Re: Important new paper out from Freitas and Merkle


Perry E. Metzger wrote:

Actual nanomachines will be the most complicated objects ever produced
by man. One should not assume that the path to building such things
will be cheap and easy. It takes gargantuan sums of money and armies
of people working very hard to design a new microprocessor, so
we should expect something far more complicated to have higher
barriers, if anything.

What about the cost of the product? Say, hypothetically, that it is
possible to pull those H atoms off and replace them by carbon atoms
pulled from a C source - and form a large lattice, one atom at a
time, using a pointy tool, and get a low error rate at 80 K. That's
a number of mechanically-broken bonds per atom, and the acceleration
and deceleration expenditure on the tool and its holder - probably
plus a whole bunch of monitoring costs, so the constructor can see
what it is doing when grabbing carbon atoms.

Has anyone ever calculated how much it would cost (in terms of
energy costs) to make a diamond that way? How would it compare to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_vapor_deposition_of_diamond

....? Rather poorly, I would expect.

This seems like a kind of "brute force" nanotechnology to me.
It doesn't follow the Taoist principle of cooperating with nature.

They won't make diamonds - but I would expect fields such as DNA
self-assembly to make much better progress than this sort of thing.
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