Building with DNA

reply to post by projectvxn


Ya know, I'll get over it. Without people like you around we would have just let lions eat us a long time ago.

reply to post by xFiDgetx


I spread my own share of doom around here so I don't know...

reply to post by projectvxn


Aww man... nobody would be here if we thought EVERYTHING was cakes and sunshine. But seriously any thread that makes us think of things like...



...makes up for some of that stuff.

reply to post by xFiDgetx


That one piece of technology would solve the worlds problems over night.

I hope people really are working on something like that.

reply to post by projectvxn


I can't seem to find the article that pic came from now. It was an interesting piece on the theory of replicating.

They stated that a nano 'assembler' would take millions of years to produce even a small amount of material. But if you program the assemblers to first build more assemblers then growth becomes exponential and viable. After enough assemblers are built you can then tell them what to build. With the advent of these crystal structures we are building the theory becomes much more sound. What kind of bulk materials could be used for recycling and exactly how much energy would be required are still two big questions.

reply to post by xFiDgetx


It's an interesting theory.

I'm not so sure it would be practical to approach the problem in such a manner however.

I'll have to think about that one a while.

Originally posted by xFiDgetx
reply to post by projectvxn

 

I can't seem to find the article that pic came from now. It was an interesting piece on the theory of replicating.

They stated that a nano 'assembler' would take millions of years to produce even a small amount of material. But if you program the assemblers to first build more assemblers then growth becomes exponential and viable. After enough assemblers are built you can then tell them what to build. With the advent of these crystal structures we are building the theory becomes much more sound. What kind of bulk materials could be used for recycling and exactly how much energy would be required are still two big questions.

edit on 25-10-2011 by xFiDgetx because: (no reason given)

The 'quotes' in question came from Richard Smalley. He stated it would take millions of years for a single nanobot to produce a 'useful' amount of whatever you were building.

It's pointless to even worry about such a scenario when you think that you would need billions of them to do simple tasks in certain areas of the body. While the likes of Robert A Freitas has postulated as much as 500 trillion of them if you wanted to replace a human's blood. Imagine scaling that up to the industrial use for producing everything from clothing to cars. Warehouses packed out with individual work stations...each station housing tens/hundreds of quadrillions of nanobots.

reply to post by big_BHOY


Yup... That's why you would need the exponential growth of assemblers building assemblers... If it took a day to build an assembler and that assembler took a day to build an assembler you would have something around a billion inside of a month. And that's just one lab producing one assembler.

That is jumping ahead of oneself I guess, but it doesn't make it any less fun to talk about.