X-Message-Number: 4989
Date: Sat, 14 Oct 1995 22:35:30 -0700
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: SCI.Cryonics What Goes There?
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In #4983 On 13 Oct 95 Mike Darwin <> Wrote:
>When we watch cells being frozen under a cryomicroscope
>we see incredible things. [...] we see great turbulence as
>ice grows and vast (on a nanometer scale) flow of water out
>of cells as ice fronts move forward.
Turbulence, if true, would be very bad news. It would mean tiny changes in
initial conditions would lead to huge changes in the outcome, it would mean
loss of information making recovery virtually impossible, it would mean the
end of the ball game as far as the feasibility of cryonics was concerned.
Fortunately I don't think what you saw could possibly be turbulence. I will
quote from an excellent post from Ralph Merkle < :
"While there might be some concern that the currents created
during freezing will result in turbulent flow, this appears
quite unlikely. The approximate criterion for the onset of
turbulence in a liquid volume with characteristic size r is
that the Reynolds number 2rdv/n exceed about 2000, where d is
the density of the liquid, v the velocity of the flow, and n
the viscosity. The characteristic dimensions in a cell are
about a micron, the density is roughly a gram per cubic
centimeter, the velocity is probably much less than a meter per
second (and probably much less than a micron per second), and
the viscosity of water at room temperature is about 0.01 poise
(viscosity increases both with decreasing temperature and with
an increasing concentration of glycerol, so 0.01 is
conservative). This produces a Reynolds number of roughly
10^-6 x 1 x 1 / .01 or 10^-4. This is much smaller than 2000,
and indeed offers a "safety margin" of roughly seven orders of
magnitude before turbulent flow could occur. We can safely
conclude that any flows that occur will be laminar."
>When you freeze living systems you do not JUST get a
>collapsed bridge or a distorted puzzle. You get mechanisms
>coming into play which are very different. You get
>BIOCHEMISTRY and self assembly, and all sorts of phenomenon
>that are NOT like the molecular bearing designs in
>NANOSYSTEMS. What you get is biology.
>From a nanotechnology point of view the mechanisms of Mechanics,
Biochemistry, Biology, or even Ecology are all exactly the
same, putting the right atom in the right place. Building or
repairing an object is easy in nanotechnology even if you have
no idea what the object is or what it does.
If I was given a the complete blueprints of the World Trade
Center I could not construct a duplicate, not even if I had
access to all the machinery and raw materials in the world.
I know nothing about construction techniques, thus the blueprints
do not contain enough information for ME to implement them.
It would be enough for a master architect, but he'd have to be very good.
A blueprint assumes that you have the construction skills
needed, it tells you a part should go in a particular spot but
it doesn't tell you how to put it there. A skyscraper is made
out of thousands of different parts that interact in trillions
of different ways. Most of the interactions would be disastrous
if not handled in exactly the right way, it takes great skill
and intelligence to master them all. The parts are made of
subparts and are themselves extremely complex, even the
architect has little knowledge of how to construct subparts
from raw materials. No one man, no thousand men, has the knowledge
to go from ore in the ground to a fully functioning building.
Things would be very different if I was working with Lego
blocks. There are only a few different kinds of blocks and they
can snap together in only a few different ways, none of them
disastrous because the blocks are tough and cheap. Once I
mastered the ability to pick up a individual block, move it
anyplace I want, and snap it to another block, I could build any
conceivable structure that can be made with Lego blocks, all
I'd need is the blueprints (and the patience). Even if I didn't
have the blueprints it would be easy to look at a Lego object
and note how the blocks fit together, then I could make my own
blueprint (or recipe) and build a duplicate object.
Nature only uses 92 different types of blocks (the atoms of the elements),
less than 20 are important in making most objects that interest us,
less than 10 for life. By definition nanotechnology means the ability
to pick up an individual atom, move it anyplace you want, and bond it to
another individual atom. Once you have that ability the distinction between
a recipe and a blueprint starts to get a bit fuzzy.
If anything a blueprint would be more useful to nanotechnology
because most recipes assume you would be using techniques other
than nanotechnology. Besides moving atoms you could also detect
the position of atoms in an existing object, so as long as you
had access to the object, you wouldn't really need a recipe or
a blueprint, all you'd need is a good look at it and you could
duplicate it.
With bulk technology moving things is easy but building objects
from a description, like a blueprint, takes great skill because
the parts are so complicated. With nanotechnology moving things
is hard but once you've gained that ability, building from a
description is easy.
>I doubt whether you could fit the volume of DNA required to
>specify the PRECISE position of every atom in the human
>body into the volume of that human body.
You don't need to, there is an enormous amount of redundancy so you could use
standard loss-less data compression techniques.
>poorly understood but LOCAL processes to carry on their
>fabrication and repair.
Nanotechnology will also us local processes but they will not be poorly
understood, they just move atoms from one place to another.
John K Clark
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