/sci/ - Science & Math

Fuck this, we can overcome this shit, we just have some issues here and there. I have no doubt we will survive for much longer.

I do reckon we'll get there, but not at least for another couple of decades.

>>3551601

We Doomed
We Doomed
We Doomed
We Doomed
We Doomed
We Doomed
We Doomed
We Doomed
We Doomed

>>3551611
OP here

Get where, to the bleak predicted death of mankind?

Or to the utopian equilibrium others believe?

>>3551676
Something more aligned with the utopian ideal.

>>3551694
Ah interesting, most of the people who are asked this are quite inclined to the dystopian/horrific idea. I personally don't really know where i stand.

>>3551703
Too many technologies and lines of research are advancing for us to not reach a point when we can bring great abundance to everyone on the planet. That's how I see it. Space, robotics, medicine, and communications via the internet.

>>3551715

Surprised more people arent into this thread, i have to disagree to an extent, we are horrifically irresponsible and i'd almost say it's our fate to fuck up something so major, that it ends with our demise

>>3551715
That's true, i suppose i can understand that point of view.

>>3551676

Neither death by nuclear fire nor 'balance with the planet'.

>>3551740
Oh there's no doubt we'll likely cause some catastrophe that will kill off a statistically significant portion of both the wildlife and humans on Earth, as well, we're already there. But some very simple and fundamental things can change a lot. For example:
Liquid fluoride thorium reactors to produce 80% of world's electricity with waste heat used for desalinization of water and creation of fuels like dimethyl ether and methanol. Mandate all 'fossil fueled' cars be converted to be flex fueled, with an increased percentage of electric cars to be made by 2020 or something. That just knocked off energy scarcity by a wide margin, rising oil prices, and a fair bit of out contribution to climate change. not to mention preventing the water shortages and no longer funding the Saudis for their oil. And China is already embarking on LFTRs, so I think this will come to pass relatively soon.

>>3551754
>We will stay the same

>>3551770

No, not the same. Some will, of course, but not everyone...

Enter mechanochemistry.

Within, more or less thirty years, we'll have positional, atomically-precise control of diamond and diamond derivatives. [1] Zyvex has demonstrated something close to mechanosynthesis by removing Hydrogen atoms with atomic precision from a Silicon surface [2]. And it will not be restricted to diamond, just about any covalently-bonded crystal can be used: Boron nitride, for example, and Silica are the ones that come to mind [3].

We still have to solve the chicken and egg problem (The only efficient way to make a diamondoid assembler is with another diamondoid assembler) alternate paths have been proposed [4] and the fact that they are complete enough to be criticised and patent-worthy [5] speaks rather nicely about the work being done in this area.

Continued.

[1]: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/philip-moriarty-discusses.html
[2]: http://www.zyvexlabs.com/Research.html
[3]: http://www.softmachines.org/PDFs/PhoenixMoriartyI.pdf page 10
[4]: http://www.molecularassembler.com/Papers/PathDiamMolMfg.htm
[5]: http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/04/robert-freitas-awarded-historic-first.html

Societal evolution happens.
If the human condition becomes unbearable in an environment, the environment or general attitude toward it will change. Sometimes gradually and painfully, sometimes faster and painlessly.

Even if the world gets engulfed in flames of war, that would be a part of the process, with a resulting lower population density and a lot of recyclable debris to take advantage of.

This would of course be a setback to technological development, but a good shaking down of society does good once in a while.

Currently the society has become alarmingly stratified, with an incredibly small amount of vertical movement. In the past, such a situation has preceded periods of large turmoil.

I wonder if the current trend of increasing politically or socially motivated violence in western countries is a sign we're heading for the next upheaval.

>>3551760
Source for this photo?

>>3551802

Surely, atom-stacking of covalent crystals won't give us a 'universal assembler'. I'm skeptical of the concept of a universal assembler. But a machine which can churn out indefinite amounts of diamond, lonsdaleite, graphite, graphene, CNTs, and buckminsterfullerene... Would be the most valuable thing in the world. For a while, conventional 3D printers would be above it, of course. We've seen tremendous progress in the area of 3D printers (Two decades ago they cut little sheets of paper into circles of varying diameter, then glued them together to make a 'sphere'. Now we have the RepRap which is mostly self-replicating, but can't chipfab. Although Bryan Bishop insists that, if the first chips were made using brute, hardware-store lenses, then a photolithography machine for a more-or-less decent microchip shouldn't be entirely within the realm of the imagination [1]).

There is also my objection that diamond mechanosynthesis can't make a protein, it's atom stacking, and as such making something like an ethanol molecule or ethylene glycol would be hard, if not impossible, though a tip-based approach. But after we have a diamondoid nanofactory, we'll reach a stage where Carbon allotropes can be produced in arbitrary amounts -- And those, in themselves, are very useful. Logic rods (Pic) for rod-logical computers [2] and diamond bearings [3][4], and diamond universal joints [5] will be very simple to build with 'conventional' mechanochemistry, and will be very important for the development of nanoscale and microscale robots, and terahertz computers -- [cont]

>>3551860

Which will enable faster, more accurate molecular dynamics and speed up progress in the field. Eventually the nanofactory will grow in the set of things it can print, until we get to the point where we have a nanofactory capable of producing 'nearly anything' -- However I don't think this will happen any time in the near future. Still, a 'simple' diamondoid nanofactory... Is more than enough.

