3 ms·

I went back to school to get into "nanotech". Then I quickly realized it's been around for 3.5 billion years, and promptly switched into biology.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Yeah. This is the basic point many people decrying nanotechnology as a pipe dream are missing - that life itself is nothing but nanotechnology, only one that we didn't design and we don't know how to control yet.
- aetherson 11y ago
  Clearly it is possible to use self-replicating microscopic things (cells) to produce macroscopic objects. Life does indeed prove this. But, you know, it takes billions-of-years evolved plantlife about 20 years to produce a simple structural element able to support maybe a thousand lbs and 20 feet long (ie, to grow a tree). We notably do not see anything in nature that does "molecular assembly" from microscopic cells to differentiated macroscopic objects in a time-scale of less than months.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Well, having already a working process, speeding it up will be easier. In nature, you don't really have dedicated nanoassemblers that do only structure scaffoldings with no other considerations - they have to support a whole organism. So when, for instance, growing a skeleton, you need it to go slow enough that the more complex parts like veins and nervous system can keep up. But if we needed biology to grow us a particular object, we can learn how to put the relevant process on overdrive and ditch the rest. Also, even if the initial version of nanotech worked as fast as tree grows, you could still put a lot of products in parallel, so for most intent and purposes, after few months of waiting, you'll be getting new copies daily. We do that a lot with traditional manufacturing today. > But, you know, it takes billions-of-years evolved plantlife about 20 years... Well, evolution is really stupid and really slow. Having brains, we can now iterate many orders of magnitude faster, so I wouldn't worry. Comparing things to evolution is comparing to the simplest and dumbest possible process imaginable that still works.
chm 11y ago
They're really different points of view, with different goals. There's studying how life works at various levels, and there's designing systems from the ground up. Both complementary!

TeMPOraL 11y ago

Yeah. This is the basic point many people decrying nanotechnology as a pipe dream are missing - that life itself is nothing but nanotechnology, only one that we didn't design and we don't know how to control yet.

aetherson 11y ago
Clearly it is possible to use self-replicating microscopic things (cells) to produce macroscopic objects. Life does indeed prove this. But, you know, it takes billions-of-years evolved plantlife about 20 years to produce a simple structural element able to support maybe a thousand lbs and 20 feet long (ie, to grow a tree). We notably do not see anything in nature that does "molecular assembly" from microscopic cells to differentiated macroscopic objects in a time-scale of less than months.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Well, having already a working process, speeding it up will be easier. In nature, you don't really have dedicated nanoassemblers that do only structure scaffoldings with no other considerations - they have to support a whole organism. So when, for instance, growing a skeleton, you need it to go slow enough that the more complex parts like veins and nervous system can keep up. But if we needed biology to grow us a particular object, we can learn how to put the relevant process on overdrive and ditch the rest. Also, even if the initial version of nanotech worked as fast as tree grows, you could still put a lot of products in parallel, so for most intent and purposes, after few months of waiting, you'll be getting new copies daily. We do that a lot with traditional manufacturing today. > But, you know, it takes billions-of-years evolved plantlife about 20 years... Well, evolution is really stupid and really slow. Having brains, we can now iterate many orders of magnitude faster, so I wouldn't worry. Comparing things to evolution is comparing to the simplest and dumbest possible process imaginable that still works.

chm 11y ago

They're really different points of view, with different goals. There's studying how life works at various levels, and there's designing systems from the ground up. Both complementary!