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http://nanotech-now.com/chris-phoenix-a … 71502.htm#
I personally like Japan to let loose the new-age sputnik; europe has to many conflicting contries to pull everyone's desires in the right direction; china is not as productive as japan; the u.s.a has to many christians(sorry; don't know how else to put it).
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I agree that if anybody's likely to develop something like an "assembler" it would be Japan. But I think we put too much emphasis on the idea that government has to develop everything. It'll probably be some high-tech upstart company that develops such technology. Considering the profitable uses nano-technology could be put to I doubt if you'd have a hard time finding investors.
To achieve the impossible you must attempt the absurd
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I've known about molecular nanotechnology for awhile now. I first saw Drexlers "Engines of Creation" around 1988, but at the time, I did not understand it; i didn't buy it and read it till a year or two later. Drexlerian nanotech is an idea that was first thought of a few times before with Richard Feynman and Robert Heinland. Still, Drexler did the most when he thought of it in the nineteen seventies. With only a few published articles, one in 1981, a few others in 1989, one book in 1986 and a Britanica article; Drexlerian nanotech started out pretty small and slow moving. After the first foresight conference, thing's started speeding up. After the first foresight conference in 89, Drexler came out with "NanoSystems", and a year or two after that the first university course was taught with nanosystems. Foresight held their first few conferences every other year. By the end of the nineties, not only the Foresight institute was holding conferences every year, but there were a few other nanotech conferences being held yearly. The Foresight Institute website used to keep track of what countries visited their website; it was pretty hard to find one country that wasn't; there were countries you've never heard of visiting the website. Clinton in his last years started a two hundred million dollar nanotech initiative. When the U.S. did that, china put up even more. When china put in more, the U.S. duplicated. When George Bush Jr became president, the new energy source people were running for their lives; now, President Bush has hiked up the Clinton nanotech initiative to seven hundred million dollars. Every countries government's have put their money into nanotech. All the research corporations are putting their money into nanotech. Every research university now has a nanotech building. The U.S. has doubled the national science foundation money. With the terrorist attacks, nations put even more money into science and technology. It's almost like religion; try to strike technological civilization down, and it put's even more resources into science and technology; in other words, industrial civilization's real faith is in science and technology no matter what religion is dominant in which particular country. Environmental groups? A deaf ear is turned(not that nanotech can't actually be a good thing for the country; in fact, that's what the governments of the world tell the environmental interest groups when they try to shut down this explosive nanotech growth. Now, most of this money is going to top-down nanotech, which means that bare minimum, drexlerian bottom up nanotech arrives before twenty-twenty, but one thing is for sure, civilization is going to do everything in its power to keep the cancerous anti-industrial civilization people from bringing it down, not to mention everything in its power to keep the environment from collapsing before humanity has become almost completelly technologized. As I've indicated elsewhere here, the reason civilization has overcome Malthus's exponential growth is because of science and technological growth allowing us to grow ever bigger. Ultimaitelly, I think humanity has gotten on a runaway effect towards the stars and humanity surviving adolescence. It's hard to believe without seeing all these insights, but humanity will be one of the few intelligent species to reach the stars; i wonder how many others will make it?
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I wouldn't agree with the analysis that Japan will be the country to develop nanotech assemblers. Japan did so well in the electronics industry in the 80s and 90s simply by working very, very hard, and as we've seen, social problems are catching them up now. Their economy, while still large, is nowhere near as robust as it was a decade ago and the research output of their universities and companies is simply not comparable to the overall output of the United States.
When you factor in the huge amounts of government funding that the US is pouring into nanotech - I can't remember the exact figure but I think we're talking hundreds of millions - then chances are that someone is the US will first develop a nanotech assembler.
Incidentally, I don't think the US will try a Manhattan Project for nanotech - they don't have to, because while you can't (legally) sell nuclear bombs, you can certainly sell nanotech assemblers, and hence despite their large research funding most practical development will be funded via the private sector. Certainly in this market driven era I don't envisage a Manhattan type project. For comparison, look at the Human Genome Project - biologists were predicting that it would take decades to record the entire human genome and it would take Manhattan amounts of funding. We now know that it was finished early, under budget and was (somewhat controversially) aided by private sector funding.
Editor of [url=http://www.newmars.com]New Mars[/url]
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Incidentally, I don't think the US will try a Manhattan Project for nanotech - they don't have to, because while you can't (legally) sell nuclear bombs, you can certainly sell nanotech assemblers, and hence despite their large research funding most practical development will be funded via the private sector. Certainly in this market driven era I don't envisage a Manhattan type project. For comparison, look at the Human Genome Project - biologists were predicting that it would take decades to record the entire human genome and it would take Manhattan amounts of funding. We now know that it was finished early, under budget and was (somewhat controversially) aided by private sector funding.
