3 ms·

In term of nanotech, biology is decades or centuries more advanced than what we are doing. They are literally grabbing electron and move them around with the pr

In term of nanotech, biology is decades or centuries more advanced than what we are doing. They are literally grabbing electron and move them around with the precision of nanometers while here we would be happy if we could manipulate a bacteria. I think with more powerful computers, biomimicry can go pretty far. When we can simulate nanometer interactions on timescale of microseconds over minutes, lots of things can be unlocked.

tejtm 3y ago
to be fair, biology did have a 4B year headstart
adastra22 3y ago
This is comparing apples to oranges. Biology is not machine phase. The stochastic motions that drive biological processes forward are 5-6 orders of magnitude slower than engineered machine parts would be at that scale. What is remarkable about biology is not its performance, but that it works at all.
- tomohelix 3y ago
  I disagree. Things bump into each other randomly but that is it. An enzyme conformational changes are anything but random. And the thing can work at the speed of a thousand molecules per second. That is not slow and I guarantee you an engineered nanomachine is nowhere near that speed. Get down to the molecular level and biology is at the machine phase.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Biology is not machine phase at any level. Machine phase means directed motion, often carried out in vacuum by parts highly constrained to follow rigid paths. Like a factory. That does not describe biology. The kind of systems described in Drexler’s Nanosystems would comfortably operate at gigahertz speeds. So yes, a few thousand reactions per second is sloooooow.
    - tomohelix 3y ago
      >directed motion, often carried out in vacuum by parts highly constrained to follow rigid paths. Like a factory That sounds exactly like biology to me. That is how any enzyme operate. Why do you think it isn't? How else do they literally pluck an electron from a molecule and move it to another molecule at precise atomic positions? How else does biology reliably produce polymers with polydispersity of 1 if it isn't controlled by highly directed parts? Regarding the speed, I would like some clarification. In my field, when I mention an "operation", it means the machine has to work on a physical object, process it, and output a product different from the output. These are often molecules like drugs or some chemicals. So when you mentioned Ghz operation speed, are you talking about a current nanotech that can actually produce billions of products per second? Or did you mean it just vibrate or have some repeated motion? I am interested to know that. Here is an enzyme with 2Mhz operation speed whose parts are just exactly one atom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalase And for a more apple to apple comparison, the fastest moving nanomachine I know moves at around 100nm/minute https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/new-dna-origami-motor-breaks-speed-record-for-nano-machines/ https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/new-dna-origami-motor-br... Compared to a kinesin, which isn't the fastest protein, it is over 800nm/*second* http://book.bionumbers.org/how-fast-do-molecular-motors-move-on-cytoskeletal-filaments/ http://book.bionumbers.org/how-fast-do-molecular-motors-move...
      - adastra22 3y ago
        Yes, gigahertz operation speeds. This is a straightforward result from mechanical scaling laws. A machine scaled down by 1/10th in each linear dimension is able to operate at 10x speed. So a machine operating at 10Hz in ~1m regime (perfectly reasonable in an industrial setting) will be able to operate at 1GHz speeds when scaled down to be ~10nm in size. Biology operates by means of Brownian motion. Enzymes randomly jiggle around as they are bombarded in solution, until by totally random chance one of the reactants they catalyze hits in the right spot and sticks, then waits until the other reactant hits the other spot. This can take a very, very long time to happen. Animations you might watch showing their operation are lies: they show reactants sliding into place, reactions happening, and products being ejected. This is not what happens. If you actually watched a molecular dynamics simulation of a typical enzymatic reaction, and slowed it down just enough that you could see molecules moving around, it would take YEARS to watch typical reactions happen. For the fastest reactions, the ones you mention, maybe weeks or months. Biology works by molecules just randomly jostling around, sometimes moving forward and sometimes moving backward, but a small set of one-way reactions driving things forward over extended time. Kinesin, for example, has no process that drives its motion forward. It relies on random jostling to move its "feet" into the next position, at which point it can react with ATP to prevent being moved back. But only if an ATP molecule happens to be there, otherwise it gets jostled out of place again. Your 800nm/s speed is a random-walk average. Machine phase chemistry, on the other hand, is like the assembly line of a fully-automated factory. Parts can, in principle, move at up to the speed of sound--thousands of meters per second in typical gemstone materials. But to minimize friction and heat dissipation requirements, actual speeds will probably be in the mm/s or cm/s range. Reactants are attached to machinery that moves them into position at >GHz operational speeds, and each reaction happens as directed according to a preprogrammed sequence of events. This is a rather dated video that shows the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqyZ9bFl_qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqyZ9bFl_qg

tejtm 3y ago

to be fair, biology did have a 4B year headstart

adastra22 3y ago

This is comparing apples to oranges. Biology is not machine phase. The stochastic motions that drive biological processes forward are 5-6 orders of magnitude slower than engineered machine parts would be at that scale. What is remarkable about biology is not its performance, but that it works at all.

