X-Message-Number: 33043
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2010 09:13:41 -0500
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <>
Subject: Gerald Monroe should do some calculations.
References: <>

> From: Gerald Monroe <>
> 
> Perry :

Gerald :

> for the repair task to ever complete it has to happen
> faster than cosmic rays damage what you are working on.

I see that you don't understand the nature of the argument. If you
did, you would focus on the fact that you made an unsupportable
statement and I more or less destroyed it with a trivial thought
experiment, and not on the thought experiment (which no one would ever
actually execute per se, any more than one would take a pair of twins
and send one on a long journey near the speed of light).

However, your objection is also wrong. Of course you can reduce the
rate of cosmic ray damage to be almost arbitrarily low as well if you
wished -- you can just do your repairs inside the bottom of a deep
mine, inside a lead room to get rid of beta and gamma radiation from
the surrounding mine walls.

Not that you would do such a thing as fixing a brain so slowly, as
there would be little to no point -- the original comment was a
thought experiment designed to show that your assertion was ridiculous
-- but it would be quite straightforward if one actually needed to.

> There is such a thing as "too slow".

Yes, but it doesn't matter, because a simple calculation which you
apparently haven't performed would show that it isn't an issue.

The whole point here was that if you really generated too much heat
doing the repair in an hour you could do it in two hours or two weeks
and get the heat production down to the point where you could extract
the heat successfully, though you would have to be generating quite
large amounts of heat given the amount of it you can extract with
circulating coolant.

> Also, how could you test or validate a process that takes a century?

Without much trouble if you bother to think about it a bit -- people
used to take centuries to build cathedrals, and engineers are
remarkably clever if they have time to think about things, but again,
you seem to have entirely missed the point.

No one would take a century to do such a thing, and no one would need
to. The point of the thought experiment was merely that heat
generation cannot be a limit here, because the heat produced is
clearly going to be reasonably modest and one can arbitrarily lower it
because one doesn't need to complete the work in a fixed short amount
of time.

You go on to write several pages of text in this last missive, and on
none of them do you do a single calculation or to consider that other
people may have done such calculations before. Not one.

If you assert that something is possible or not possible because one
number will be larger than another number, it is incumbent upon you to
present the numbers. You never justified that claim, and you continue
not to justify it. Indeed, you loftily asserted that "physics" would
prohibit doing such a thing, never telling us precisely *how*.

So I would suggest that you give us a basic calculation of how much
heat will be released by a given rate of repair and how much heat can
be removed by circulating coolant. I think you will find that you can
do a repair quite quickly and that your original assertion was
nonsense, but I'm going to leave it to you to do the calculation.

If you can't, I see no reason to continue the discussion.

> Even if you could construct "free floating" nanomachines capable
> of operating while immersed in liquid nitrogen, how would you get
> the data out of them?

Why don't you read the very large chunk of the literature devoted to
this to find out? I see no reason to read it for you.

And with that, I'll leave you be. I will be clear, though: you seem to
operate on the assumption that people who have been thinking about
these problems for many years haven't done even basic thinking about
the issues. Kind of an odd assumption to make I'd say, not to mention
deeply insulting when you haven't read the literature.


Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		

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