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Fritz Wuehler

Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 6:41 pm

Guest

Im fairly certain the military is spending far more than we can imagine on
nanotechnology research. Assumming they are the first to build an assembler,
are they likely to share it with the rest of the world, or will this be kept
classified for the next 100 years or more?

Malcolm McMahon

Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 7:30 pm

Guest

On 22 Sep 2003 00:41:35 GMT, Fritz Wuehler
<fritz@spamexpire-200309.rodent.frell.eu.org> wrote:

Quote:

The thing about secrets is that they only stay secret (at best) until
you use them.

And nanotechnology secrets are particularly easy to steal.

erincss

Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2003 6:19 am

Guest

Quote:

Fritz Wuehler

Assumming they are the first to build an assembler,
are they likely to share it with the rest of the world, or will this be kept
classified for the next 100 years or more?

It would be classified, and they would never tell you about it until it was
absolutely necessary to deal with it, and then they would take credit for it.

John S. Novak, III

Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2003 6:20 am

Guest

In article <bklgfv01ub5@enews1.newsguy.com>, Fritz Wuehler wrote:

Quote:

First, United States military classifactions usually only last for
seventy years, not one hundred. I find it remarkably difficult to
believe that, given the rate of technological advance today, that there
is any fundamental breakthrough that the military could make which could
not be replicated by private industries and academia in the ten to
twenty years following, depending on the luckiness of all concerned.

Second, it quite literally depends on where the funding comes from and
who does the research. Some research is done by government labs, such
as Sandia or Oak Ridge National Labs. Some is done by more
exclusively military labs, like the Naval Research Observatory. Some
is contracted out to universities (as by DARPA) and some to private
military contractors like Northrop Grumman or Raytheon.

There are lots of contracts for lots of situations. Dual use is a big
word right now, and most private institutions like to get more than
just direct money for their contract efforts, meaning, they would like
to be able to abide by certain export stricture and use it
commercially. There are many different forms of contracts, and
developing something as immense as a general assembler is not likely
to fall under only one.

--
John S. Novak, III jsn@cegt201.bradley.edu
The Humblest Man on the Net

Robert J. Bradbury

Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2003 6:46 am

Guest

Fritz Wuehler wrote:

Quote:

There are two things to note -- First, as I'm the only person I'm aware of who
has
made an attempt at the cost analysis of producing an assembler I'm perhaps one
of the few people who can comment with some authority on the topic. My estimate

for the cost of producing a single arm assembler system (~8 million atoms) is
~$17 billion.
So it seems unlikely the military would be able to hide efforts of that
magnitude. If one
extends this to the nanorobot level (18 billion atoms) then one is looking at
costs of
~$4 trillion. Now those costs *will* come down but there seem to be people,
such
as those at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, who think one year we
will
produce a nanoassembler and the next year we will have desk-top replicators.
In my opinion it just isn't going to play out that way unless a tremendous
amount
of up-front effort is put into computer-aided-design of nanoscale parts and the
methods
for assembling them.

Second, there are many paths to assemblers. So once someone demonstrates it is
possible (one could argue the ribosome proves it is possible but the idea
sharing between
molecular biologists and mechanical engineers is virtually nil) there will
likely be a
race between companies with reasonably large engineering staffs to produce their

own assemblers. The competitive advantage is simply too great for such
abilities to
remain classified for long.

Robert

Chris Phoenix

Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2003 4:27 pm

Guest

"Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:

Quote:

My estimate for the cost of producing a single arm assembler
system (~8 million atoms) is ~$17 billion. So it seems unlikely
the military would be able to hide efforts of that magnitude.

How do they hide large aviation projects? And remember that we're not
only talking about the US military--other countries might find it easier
to hide that money.

Quote:

If one extends this to the nanorobot level (18 billion atoms)
then one is looking at costs of ~$4 trillion.

Merkle estimated that a basic assembler would take only half a billion
atoms. So the cost would be a fraction of that.

Quote:

Now those costs *will* come down

Yes--I assume you're referring to your paper, "Protein-based Assembly of
Nanoscale Parts", http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Papers/PBAoNP.html in
the "Cost Reduction Analysis" section.

You calculated that between 2001 and 2005, costs could reduce by a
factor of 100. So your $3.6 trillion estimate turns into $3.6 billion
in just a couple more years. (I'm having trouble following your Table
4; that looks like a thousand-fold improvement.)

Also, you're assuming an enzyme-based fabrication method. If a directly
programmable mechanosynthetic method is discovered, the cost to
fabricate parts could be a lot lower than you figured.

