X-Message-Number: 10646 Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 09:13:55 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #10641 - #10644 To Peter Merel: Basically I do not credit the idea that nanotechnology will produce a situation without ANY kind of scarcity at all. Nor do I credit the idea that we will EVER have a universal machine ie. a machine able to make whatever we want in whatever conditions. I'd like to go on longer about this, and may do so later. But I got cut off in the middle of a much longer argument, and now its time for bed. I will say that it is not denigration to say that someone has noticed a trend going on all around us. Drexler noticed that trend. I think he took a wrong turn when he decided to emphasize his "molecular nanotechnology", mainly because he wandered off into theory and forgot one other major point Feynman made: that we are unlikely to be able to apply effectively apply principles we have learned about physics in other scales to the nanoscale. (He didn't mean that our physics was WRONG, but rather that its consequences on those scales were far from obvious and probably would have to be found out by experiment and explained later). You may have heard of, by now, my newsletter PERIASTRON. I make a point of reporting developments in nanotechnology of any kind --- but NOT theory. Only actual working devices... or at the very worst, devices under construction. There are tons of things going on quite independently of Drexler and his coterie. I found his nanotechnology book frustrating because it spent far too much time on simple machines, with no attention to actual experiments or even building just one such machine out of a large number of simple parts (the real test of his ideas, and the only test). But that's only my answer for now. Best and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10646