X-Message-Number: 32804 From: "John de Rivaz" <> Subject: Fw: [LongevityReport] "Nano-nonsense: 25 years of charlatanry... Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:33:34 +0100 [Mark Plus' message below to Longevity Report was held up by the Yahoo moderation process] The comment below is surely a feature of exponential growth. da Vinci was writing about planes with little hope of making one with the materials and knowledge of his time. PCM (or analogue to digital conversion) was conceived [1938] more than 25 years before technology made it possible to implement cheaply. Now virtually everything we take for granted would not be possible without it. Shouting at nanotechnologists won't make programmable assemblers appear any quicker. Evolution made molecular scale assemblers appear, so they exist. The problem of how to make them, and how to make them do our bidding, remains to be solved. I note the header on http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/nanoshite/ >>> Lachlan passed away in January 2010. As a memorial, this site remains as he left it. Therefore the information on this site may not be current or accurate and should not be relied upon. <<< ... without the benefit of cryopreservation, no doubt. -- Sincerely, John de Rivaz: http://John.deRivaz.com for websites including Cryonics Europe, Longevity Report, The Venturists, Porthtowan, Alec Harley Reeves - inventor, Arthur Bowker - potter, de Rivaz genealogy, Nomad .. and more ----- Original Message ----- From: MARK PLUS To: Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 11:34 PM Subject: Re: [LongevityReport] "Nano-nonsense: 25 years of charlatanry... Scott Locklin in the comments to his blog post points out: >Charles Babbage designed something which could have been made with the technology of the time. If Britain had dedicated a significant portion of its GDP and thousands of workers to creating an analytical engine for the next 25 years, and failed to even build a gear for the damn thing, well, then we might have suspected that Mr. Babbage was full of baked beans. 25 years! Do you know how long 25 years is? In 25 years, we went from Von Neumann writing a paper on how to make a digital computer to having freaking Unix and GUI's. In 25 years, we went from biplanes made out of cloth to the SR-71. 25 years is a working lifetime for many people. And there have been hundreds or thousands of people who have dedicated their lives to this "nano idiocy. Yet, we are not one whit closer to having anything remotely resembling a nanotechnology now than we were 25 years ago. If Drexler and his propellor heads wish to comfort themselves with the idea that they are visionaries ahead of their time; well, I deny it. I maintain that they have picked a delivery date so far into the future that the day of judgement will never come. They'll all be comfortably retired by then. How convenient. -- Mark Plus Life is short: Freeze hard! Content-Type: text/html; [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=32804