Quote:

but there seem to be people, such as those at the Center for
Responsible Nanotechnology, who think one year we will
produce a nanoassembler and the next year we will have desk-top
replicators. In my opinion it just isn't going to play out that
way unless a tremendous amount of up-front effort is put into
computer-aided-design of nanoscale parts and the methods
for assembling them.

I'm Director of Research at CRN. I basically agree that rapid
development of a nanofactory (desk-top MNT manufacturing system making
large products) will require a lot of preliminary work. But I fully
expect that the required work will be done.

I have a 58-page paper in press on nanofactory architecture. The basic
point of the paper is that, given a Merkle-type hydrocarbon fabricator,
a tabletop nanofactory is actually surprisingly simple.

So here's my reasoning:
1) A nanofactory is much more valuable than a fabricator soup.
2) Designing a nanofactory will take a fraction of the effort of
designing and building a fabricator.
3) Therefore, anyone who "gets" MNT enough to fund a fabricator project
will also understand the potential of a nanofactory, and will put the
required effort into CAD systems to design a nanofactory.
4) Many of the nano-gizmos required in a fabricator will also be useful
in a nanofactory--and its products. A CAD system capable of designing a
nanofactory will also be capable of designing many products. So the
fabricator is the hard part, and the rest--including the "flood of
products"--is easy by comparison.

Chris

--
Chris Phoenix cphoenix@best.com http://xenophilia.org
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (co-founder) http://CRNano.org

oker

Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2003 9:09 pm

Guest

Fritz Wuehler <fritz@spamexpire-200309.rodent.frell.eu.org> wrote in message
news:<bklgfv01ub5@enews1.newsguy.com>...

Quote:

considering what many of the more hard core nanotech guys are saying
about how much it is going to take to make assemblers and that more
top-down nanotechnology applications to military technology can do a
lot; for instance, make soldiers more deadly than the terminators(at
least that is my impression after reading about these nano-armoured
soldiers), they can take out all terrorists; and with that ability,
they could make for a totalitarian state. Seeming how this can and
probably will come before assemblers, then maybe due to some unforseen
historical curcumstances, they could keep assemblers all to
themselves.

[ NOTE: This thread is approaching activation of the "No Politics" clause
of the Charter. Please try to stay focused on the "nanotech" portion
of the thread topic. -- /gdp ]

Robert I. Eachus

Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2003 9:10 pm

Guest

Chris Phoenix wrote:

Quote:

1) A nanofactory is much more valuable than a fabricator soup.
2) Designing a nanofactory will take a fraction of the effort of
designing and building a fabricator.
3) Therefore, anyone who "gets" MNT enough to fund a fabricator project
will also understand the potential of a nanofactory, and will put the
required effort into CAD systems to design a nanofactory.
4) Many of the nano-gizmos required in a fabricator will also be useful
in a nanofactory--and its products. A CAD system capable of designing a
nanofactory will also be capable of designing many products. So the
fabricator is the hard part, and the rest--including the "flood of
products"--is easy by comparison.

I agree with all of the above, but I have taken it a bit further, and it
reminds me of the first race for what became the America's Cup. Queen
Victoria was told that the America had won the race between 16 yachts
around the Isle of Wright, she asked who was in second. "Madam, there
is no second," was the reply. The following yachts were so far behind
that they could not even be seen from the finish line. (It was more
embarrassing than that for the British. The wind died and the tides
were adverse, so the next yacht crossed the line over eight hours later.)

What has this to do with nanotech? The first assembler (or nanofactory)
will be built by a group that will be moving so much faster in terms of
technical progress than the rest of the world that there will be no
comparison. And even if there are several close competitors, reaching
the goal line will allow the winning team to accelerate their technical
progress exponentially.

Even if the winning team takes the weekend off to celebrate, and the
"second place" team finishes before Monday, the nanofab working over the
weekend will probably give the first place team a thousand times the
industrial base of the second place team. And there will be no way to
catch up. (For example by the end of that weekend the Top 500
supercomputers will all be owned by the winning team, and each will
probably have more computing power than all of the computers on the
previous list combined--even though the winning team will still own a
significant fraction of those, unless they have already junked them.)

So it is very important to me--and to the human race--which team wins,
and what they do in those first few days. Beyond that anyone who claims
to have a clue today about what will happen is either a time traveller
or crazy. During my lifetime, computers and new technologies have
increased my ability to do research in my field by about a factor of
1000. There are fields where that multiplier is much smaller, but I see
a time coming when the doubling time for knowledge in any field will be
measured in days or hours. (It may then level off as the field reaches
the point where "all that there is to know" is reached. Some fields may
have such a limit--others won't.)

