Re: Flaws in Drexler's vision


On a dark an' dismal Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:28:17 -0000, in flickering =
lamplight, Tim Tyler
<seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> scribed with phoenix qill :

I found an article which expresses some of my discomfort
with Drexler's ideas:

``Flaws in Drexler's vision
Why, for example, do illustrations of nanosubmarines look so
absurd to a scientific eye? The reason is that these
pictures assume that the engineering that we employ on
macroscopic scales can simply be scaled down to the
nano-scale.

What rubbish !
The reason is that the *artist* has seen a submarine, and possibly=20
=46antastic voyage.

But physics looks very different at such
dimensions. Designs that function well in our macroscopic
world will work less and less well as they shrink in size. [...]''

try reading some real details from the source, this may lay some=20
of your qualms to bed.
http://www.foresight.org/UTF/Unbound_LBW/download.html

The article goes on in some detail about how scaling
things down works poorly.

I believe that you might prefer to jump to chapter2
since it does address your specific point.
"physics looks very different"=20

It doesn't contain any real criticism of assemblers, or
diamondoid materials, though.

i think that the nearest to a 'submarine' to go into the body=20
was an artificial red blood cell, but i can't remember its name.

mik :-)


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