tomohelix 3y ago
I disagree. Things bump into each other randomly but that is it. An enzyme conformational changes are anything but random. And the thing can work at the speed of a thousand molecules per second. That is not slow and I guarantee you an engineered nanomachine is nowhere near that speed. Get down to the molecular level and biology is at the machine phase.
- adastra22 3y ago
  Biology is not machine phase at any level. Machine phase means directed motion, often carried out in vacuum by parts highly constrained to follow rigid paths. Like a factory. That does not describe biology. The kind of systems described in Drexler’s Nanosystems would comfortably operate at gigahertz speeds. So yes, a few thousand reactions per second is sloooooow.
  - tomohelix 3y ago
    >directed motion, often carried out in vacuum by parts highly constrained to follow rigid paths. Like a factory That sounds exactly like biology to me. That is how any enzyme operate. Why do you think it isn't? How else do they literally pluck an electron from a molecule and move it to another molecule at precise atomic positions? How else does biology reliably produce polymers with polydispersity of 1 if it isn't controlled by highly directed parts? Regarding the speed, I would like some clarification. In my field, when I mention an "operation", it means the machine has to work on a physical object, process it, and output a product different from the output. These are often molecules like drugs or some chemicals. So when you mentioned Ghz operation speed, are you talking about a current nanotech that can actually produce billions of products per second? Or did you mean it just vibrate or have some repeated motion? I am interested to know that. Here is an enzyme with 2Mhz operation speed whose parts are just exactly one atom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalase And for a more apple to apple comparison, the fastest moving nanomachine I know moves at around 100nm/minute https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/new-dna-origami-motor-breaks-speed-record-for-nano-machines/ https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/new-dna-origami-motor-br... Compared to a kinesin, which isn't the fastest protein, it is over 800nm/*second* http://book.bionumbers.org/how-fast-do-molecular-motors-move-on-cytoskeletal-filaments/ http://book.bionumbers.org/how-fast-do-molecular-motors-move...
    - adastra22 3y ago
      Yes, gigahertz operation speeds. This is a straightforward result from mechanical scaling laws. A machine scaled down by 1/10th in each linear dimension is able to operate at 10x speed. So a machine operating at 10Hz in ~1m regime (perfectly reasonable in an industrial setting) will be able to operate at 1GHz speeds when scaled down to be ~10nm in size. Biology operates by means of Brownian motion. Enzymes randomly jiggle around as they are bombarded in solution, until by totally random chance one of the reactants they catalyze hits in the right spot and sticks, then waits until the other reactant hits the other spot. This can take a very, very long time to happen. Animations you might watch showing their operation are lies: they show reactants sliding into place, reactions happening, and products being ejected. This is not what happens. If you actually watched a molecular dynamics simulation of a typical enzymatic reaction, and slowed it down just enough that you could see molecules moving around, it would take YEARS to watch typical reactions happen. For the fastest reactions, the ones you mention, maybe weeks or months. Biology works by molecules just randomly jostling around, sometimes moving forward and sometimes moving backward, but a small set of one-way reactions driving things forward over extended time. Kinesin, for example, has no process that drives its motion forward. It relies on random jostling to move its "feet" into the next position, at which point it can react with ATP to prevent being moved back. But only if an ATP molecule happens to be there, otherwise it gets jostled out of place again. Your 800nm/s speed is a random-walk average. Machine phase chemistry, on the other hand, is like the assembly line of a fully-automated factory. Parts can, in principle, move at up to the speed of sound--thousands of meters per second in typical gemstone materials. But to minimize friction and heat dissipation requirements, actual speeds will probably be in the mm/s or cm/s range. Reactants are attached to machinery that moves them into position at >GHz operational speeds, and each reaction happens as directed according to a preprogrammed sequence of events. This is a rather dated video that shows the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqyZ9bFl_qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqyZ9bFl_qg