--
Robert I. Eachus

Ryan gunned down the last of his third white wine and told himself it
would all be over in a few minutes. One thing he'd learned from
Operation Beatrix: This field work wasn't for him. --from Red Rabbit by
Tom Clancy.

Joann Evans

Posted: Thu Sep 25, 2003 10:46 am

Guest

erincss wrote:

Quote:

Fritz Wuehler

Assumming they are the first to build an assembler,
are they likely to share it with the rest of the world, or will this be kept
classified for the next 100 years or more?

It would be classified, and they would never tell you about it until it was
absolutely necessary to deal with it, and then they would take credit for it.

And what's to keep others (openly or not) from doing the same
research?

Guest

Posted: Thu Sep 25, 2003 10:49 am

On Thu, 25 Sep 2003, Robert I. Eachus wrote:

Quote:

What has this to do with nanotech? The first assembler (or
nanofactory) will be built by a group that will be moving so much
faster in terms of technical progress than the rest of the world that
there will be no comparison.

Why ? You seem to have forgotten to include any trace of reasoning for
this bald-faced claim. It's a fact that there is today multiple teams
working on multiple technologies nessecary to reach full nanotech. What
leads you to the conclusion that all but one of these will neccesary
fade to irrelevance even before the construction of a replicator ?

Quote:

Only if "industrial base" is identical to products of this one first
nanofab. (It'd be nice if you'd clarify a bit: when you say 'nanofab'
are you refereing to a general assembler, as in one capable of building
a copy of itself, or merely a molecular manufacturing-plant capable of
say mass-producing a single simple nanotech-part ?)

And winning the race with one day *still* gives the winning team only
one days advantage. Anything the winning team can do on wednesday the
second team, one day behind, can do on thursday. I don't think it's safe
to assume, like you seem to do, that all development is essentially over
when the first nanofab is made, and thus human input are at that point
so irrelevant that it'll never be possible to catch up even a single
days advantage.

(i.e. you're saying that given two teams, one that's had a nanofab for
1000 days, and one that's had a nanofab for 999 days, it's a given that
the first team will be more technically advanced. I don't think you've
supported this at all.)

Quote:

During my lifetime, computers and new technologies have increased my
ability to do research in my field by about a factor of 1000.

This migth be true with some specialized definition of "do research",
but it's not at all true in the general case. In many fields, the part
of research that consists of finding and accessing the relevant
information (be it a dataset, a technical report, a journal article or
something else) is much quicker. I can find many things in 10 minutes
now that would've taken a intra-library-loan and a week to access
earlier.

But "doing research" also means reading or otherwise making use of that
data. Understand it. I don't see any huge speedups on that front.
(though some smaller ones)

Sincerely,
Eivind Kjrstad

John S. Novak, III

Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2003 6:52 am

Guest

In article <bkpdp20u8t@enews4.newsguy.com>, erincss wrote:

Quote:

This is the point where I must, in fairness, ask if you actually know
what you're talking about-- ie, have you actually done any government
or military research-- or if your opinion is informed solely by
popular media and culture.

--
John S. Novak, III jsn@cegt201.bradley.edu
The Humblest Man on the Net

Chris Phoenix

Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2003 6:55 am

Guest

ekj@ekj.vestdata.no wrote:

Quote:

On Thu, 25 Sep 2003, Robert I. Eachus wrote:

What has this to do with nanotech? The first assembler (or
nanofactory) will be built by a group that will be moving so much
faster in terms of technical progress than the rest of the world that
there will be no comparison.

Why ? You seem to have forgotten to include any trace of reasoning for
this bald-faced claim. It's a fact that there is today multiple teams
working on multiple technologies nessecary to reach full nanotech. What
leads you to the conclusion that all but one of these will neccesary
fade to irrelevance even before the construction of a replicator ?

Here, I have to tentatively agree with Robert. Not because multiple
teams will fade to irrelevance, but because there'll probably be only
one team succeeding at it. Developing MNT will require innovation: not
invention, but things like realizing easier ways to do mechanochemistry
in ultra-clean environments. It's possible that the final required
innovations will be published, but I doubt it; anyone working on MNT
will know what they have, and will be pretty secretive.