I think another reason why the US isn't likely to go the Manhattan Project route with nano-technology is because there's no pressing military threat demanding that such a course be taken. I think at the moment the gov't is more concerned with things like missile defense and detecting the whereabouts of terrorists. I know nano-tech could be used in those applications but there are easier ways in the short term of achieving those goals.
As I've indicated elsewhere here, the reason civilization has overcome Malthus's exponential growth is because of science and technological growth allowing us to grow ever bigger. Ultimaitelly, I think humanity has gotten on a runaway effect towards the stars and humanity surviving adolescence. It's hard to believe without seeing all these insights, but humanity will be one of the few intelligent species to reach the stars; i wonder how many others will make it?
I agree 100%. Like Carl Sagan said, any species that fails to reach for the stars is doomed to extinction and I don't think a lot of radical environmentalists really grasp that concept. I sometimes wonder if there have been e.t. civilizations that collapsed and became extinct because they also had these anti-technology "environmentalist" types who eventually convinced the masses to forgo spaceflight and stop developing better sources of energy or whatever. God knows if we stay Earthbound in five billion years it's going to be over for us and all other life on Earth should we manage to even survive that long. The Sun turning into a red giant will be an ecological catastrophe if there ever was one, so why not strive to spread life throughout the galaxy and the universe as long as we can do it without harming ecological systems that we might come across as we travel the stars?
To achieve the impossible you must attempt the absurd
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beat me to it; i had recently made an observation that the reason why the japanese economy went down was because they didn't have the scientific and technological research to keep them above malthus's law's which is what has kept us from falling for hundreds of years now.
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There are already funded assembler projects in the private sector, Zyvex being the first that comes to mind. They won't tell you how close they are (for obvious reasons), but they've been working on it for some years now, and their website shows constant progress.
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They've had micro-assemblers which they call convergent assembly for a few years now. Their idea is the Richard Feynman top-down path towards molecular assemblers which means they are on course to have molecular assemblers around 2015-2020.
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In fact, Zyvex used to have video of various micro-machines, now they don't . . . ? ? ? ! ! !
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I see your point about Zyvex funding nanotech assemblers before this timeline say's they should be.
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Err.. convergent assembly is the name given to one process by which a nano-scale molecular assembler might operate. It is merely one possible design for a large-scale molecular assembler, and is a resultant, not enabaling technology. Relevant link.
The pictures and videos of developed MEMS systems are still availible on their website (some are even on the front page). MEMS are a enabaling technology for molecular nanotechnology in that they allow (in theory) the construction of microscopic equivalents of current industrial machines, meaning much finer precision, eventually (hopefully) leading to true molecular precision. However, despite being too small to be seen by the naked eye, MEMS are not nanotechnology, and are gigantic compared to their nano counterparts.
My point, however, was not the shortened timescale for development of molecular nanotechnology (which could be as small as a few years), but that it can and will be done by the private sector today, without the need for a full-blown government initiative, as proposed by this thread.
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An interesting article on US nanotech research funding. Talks of a bill being introduced to establish $446 million research program and that "by 2003, investment in nanotech start-ups will be more than $1.2 billion". Also, "In June, the Bush administration recommended a budget of $710 million for the existing National Nanotechnology Initiative for the fiscal year beginning in October."
Editor of [url=http://www.newmars.com]New Mars[/url]
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this thread does not propose that private companies cannot develop drexlerian nanotechnology, just that they cannot untill a few more years down the road
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http://computerworld.com/managem....00.html
Article mentions many other countries are matching the U.S. government spending step for step no matter how much money we put in. Also, it seems to indicate that the government leaders only think of nanotechnology as a computer technology and don't seem to know about assemblers.
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Well, when it comes to business and politics "nanotechnology" and "molecular nanotechnology" are two unrelated concepts. "Nanotchnology," taken alone, is often used to mean the manufacturing objects on the nano-scale, and is quite different from "molecular nanotechnology," which implies atomic precision in the construction of these objects.
It is the former that receives most current funding, as it offers the quickest return on investment. Once a technique is developed for mass productions of nano-scale, but atomically unprecise objects (using improved conventional techniques), one can expect products on the market within the year (smaller, faster, less power-hungry computer chips, and various medical tools and instruments are the most looked at possibilities).
Molecular nanotechnology, on the other hand, will require many years from first development (which is possible in a 3-year timeline) to it's predicted use in a "universal" assembler. The ability to construct atomically precise structures may be just around the corner, but the ability to build macro-scale objects one atom at a time requires infrastructure that will take years to design and construct.
Anyway, the point is that most governments and businesses think of nanotechnology as a computer technology because that is exactly what they are funding. Much like the development of space resources, until a profitable business plan can be written to design and develop molecular nanotechnology, or until the technology is developed by a more forward-thinking organization, molecular nanotechnology will remain in the background of business and politics.
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more nanotech funding news
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