X-Message-Number: 1102 Date: Tue, 4 Aug 92 12:24 PST From: (Keith Lofstrom) Subject: Re: cryonics: #1092 - #1096 Perry, let's back off from "quoted authority" and put our speculation caps back on. We can get in an argument about who knows the writings of Eric Drexler best - I've only read Engines twice and talked with Eric a dozen times, while you probably know him from his MIT days. My background is different than Eric's; I see different problems needing solution, some that he dismisses with a wave of a hand as engineering detail. Well, cell repair will someday be "an engineering detail". I like to speculate on engineering details. I'm an engineer, that's my job... >... > Drexler et al have >pretty much shown that thermal jiggling on the atomic scale (not the >electron scale) isn't an issue. Where is this shown? I have seen a few of Eric's studies, as regards thermal effects on rod logic and assembler machines. Could you direct me to a paper on sensors, or long distance, high bandwidth communication? In the macroscopic world, these are two areas where cooling is used to improve performance. Is it inconcievable that the nanotechnological equivalents would stoop to using these macrotechnological techniques? Page 15, EOC, (1986 Doubleday first edition) has a paragraph on thermal effects on assemblers. Chapters 7 and 8 of EOC discuss room temperature cell repair. Chapter 9, "A Door into the Future", has a section called "Reversing Biostasis", page 136 to 138. This section describes repairing a biostasis patient at LN2 temperature. Nothing much changes between the 77K Eric assumes and the <4K I am assuming except the amount of thermal noise, and the choice of working fluid, if any. Wet chemistry is stopped. This section includes such sentences as: "Small devices examine molecules and report their structures and positions to a larger computer within the cell." There is NO natural analog to this process. Certainly a molecule can be identified with an enzyme surface in a "blind" fashion - just as a book could be "read" by comparing each page to all possible permutations of a page, then computing which comparisons made the best "fit". That is a heck of a slow way to work. In an old patient there will be quite an accumulation of damaged - but still functional - proteins that can't just be blindly discarded. These molecular structures will have to be examined and modeled ad hoc, to determine which healthy structure should replace them. Some of these molecules will have internal structure not directly accessable to enzymatic pattern matching at the surface. Those internal structures may express themselves only at room temperature. Do we heat the patient up with internally flawed molecules? If so, once a cell is up to room temperature, how do we tell which molecule is the one causing problems, short of boxing them up and observing them one at a time? Too hard. I'll take precision measurement instead. >Sorry. Your cells work fine operating by touch. Mine don't. The damn things fail after only 3 billion seconds or so. They don't compile any of the popular programming languages. They eat any old crap I put in my bloodstream, and sometimes choke on it. They won't run revision 2.0 DNA. The diagnostic readout is broken. They cost too much. Pretty shoddy - I'm getting mine fixed at the earliest opportunity ;-) Seriously, we are moving from a paradigm of random transport, enzyme matching, and wet chemistry, to a one of directed repair, central control, and observation and modeling in a rigid framework. THE SAME PROCESSES DO NOT APPLY. When nature wants something, it builds a new one, and discards the old one - at the cellular level or the whole organism. The new one follows the same blueprint as the old one, but is not a duplicate. Cryonics attempts to make an "improved duplicate" of the patient. This is new ground; I posit a model based on machine repair rather than biological growth, though biological processes and techniques will be among the major tools. The other tools needed - IN ADDITION TO the biological ones - will be the ones benefiting from lower temperatures. >Your cells operate just fine without having to do such things. This is >rapidly becoming tedious. Why don't you just read EoC and be done with >the topic? I guess I didn't get the special edition with the engineering details. EOC is a WONDERFUL book, a great start, and a real stimulus to the imagination. It is NOT an engineering document. It will be jokers like me that fill in the details. As illustrated above, we seem to have paid attention to different parts of the book. >Why should we believe your claim that we have to go colder in the >absense of any evidence at all? > >Perry Why, Perry, you can believe anything you want. I am putting forth the idea that certain measurements become easier the colder you get. Perhaps they are easy enough at 77K, and therefore do not justify the approximately 1 megajoule needed to cool a 70Kg patient to 4K, or 3 megajoules to 0.001K (at Carnot efficiency). I would think that a 20x or a 70,000x improvement in measurement accuracy, with a corresponding 8000x to a 3e14x improvement in 3D position modeling, would justify a nickle or a dime's worth of energy. But then, I live in a world where customers will spend $1000 for two more bits on an analog-to-digital converter, if it is fast enough. I'm a junkie for accurate measurement, I guess. It could well be that we measure every thing cold, then do the synthesis "hot". That would save energy. What I am having trouble understanding is where all the hostility is coming from. Perry, you and I are part of a small band of brothers facing a sea of superstitious, antagonistic moral midgets who will try to smash either of us if given the chance. I may someday help with your suspension or revival, as you may help with mine. We need each other. Perhaps I am misinterpreting an "East Coast - West Coast" language difference here; if so, let's get it worked out. Let's save our energies for battling the "Monash Menace" :-), and BUILDING this stuff, and not fritter it away on doctrinal minutiae. -- Keith Lofstrom Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Power ICs Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=1102