/sci/ - Science & Math

>>3805444

This is just silly now.

>>3703396

>So, the sorting rotor. The movie shows a cylinder with a divot in it for binding the acetylene, then the passing of the acetylene from one chamber to another before finally getting deposited on a tooltip. Is this part of the movie rendered with atomic precision enough to shake the skeptics into submission. No. This is one of those “indicator” sections. To the typical viewer, they see a molecule being sorted and probably wouldn’t think hard beyond it. To a supramolecular chemist or someone knowledgeable in guest-host chemistry, they’ll look at the rendering of the acetylene binding pocket in the movie and scream in horror. That said, those chemists would be able to look at the movie and say “Ah. They want to sort acetylene. A binding pocket could probably be designed to preferentially bind acetylene or other small, non-polar, linear molecules that would bind those molecules tightly enough to allow for this mechanical transfer. Jot jot jot, thermochemistry, some quick calculations, a plausible binding pocket falls out. Now, the chemical approach to this piece of the movie might just be to synthesize a membrane that will only pass very small molecules, might bind some small molecules, like molecular oxygen, preferentially, or have a gamut of reaction vessels to get the acetylene as pure as possible beforehand. J. Storrs Hall presented a sorting rotor design at the 13th Foresight Conference that is far more mechanical and complicated than either the animation or this chemical approach are, the point being that we can design a way to sort acetylene and get it pure enough for the next step in the fabrication process.

Oh my God, this thread.

OP they just made the Anders Sandberg movie, check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mxG9qjI1go

Biology is pretty huge and there's a lot of stuff. For transhumanism-related biology, there are plenty of interesting TED talks and basically all the DIY bio stuff.

As for nanotechnology, there's no real documentary. Get your copies of Nanosystems and The Diamond Age, download every paper by Robert Freitas, Ralph Merkle, Eric Drexler and Damian Allis, and compile them into a movie with some VO quotes from Nanosystems.

>>3529405

>Barring nanotechnology, we could still launch clanking replicators to the moon. And even if they couldn't be made totally autonomous, supervision could be effected by telepresence.

Yes, of course, but I worry about the initial size of the factory. Without nanotechnology, and even /with/ some degree of nanotechnology, you're going to need mining machines for many kind of terrain and regolith, transportation, a power supply (The Moon takes too long to rotate -- Land on the Peaks of Eternal Light?), a refinery to sort the materials (Which would require a foundry, and a way to separate what comes out of it. Centrifuges?), and then you get to the actual manufacturing system, which might be limited to a very small array of products -- And if the only thing the factories can produce is more of themselves, then there isn't really a point to Von Neumanning the Moon.

>Oh? What did I get wrong?

Disregard that guy.

>>3363888