/sci/ - Science & Math

Why do people always use the iPhone as an example? For FUCK's sake there has to be a more interesting technology.

How about gene sequencing, which experts thought was going to take ages? How about scanning probe microscopy?

>>3843853

Back to Nano.

>The tabletop was now a smooth plane glittering with bits of light. There were millions of these light bits, which winked on and off in a blizzard of colours: crimson, sapphire, violet and green. And magenta, rose, flame red, indigo and aquamarine and a hundred other colours. Each light bit represented a certain configuration of information stored inside the universal computer. The light bits – or rather the information they represented – were like artificial atoms, each of which was programmed with unique properties. These fundamental information structures existed in the cybernetic space that the cetics call the alam al-mithral. This is the space in which images are real, the space halfway between the real world and the Platonic world of ideals. On Old Earth, a thousand years before the first computers, Avicenna the Wise had posited a realm of existence midway between matter and spirit. For millennia, the cetics had applied all their ingenuity to creating such a realm; it was the claim of the cyber-shamans that they had succeeded. Many cyber-shamans possessed black spheres like Hanuman's. Many cyber-shamans had created and programmed their own unique information atoms in order to evolve life made of pure information.

cont

>>3780860

Atomic Force Microscopes and Scanning Tunnelling Microscopes have been here since the eighties :)

>>3703396

>There are certain parts to the movie that probably bug attentive chemists, including myself to some extent, but those parts are there to be scrutinized and “filled in” by research, which is the first thing I thought of when I saw them. I won’t speak for Eric and John Burch, but I would imagine that one important part of having this walk-through of a mechanosynthetic process is to finally have specific steps in a fabrication process drawn out, on screen, for people to begin arguing about. Why argue about feasibility when you can knit-pick individual steps along one proposed path? Further, if someone doesn’t like what’s proposed in a step, they’re more than welcome to propose a way around it.

>I can speak to the three first steps in the fabrication process, those steps being (a) the sorting of the acetylene feedstock, (b) the binding of the acetylene to the tooltips, and (c) the deposition of the dimer onto the growing block workspace. Beyond the deposition and transfer of the blocks to the later assembler, the value of my opinion drops exponentially with increasing scale in the movie. I’m not an assembly linesman, although I assume we’ll be able to accurately manipulate 50 nm blocks in the future if we can move single atoms now.

>>3546157

And what exactly did you change? The models look more or less the same.

>>3437771

>SELF. REPLICATING. NANOBOTS.

Goddammit, get your shit together. Even Eric Drexler hates that term, "nanobots", and nobody seriously considers them anymore except for medical applications, ie clottocytes and chromatocytes, and those are --gasp!-- not intended to be self-replicating. The modern view of an assembler, which has been just about the same since 1997, is that of a small equivalent of a 3D printer where the extruder is covered in mechanosynthesis dimers.

If you want a "self-replicating nanobot", you're going to have to explain how you'll fit a few cubic nanometers of rod logic computers, data storage, batteries, and mechanosynthesis tooltips -- And then you face the problem of the tooltips being for the sole purpose of mechanochemically synthesizing diamonds. These robots won't be able to make food, or neurons, and maybe not even fullerenes -- Only diamondoids, unless you fit them with more tips. Tips all over the place, and for every allotrope -- Or a few thousand, actually, since you'll never get anything done with one tip for diamond, another one for graphene. And then you have complex molecules that are hard to assemble by stacking atoms on a diamond surface, and for those you'll need some interior chamber with more tips specific to that molecule...

Moreover, diamond mechanosynthesis only happens in a vacuum. How does the robot move in a vacuum? A propeller? A flagellum? Robot limbs, in which case it can't move in 3D unless it climbs something.

Kinematic self-replicators that make "almost anything" are for all practical purposes, impossible.

http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2010-07/homemade-open-source-scanning-tunneling-electron-microscop
e

This is an AFM tooltip. It's shaved down to the width of a single atom, and is then set to crash on a surface to move atoms around.

FLASH FACT: Most of the people involved in this work spend most of their time cleaning and shaving the tip.

>Any theories on materia converters or 100% recycling or something?

Obviously not 100% because as >>2917476 mentioned, entropy. But this is close enough to 100% efficient recycling and manufacturing.

It's most certainly waste-free, unless you consider waste heat as actual waste! (And we're talking about a bit of hot steam, not anything actually hot)

http://www.molecularassembler.com/Nanofactory/DMS.htm
http://thenanoage.com/
http://www.dse.nl/~hkl/e_nano1.htm
http://thenanoage.com/molecular-manufacturing.htm

A molecular assembler (Or Nanofactory, Nanofabricator, Overtool, Cornucopia Machine... You get the point...) would be the meeting of three different emerging technologies.

The first is top-down design: 3d printers, which work by having the deposit-head move around squirting plastic and some metals on a surface. Little by little it builds up into mouds, shaped like gears, engines, tanks, shells, machines of all kinds. The problem here is that the size of it's "lego blocks", the size of the smallest things it can deposit, is around that of a grain of sand: And that is too big. It can, kinda pile up plastic. But it can't make anything smaller than the blocks of plastic it is fed.

Then there is protein engineering: There has been a lot of work, recently, into using "DNA Origami" to fold DNA into shapes like cubes, bowls, and protein engineering (Nanochemistry) is the only part of nanotechnology besides STM/AFM that we know for total, absolute sure works. We are made of molecular machines, proteins and enzymes arranging atoms, pulling them around, pulling apart molecules. Our cells are machines, emergent properties of the working of these proteins, and so are we. But that we are machines does not make us any less people.

Then, there is "dry" (Not biological) nano: There is STM/AFM: The first is Scanning Tunnelling Microscope, which uses a quantum effect to move around atoms, and being a Microscope, can also sense the surface it's working on. The quantum effect in question is tunneling, through which electrons flutter around, teleporting from the surface to the tip. Then there is AFM; Atomic Force Microscopy, which is kinda the same except that not really. They are not the same but I put a slash between them because I cannot be arsed to think of them as different. It should be called a "Nanoscope" at this point, though.