X-Message-Number: 1089 Date: Sat, 1 Aug 92 13:14 PST From: (Keith Lofstrom) Subject: Re: cryonics: #1083 - #1086 >... you can take 20 years if you like to do the >repair provided you can do it at a low enough temperature. At worst, >you can use the patient's own circulatory system as a cooling duct >system, once you've made some minor temporary adjustments to it. > ... >Its almost impossible to find anything that operates effectively at >liquid helium temperatures; designing functioning nanomachines that >operate near the glass transition temperature at -130C is going to be >hard enough. As for "colder" than LHe, its very hard to get anything >colder than liquid helium. There are no gasses at that temperature to >use as working fluids for conventional cooling techniques. Maybe you >could use some sort of strange Peltier effect device, but if you could >I haven't heard of it -- hell, I'm not even sure that things like the >Peltier effect still operate as advertised down that cool, (everything >starts acting strange that close to absolute zero -- liquid helium is >a superfluid, many if not most metals start superconducting, anyone >know if the Peltier effect or other similar effects still function?) >and certainly building equipment at those temperatures is a bitch. >Thermal motion is not really a problem -- your body works fine, >doesn't it, and its full of nanomachines. Drexler's arguments about >this in EoC are pretty solid. Another problem is that getting that >cold causes even more thermal stresses on large inhomogeneous objects >like humans -- thermal stress cracking is bad enough just at LN2 >temps. Regards 20 years - people do NOTHING that takes 20 years. Sometimes they initiate a process that takes longer, and look in on it from time to time, but where options are possible they try to do things as fast as possible. 1 33MHz 386 is worth a lot more than 10 6MHz PCs, for example. Given what I expect will happen with the time value of money in a nanotechnological age, decision makers would be silly to initiate a process that completes 1000 money doubling times from now, if there is any way to complete it sooner. Regards temperature: Do I pull rank here? Well, I'm a microcircuit designer, who studied superconductivity in school. While it's true that the structures I work with are hundreds of nanometers in size, I have had a chance to work with these large structures for a while. I am working in an area in the transition region between bulk handling and individual handling of electrons ( the charge that makes it from a dynamic RAM cell to the sense amp can be measured in the thousands of electrons). Thermal problems - where the electrons jiggle from where you want them to where you don't - is a hell of a problem. The biggest problem with nanotechnology is observation. Bucko, when a wavelength of light is 1000 times the size of what you are looking at, AND there is enough energy in that light quanta to tear a hole in what you are looking at, you use something else to do the looking. And believe me, you've GOT to look (I'll eat my words if you can find a machinist that will work in the dark, with no sound, and no sense of touch) because you don't know what you are going to find. I bet a cookie that the processes to look at things will be "acoustic", that is, you yank on something and see how it moves in response, then infer the structure. If it is moving thermally, it will mask out the tiny echos you are looking for. Phonons - acoustic quanta - are the only "particles" I know of that have short wavelengths, low energy, and don't stick to things, but do interact with them. Solids? Glass? You are going to be working in vacuum, in tunnels you have constructed through the frozen cells. There won't be any liquid water around, so wet chemistry is not going to happen. I am assuming you are doing machine work at this scale, not bulk chemistry. Pick up a radical from the toolbox, and bond it into place. Who needs viscosity, or Brownian motion? You want things to move when you want, and stay put when you don't. Macroscopic heating and cooling stresses are absurdly simple to take care of - you just put the right things in the right places at the small scale, and you don't have any macroscopic stresses. Regards cooling - they MAKE liquid helium somehow, don't they? That isn't the coldest you can get. 4.2K is the temperature of liquid helium at standard pressure; it gets a good bit colder if you boil it off in a vacuum chamber. When we went over to the physics building to get LHe for our experiments, I could watch the multi-stage compressor working to make more - there were parts of the machine much colder than 4.2K. There are labs that are working at 0.001K right now. If a patient isn't spending long at that temperature, it doesn't cost that much to dump them in LHe for a while. Actually, I would be using some sort of solid state cooler - not Peltier - probably little nanotechnological phonon pumps of some sort. A lot of nanotechnology I expect will be happening at room temperature, or hotter - the processes will be simpler, the end product simpler, and the process can be done "blind", without reference to the previous structure. We obviously have demonstration proofs that people can be constructed at room temperature. This is NOT a demonstration that people can be RE-constructed at room temperature, in some fashion arbitrarily close to a design ideal. This is a much more complicated process - certainly doable, but involving much more measurement and control. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Power ICs Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=1089