Tag: nano

Nanosolar Ships First Panels

if they scale this up, boom! energy cheaper than coal is here.

Nano risk

why were these risks not widely discussed 10 years ago? we have known about this stuff since the 80s, but of course hidebound people were entirely ignorant, maybe willfully.

Military Nanotechnology

The book’s most controversial thesis is not that MNT is plausible and should be taken seriously; it is that the only coherent response to this technology’s military implications is to develop global governance structures that supersede existing national powers. “The traditional way of guaranteeing national security–namely the threat of armed force–may no longer be compatible with the advance of technology,” he argues. And since security “can no longer be reliably ensured by national armed forces,” he prescribes “strengthened international institutions and international law, in particular criminal law with prosecution of perpetrators, moving into a direction toward an international monopoly of legitimate force, strong enough to prevent or punish threats or use of illegal force.”

a book that talks about MNT dangers as of ca. 2003 does not assuage your concerns, exactly. things are moving much faster than that..

Subcellular Remote-Control Interfaces

The breakthrough nanoradio consists of a single carbon-nanotube molecule that serves simultaneously as all the essential components of a radio — antenna, tunable band-pass filter, amplifier and demodulator. “I’m totally amazed that it works so well. Making individual components are good breakthroughs, but the holy grail was putting it all together. So we’re ecstatic that we were able to achieve that full integration.”

The radio opens the possibility of creating radio-controlled interfaces on the subcellular scale, which may have applications in the areas of medical and sensor technology.

Memory Architecture

16TB @ 1ns access speed by 3d nanowires. this has the potential to speed up computer architectures across the board: no more pushing data through a straw.

Molecular Machine Feasibility

Richard Jones lists 6 challenges for molecular nanotechnology:

Stability of nanoclusters and surface reconstruction. Surfaces have a tendency to “reconstruct” – seek out stable equilibria in ways not necessarily predicted by molecular dynamics simulations.

Thermal noise, Brownian motion and tolerance. Atoms on the nanoscale may be too wobbly to build complex machines out of. Drexler addressed this, but not in thorough detail.

Friction and energy dissipation. Surface area becomes much larger as machinery scales down, and high functional densities will give rise to high power densities in molecular machine systems. The friction and heat may be so intense that molecular machine systems cannot be reliably constructed.

Design for a motor. Richard is skeptical that the electrostatic motor as described in Drexler’s Nanosystems would actually work. More detail needs to be fleshed out and supported by experimental testing.

The eutactic environment and the feed-through problem. For MNT systems to work, they would need to operate in ultra-high vacuum. But, interacting with the outside, they’d be exposed to a very atomically messy environment. Valves and pumps need to be around 100% efficient to exclude foreign molecules.

Implementation path. How do we get there from here? If “soft” nanotechnology is all that works, how do we transition from there to hard?

These are all valid arguments, but some are a bit more interesting than others. To estimate them roughly in order of declining importance based on my own opinion, I’d list them as 3, 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6.

beats tracking down all the physical chemistry papers

No Femtotech Grey Goo?

The paper shows that it is not possible to make a self-replicating quantum mechanical device because of the linearity of quantum mechanics, the no cloning theorems and the conservation of entanglement.

would need decoherence. one worry less 🙂 otoh, also one hard scifi scenario less.