[1]: http://www.thefutureandyou.libsyn.com/the-future-and-you-march-23-2011
[2]: http://www.halcyon.com/nanojbl/NanoConProc/nanocon2.html
[3]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7un3sLKnr2I
[4]: http://nanoengineer-1.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=Strained-shell_Sleeve_Bearing
[5]: http://nanoengineer-1.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=Universal_Joint

As for the disassembly, we'll I'd go for a traditional plasma arc + magnetic separation (http://www.molecularassembler.com/KSRM/3.14.htm))

I don't know of a better way to obtain purified stock, besides, perhaps, using a molecular sorting pump (http://nanoengineer-1.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=Sorting_Pump)) to separate the elements. But dissociation of the molecules still has to be carried out by a plasma arc, because a 'universal disassembler' is just as hard as a universal assembler: It's going to be dealing with all kinds of molecules, so atomically plucking out everything is not feasible. Ionize the damn thing.

Still, the sorting pump is such a complex thing, it has to be done by, um, 'third-generation' universal assemblers rather than first generation diamondoid-only nanofactories.

>>3551860
A possible solution to making a limited UC would be to have a molecular constructor with several parallel production lines with systems to re-tool the production lines, in parallel or series.

To get finished products out of this would require a larger assembler, but without that it could still churn out several different products at the same time or larger volumes of a single product.

And intriguing possibility would be to have all the lines producing CNTs or CCTs and have a micro-scale braider be fed by these to produce tethers by the meter.

>>3551899

Yes, but what worries me is that we may have one tip per allotrope. Or per group of allotropes.

In which case, massive parallelism would be nice and all -- If the assembler is destined to make diamond on the fly. Any other allotrope needs a few billion of the *other* tips, and suddenly you have the entire print-head crammed with mechanosynthesis tooltips. Also the problem of the manipulator arms for these tips colliding.

>do you think we will overcome our inherent evils, and eventually better ourselves to the point where we do really reach an equilibrium with the planet and get a good balance going

I'm pretty much completely with this, although I don't think people are inherently evil.

War, pollution, bad resource management, political conflict, crime - these are costly. They impact our ability to survive as individuals and as a species, so they are selected against. Global indicators of wealth, longevity and economic development have risen steadily since the beginning of the 20th century. Overall crime rates in most parts of North America have fallen for decades. The total number of conflicts around the world hasn't been this low since 1966. Things really are getting better, but it happens slowly.

I think if something dramatic happened that threatened the world's survival, we'd pull together as a species and face it. It's in our own interest.

I think society has seen its pinnacle (the Romans? now?) and it can only get worse.

Op here

This is some interesting shit

>>3551913
Any kind of commercial UC that could provide macro-scale products is bound to be massively parallel. And I mean MASSIVELY.

If it's not, the production sizes and amounts would be too minuscule to be o any use outside of laboratories and specialist applications.

Bumping.

/sci/, what do you think the implications of everyone owning a machine that can print just about anything using only electricity and raw Carbon, and producing nothing more than heat as waste?

>>3551991
The cost of raw materials and their transportation would increase. At least until it became ubiquitous and became incorporated into the mains.

>>3551991
Near post-scarcity

>>3552019

Dude, I've been playing around with NanoEngineer. I got the CNT gears (http://nanoengineer-1.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=NASA_CNT_Gears)) to spin at 100 GHz and put a case around it, I'm trying to make it into some sort of very primitive sorting pump. Though adding the case alone just increase the simulation time to thirty-seconds-per-femtosecond.

*sigh*

>>3552055
>spin at 100 GHz

>>3551991
What would or could I do with one?

>>3552063

Print diamond dragon dildos.

But seriously... Just like the software industry started with companies, until the means of abstraction (ie high level languages) were in the hands of desktop users and open-source projects started popping up, this will be the same. With a machine capable of molecularly building superproducts, there will be programs capable of taking .obj or .blend files and turning them into a "general blueprint", like "fill a volume of dimensions M, N, T starting from point X, Y, Z with material G." and then the assembler repeats the same process over and over, so it does not require the position of every atom to be specified in the file, it's generated procedurally from general blueprints.

We will open-source the means of production. All previous ideologies have been all about money, how money and wealth are distributed, who controls the means of production, but MNT does not have to abide to all those future-shocked ceoncepts. Any system to date will have become entirely useless.

I'm not saying there will be post-scarcity, though. Perhaps 'near post-scarcity', but a UC is not a magic unicorn.

>>3552061

They're small so its not that bad. It's one-quarter of a rotation per hundred femtoseconds, though, which is pretty good.

>>3552080
>unlimited diamond dragon dildos

>>3552099

Yes exactly.

Bump.

Damn you guys I spent a long time typing up those informative posts and getting the sources ;_;

>>3551991
I'm actually working on something like that right now. You ever work with rapid prototypers? Great for presentation, really shitty for mass production. Eventually there will be no factories, only replicators. And everyone will be unemployed and poorfags on the street or rich and in mansions because they design new shit for the replicators or work for the people that design new shit for the replicators. It'll be a good day to be a nerd, you'll get to pick the hotter girls from the unwashed masses for sex and they'll do anything for a shower and a meal.

>>3554175

Sounds like every /sci/borg's dream.

Just today I was thinking about the dangers of nanotchnology. I think if we ever kill ourselves, everything else will go along, swept clean by a gray tide.

>>3556252

>implying gray goo

>>3552404

This is great posts! But how far are we from something functioning? I can barely imagine just the minor implications this will have, so will we live to see this?

fuck this, i'll be back sci

>>3556286

Pic related. In 1990 we could push atoms above a surface, but this is not bond breaking/forming. Ten years later we used the same technology (AFM) to demonstrate mechanosynthesis on Silicon surfaces.

This is harder to extend to diamond because Silicon can be cleaned by heating it in a vacuum, to depassivate the surface for working on it. Diamond, not so much.

Bumping once more. Pic related it's Ralph Merkle.

>>3556261
I got your fucking gray goo right here.

bump