X-Message-Number: 6708
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: vitrification + nanotech
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 1996 12:03:40 +1000 (EST)

Will Dye writes,

>I guess you could call me a nanotech "true believer".  I see 
>no _direct_ justification of the Prometheus project, because the 
>certainty that nanotech will be developed as (Drexler) projected 
>is so high that our efforts would be far better spent supporting 
>Foresight than Prometheus.  

It would be foolish to argue with a true believer, and to tell the truth
I'm also strongly of the opinion that Drexler's ideas are doable, but I
do think "certainty" is too strong a word. Drexler suggests that we'll
see the first assemblers in the next 15-30 years, with an explosive
scale-up in their abilities occurring shortly afterwards. The scale-up
is supposed to occur explosively because it is supposed to take
advantage of artifically-intelligent design engines that are to be
implemented using the nano-computers that are supposed to be the first
applications of the technology.

However there are obviously at least a couple of wild stabs in this. The
first is that we really can build the first assemblers in 15-30 years;
although we have proof of concept for such things in nature, that
doesn't tell us how difficult they will be to design or how long it will
be before the bugs are out and they become useful tools. The second is
that artifically-intelligent design engines naturally follow from the
existence of nano-computers - just think, if we had a billion
four-function handheld calculators, would they somehow automatically
represent the same functionality as a modern desktop PC? 

They would not - to produce that functionality from those calculators
would require a lot of *human* design work. So far, a half-century of
human design work by the brightest minds on the planet has not produced
anything like real AI ...

So Drexlerian nanotech might take more like 100-200 years to create instead
of 15-30. So what? Well, so perhaps humanity will be extinct before we get
there. There are some staggeringly awful problems that we shall have to face
in the next century, almost all to do with the rate of increase of human 
population - see http://www.zip.com.au/~pete/uw.html for a look at some of
these.

Now, as regards vitrification, it's a cryonics truism that the best nanotech
there will ever be will never be able to revive a human who has been ground
up into hamburger. Some of the comments that folk like Mike Darwin have made
in this group regarding the state of modern brain cryopreservation have made
it clear that there is a great deal of damage done to brains by even the best
present-day techniques, and the simple fact is that we don't *know* that this
damage is any more reparable than what you get from being minced. Brain 
vitrification would eliminate this concern, and so it may be just as important
to your future survival as the "certain" development of molecular nanotech.

Peter Merel.


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