great deal of resources simply maintaining their manipulators.
->You don't want to have to throw away and replace a multi-million-dollar
->piece of equipment.  

->    ...  Then we're talking another 20 years or
->so before people start trying to build a toaster.

<11654.3.728.4 Re: Snowballing tomk>(8/21/92)
by ian@inf.ethz.ch (Ian):

->   ... that the initial steps in nanotech
->would inevitably be expensive and that they would not be well funded unless
->they had an *immediate* use for it, ie. there was an parctical, economic,...

<11654.3.728.6 Re: Snowballing tomk>(8/23/92)
by tomk@netcom.com (Thomas H. Kunich):

->Nanotechnology is a far more serious matter. The technology isn't here
->now. It requires great amounts of capital to develop, ...

One approach to move closer to nanotech has been outlined in:
[Drexler 91] K. E. Drexler:
		"Molecular tip arrays for imaging and nanofabrication"
		J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B9(2), (1991) p. 1394-1397
By equipping an AFM with multiple antibody-tips which are able to grasp
organic molecules, positional chemical synthesis could be performed
with the possibility of performing 10^5 consecutive chemical reactions
on one substrate. With proper design, this might suffice to build a 
very crude protoassembler, which is nevertheless capable of synthesizing
something by following a string of commands, for example a copy of itself.
This crude device would be capable of getting us to next stage of increasingly
more sophisticated assemblers. A more detailed discussion can be found in
the upcoming book "Nanosystems".
By that time, how close have we come to nanotech ? We seem to at least
have demonstrated that these proposals are maybe not as weird as they
might sound at first strike. How much capital has to be spent to reach
that stage ? An AFM nowadays costs about as much as a good graphics
workstation, not millions of dollars. The costs for the chemicals out of
which the assembler is built (these might have to be thrown away, not the AFM),
even if those are very expensive compounds, are negligable, as next to no
material is consumed in the initial stages (analogous to biochemistry:
enzymes often cost many times more than their weight in gold but you don't
need a lot of them to do something interesting). In the later stages, when
a lot of assemblers will be  produced by self-replication, the raw materials
will be dirt cheap. None of the techniques needed to attach antibodies to an AFM
are very exotic and most subaspects are routine laboratary procedures. 
They just have not yet been put together, maybe because of a lack of
communication, or what ever. And already there are labs that are very
interested in trying to do this.
How fast will research proceed after the initial crude assembler demonstration,
after it has dawned on all sorts of people, companies, and governments, that
there is an imminent prospect of an incredible technology with huge pay-offs ?
How fast does self-replication work ? How many resources will be put into
engineering and design ? I won't really answer these questions as they are not
that difficult to figure out. I suspect that we will be building even toasters
before 20 years have gone by.
Who will find immediate incentives to develop something now ? Small companies
which upgrade the AFM's that they sell with some antibody technology will earn
something if they can sell a few, even if they pursue this only to improve the
imaging quality. After the demonstration of a crude assembler, the nature of
the game probably will have changed completely anyway.

->  ... Most of the 'science' that was developed
->in the past generated additional information simply as a side issue.
->This information maybe sat around for a long time before someone made
->use of it. What this _looked_ like was that all of this science had
->been accomplished as a hobby or altruistically. This simply wasn't the 
->case.

This is not exactly correct. One should not forget that for a lot of research
in Academia, there are not always fairly obvious reasons (with a pay-back
prospect) for why certain research is being performed. And the researchers are 
proud of this fact and often emphasize the importance of so called "basic
research". A lot of research in organic chemistry has been performed in this
way. Elucidating some obscure reaction mechanism or trying to synthesize some
strange molecule that can be found in nature, or wilder, which might satisfy
some aesthetic criteria, like dodecahedrane, does not always have an obvious
commercial potential that goes beyond filling the pages of an Aldrich catalog.
It often seems like technical applications have been the unintended fallout
of basic research (e.g. teflon), rather than the other way around.
In addition, nanotechnology requires no new science, as Eric Drexler explains
at length both in EoC and more technically in "Nanosystems"; what is now
required is the application of known science towards novel technological uses,
which is rather an engineering discipline.
Given the evidence that nanotech is more or less around the corner, it should
be actually in the best interest of every citizen of this planet who values 
his personal freedom and liberty, to pursue nanotechnology research in an
open fashion to avoid that such research happens first in secretive governmental
and military labs. This alone should be more than enough of an incentive.

<11654.3.728.5 Re: Snowballing tomk>(8/21/92)
by sinster@cse.ucsc.edu (Darren Senn):

->In general, you can't know a technology's disadvantages until it's
->arrived.

With a powerful technology like nanotechnology, it is certainly not too
difficult to picture certain very ugly scenarios which may be called
"disadvantages", but you will want to avoid them under all circumstances.
More on this is again to be found in EoC.



Are there any readers left who have courageously fought their way through this
pamphlet up to here ? As this has become quite lengthy, I'm going to stop here.
In short, I can see a lot of evidence why nanotechnology will happen soon.
I'd like to encourage people to read, read, and read even more. It does take
some time to absorb and get used to such an enormous technology which is highly
interdisciplinary and covers stuctural aspects through many orders of magnitude.
But all of the questions raised here have already been treated in the
literature. It is really necessary to be fully informed in order to try to
refute an idea which already enjoys solid support and is based upon sound
principles and thinking.

I would be very glad if the consensus would form on this news group that
molecular manufacturing is feasible and is coming soon. There is no point in
reinventing the wheel over and over again, and asking the same old questions
again and again. If somebody wants to question the feasibility of nanotechnology,
then the arguments will have to be much more specific. Maybe we should wait
until everybody has access to a copy of "Nanosystems" (and has read it!),
because then criticism can be directed towards formula number x on page y.
If this consensus would form, we could start trying to find answers to the
many real questions that still remain and are very important.
Some of those are of a technical nature (implementation details), but many
of the most important have a much wider scope. Consider the impact on society:
for example:
How do we make the transition from todays crude industry to a 
post-breakthrough era so that everybody on this planet gets their
fair share ? (Too gross a technology gradient could easily lead to
quite some social upheaval (just remember the Luddites, and were
the L.A. riots '92 a modern version of this ?)). 

and so on

Thank you for not being too outraged after having read all this.
Markus


------- End - of - Message -----------------------
(responsibility for my personal opinions is mine)

Richard Stallman : "The more society becomes
        information instead of material objects,
        this question of whether
        a person can copy things
        will make the difference between

        a world of universal prosperity
     or a world of constant rat race."

__________________________________________________
kr@cup.portal.com            IIIII  M   M  M   M
Markus Krummenacker            I    MM MM  MM MM
(working for                   I    M M M  M M M
 The Institute for             I    M   M  M   M
 Molecular Manufacturing)      I    M   M  M   M
                             IIIII  M   M  M   M