Another factor is that there may not be many teams working on it.
Certainly in the West, everyone seems convinced that it's a pipe dream
and there's no point even looking. I don't know if this is true in the
East. But it seems quite possible that one nation will develop it
before most others even think to ask whether they should be studying it.

Quote:

Even if the winning team takes the weekend off to celebrate, and the
"second place" team finishes before Monday, the nanofab working over the
weekend will probably give the first place team a thousand times the
industrial base of the second place team.

(i.e. you're saying that given two teams, one that's had a nanofab for
1000 days, and one that's had a nanofab for 999 days, it's a given that
the first team will be more technically advanced. I don't think you've
supported this at all.)

Here, I think you're both half-right. If the "second place" team
finishes a day later, but their nanofactories are twice as fast, their
productivity will quickly outstrip the "first place" team.

But if the "first place" team finishes even a month or two ahead of the
"second place" team, the obvious thing to do is to build lots of weapons
and destroy the other teams.

This assumes that you can go from basic self-duplicating fabricator to
building complex products in a matter of months. I think you can, with
enough pre-design--which would certainly be funded by anyone who
understood MNT enough to fund an MNT project.

This also assumes that the developer will be military-minded; a
commercial developer would not go to war, but would file lots of
patents, grab lots of market share, and try to squish their competitors
economically. But it seems pretty likely that either the first
developers will be government/military, or that the company's
government/military will be an early adopter.

Quote:

During my lifetime, computers and new technologies have increased my
ability to do research in my field by about a factor of 1000.

But "doing research" also means reading or otherwise making use of that
data. Understand it. I don't see any huge speedups on that front.
(though some smaller ones)

I've found that a good database of article abstracts, or in some cases
even a quick Google search, allows me to gain an overview of an
unfamiliar field very quickly. I don't think it's a factor of a
thousand, but it does allow me to do new *kinds* of research--much more
far-ranging and synthetic than I could have done with just a paper
library and a specialized education.

Chris

--
Chris Phoenix cphoenix@best.com http://xenophilia.org
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (co-founder) http://CRNano.org

erincss

Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2003 7:30 am

Guest

Quote:

John S. Novak, III

This is the point where I must, in fairness, ask if you actually know
what you're talking about-- ie, have you actually done any government
or military research-- or if your opinion is informed solely by
popular media and culture.

Mostly informed from what I read of other projects that have been done along
similiar lines, and the overall dishonesty of the governments.

erincss

Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2003 7:31 am

Guest

Quote:

Joann Evans

And what's to keep others (openly or not) from doing the same
research?

Nothing apart from resources, talent, and tools.

There may be classified military-industrial think tanks that have general
purpose assemblers in their hands, or at least diamondoid composite-making
assemblers, and its kept under wraps for obvious reasons.

Robert I. Eachus

Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2003 2:13 pm

Guest

Chris Phoenix wrote:

Quote:

But if the "first place" team finishes even a month or two ahead of the
"second place" team, the obvious thing to do is to build lots of weapons
and destroy the other teams.

This assumes that you can go from basic self-duplicating fabricator to
building complex products in a matter of months. I think you can, with
enough pre-design--which would certainly be funded by anyone who
understood MNT enough to fund an MNT project.

This also assumes that the developer will be military-minded; a
commercial developer would not go to war, but would file lots of
patents, grab lots of market share, and try to squish their competitors
economically. But it seems pretty likely that either the first
developers will be government/military, or that the company's
government/military will be an early adopter.

Weapons, so crude. Wink

I keep remembering what happened to the growing
of galena crystals. Say lab1 realizes that there is some "magic"
component that they need to rely on self assembly to make the first
time, but from then on can fabricate with ease. They can make some
"blue goo" that prevents that particular molecule from being formed "by
accident" and get copies to all their competitors. (For example, put
the blue goo in the ink they use in their pre-prints. ;-)

But if you want to argue that my "weekend" is overstatement, but a month
is more than enough, fine. But I do think that several days is
sufficient. Yes, if lab2 develops a technology with a faster initial
doubling time, they may catch up. But as I said, once you get a working
assembler or nanofab you almost instantly get a whole lot smarter. The
amount of computing resources you will be able to throw at improving
your designs will result in significant improvements in hours, even if
the initial doubling time is a day or more.

Oh, my definiition of a nanofab is a co-operating assembly of tools
which can replicate itself and make other nanotech products. I tend to
think that the first "assemblers" will be in this form. Hundreds or
thousands of co-operating tools. They may be used to build Drexlerian
assemblers, or more elegant nanofab arrays.

