/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10758852
>>"Just nanite everything"
The utility fog concept has been much more worked out than anything posted in this thread:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19940022864.pdf
They answer how they could move, how much power they would take to do so, how much control they would need, how strong the bulk material might be. They also point out some pretty big limitations that need to be over come, even if the foglets communicate with light and have nanocomputers and crap a 100 byte packet of information propagates through the fog at only 50 meters/second! This is horrendously slow! So the problem of figuring out how to transfer information fast enough just so we can display 2d images at rates similar to television is a pretty big issue, much less figuring out how to change shape. Oh and said utility foglets might have a core 40 microns in diameter and arms which can span up to 100 microns. That 0.1 MILLIMETERS! This is quite, quite larger than the nanoscale, so really using the definition 'nanite' doesn't make any sense.
>>make fairly efficient use of physical processes at that scale.
with nanotechnology we could do better and do so in a manner that is much more amenable to engineering. In addition, it's difficult to do fast computation, control, and communication with biology. As the case with utility fog demonstrates, fast communication may be pretty important. I will admit that we do not have the capability to make utility fog and are not sure whether we can practically make it.