X-Message-Number: 32804
From: "John de Rivaz" <>
Subject: Fw: [LongevityReport] "Nano-nonsense: 25 years of charlatanry...
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:33:34 +0100


[Mark Plus' message below to Longevity Report was held up by the Yahoo 
moderation process]


The comment below is surely a feature of exponential growth. da Vinci was 
writing about planes with little hope of making one with the materials and 
knowledge of his time. PCM (or analogue to digital conversion) was conceived 
[1938] more than 25 years before technology made it possible to implement 
cheaply. Now virtually everything we take for granted would not be possible 
without it.


Shouting at nanotechnologists won't make programmable assemblers appear any 
quicker. Evolution made molecular scale assemblers appear, so they exist. The 
problem of how to make them, and how to make them do our bidding, remains to be 
solved.

I note the header on
http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/nanoshite/
>>>

Lachlan passed away in January 2010.  As a memorial, this site remains as he 
left it.

Therefore the information on this site may not be current or accurate and should
not be relied upon.
<<<

... without the benefit of cryopreservation, no doubt.

-- 
Sincerely, John de Rivaz:  http://John.deRivaz.com for websites including
Cryonics Europe, Longevity Report, The Venturists, Porthtowan, Alec Harley
Reeves - inventor, Arthur Bowker - potter, de Rivaz genealogy,  Nomad .. and
more
 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: MARK PLUS 
To:  
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 11:34 PM
Subject: Re: [LongevityReport] "Nano-nonsense: 25 years of charlatanry...


Scott Locklin in the comments to his blog post points out:


>Charles Babbage designed something which could have been made with the 
technology of the time. If Britain had dedicated a significant portion of its 
GDP and thousands of workers to creating an analytical engine for the next 25 
years, and failed to even build a gear for the damn thing, well, then we might 
have suspected that Mr. Babbage was full of baked beans. 25 years! Do you know 
how long 25 years is? In 25 years, we went from Von Neumann writing a paper on 
how to make a digital computer to having freaking Unix and GUI's. In 25 years, 
we went from biplanes made out of cloth to the SR-71. 25 years is a working 
lifetime for many people. And there have been hundreds or thousands of people 
who have dedicated their lives to this "nano  idiocy. Yet, we are not one whit 
closer to having anything remotely resembling a nanotechnology now than we were 
25 years ago. If Drexler and his propellor heads wish to comfort themselves with
the idea that they are visionaries ahead of their time; well, I deny it. I 
maintain that they have picked a delivery date so far into the future that the 
day of judgement will never come. They'll all be comfortably retired by then. 
How convenient.



-- 
Mark Plus
Life is short: Freeze hard!




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