Quote:

I have. One simple example is the protein folding work currently being
done. How many molecules could you check a year, say twenty years ago,
for fitting a certain receptor site? How many per minute today?

Let's say that with today's software and hardware it is possible to
design an assembler in 20 years. In 18 months, it will only take ten
years, three years from now? Five years, for a total of eight. Wait
another eighteen months, and you have 4 1/2 years of waiting and 2 1/2
years of work for a total of 7. But that assumes that only the computer
hardware improves. Let's also improve the quality and performance of
the software. As soon as the next generation of molecular design
software is ready, go for it.

The other approach is to not wait for the hardware and throw money at
the design problem. I think that a few of the larger supercomputers
being thrown together right now are intended for exactly that purpose.
But beat them with a factor of ten better software, and you will be much
more nimble with a 1000 CPU system than they will be with a 10,000 CPU
monster.

So that is the situation right now. The starting gun has sounded, and
the best use of resources right now is perfecting molecular modelling
software for massively parallel supercomputers. (The second best use of
resources is work on subassemblies. Much easier to build a large system
out of hundreds of thousands of subassemblies than billions of atoms.)

The best use of our time here? Probably thinking about the ethical and
social implications. When the full nanotech revolution does arrive,
there won't be any time left to think about which way we should be
heading. And having been through a couple of similar revolutions, trying
to predict too far beyond the revolution is worthless. Indeed, I would
say that the definition of a social/moral/scientific/commercial
revolution is that you can't predict anything too far ahead. It is not
the effect of the revolution on the answers that is so devastating to
predictions, it is the effect on the questions. If you don't know what
questions to ask, how can you guess the answers?

For example my brother and I operated a printing business during
high-school as a way of making spending money. We later donated the
press and the drawers of type to his college, which runs it as a living
museum. At the time, we were fairly well aquainted with the printing
industry--the family business built photoengraving and photolithography
equipment. So if you had asked us what would replace movable type in 40
years, we could have intelligently discussed monotype, linotypes,
photolithography, and even computer typesetting. We probably would have
even said photolithography. But we never would have figured out that
the right answer would be xerography, or that the biggest use of
photolithography today would be in making computer components and other
electronic devices. (The right question to ask was, "How do you
minimize downtime while changing what you are printing?" And of course,
for lithography the right question was "How fine a line can you create?")

Quote:

There are fields of mathematics, such as fractals and chaos theory, that
couldn't exist without high-speed computers. But if you really want a
field which has been totally transformed by computers, look at
cryptography. The synergy between computers and number theory has made
possible cryptosystems which are billions of times or more harder to
crack than the systems used during WWII--and to crack those systems that
are only billions of times harder within minutes.

For example, even in the 1980s DES was a very safe encryption system,
with a 56-bit key. Today there are machines that can crack a new DES
key in a couple of minutes--and do. Triple-DES which is 2^56 times as
hard to crack as DES is currently safe, as are several systems with
128-bit (symmetric) keys. During WWII, the Germans thought that systems
with about 20 bits of key were way too large to be searched
exhaustively. The UK and US build "bombes", mechanical computers to
brute force those keys, and as a result the Germans lost WWII. (Most
people associate the bombes with Bletchly Park, in England. But the
largest number of machines was in the Navy Department building in
Washington. This was because the Naval Engima machines had 13 times as
many key combinations to search. Bletchly Park was where the Luftwaffe
and German Army messages were broken.)

Some of these improvements in speed have been due to faster computers.
But the biggest advances have been the improvements in number theory
that have accompanied the faster computers. Part of the number theory
has been accomplished by "pure" research that could be done walking
through the woods, or sitting on a log. But another part of the work
has involved lots of number crunching. I can't tell you how amazing it
is to come up with a theory, crunch for a while to see if it seems to
hold, flip back and forth between theory and number crunching to get a
proof, then validate the proof from empirical data. Euler would have
loved it.

For example there was one theorem in multivariate statistics I was asked
by my advisor to prove. I spent several days at it, then decided to try
disproving it. Much easier. Wink

It turned out that it was only
approximately true, and the error was in the 15th decimal place. Of
course, once I had cranked through the math, I was able to use a
multiple-precison math package to show that my result was correct.
Could I have done what I did without computers? Sure. Would it have
taken 100 times as long? No, my estimate was only 50 times as long...

--
Robert I. Eachus

"Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the
goal of Art. It remains to work these concepts into a practical,
down-to-earth context, and for this there is nothing more practical or
down-to-earth than what I have been talking about all along...the repair
of an old motorcycle." -- from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

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