Drexlerian nanotech

[Drashner1]

I never said that nanotech doesn't work in the first place.

Ahem. The first line of your first post in this thread basically said exactly that.

I merely noted that the initial ideas were flawed.

Hrm. That would be a matter of interpretation. If you meant to say the initial ideas were flawed in your opinion, then it might have been better to just straight up say that from the start, rather than making a fairly unequivocal statement on the matter.

More to the point, most new ideas are flawed when they are first conceived.

And as for biology not using progressively larger systems-what do you think digestive organs are for? 

Digestive organs are built from and by nanotech. Also, if you check my earlier post, I said:

a) the biosphere does quite a lot without using macroscale systems - not that it does everything without using them

b) In some cases, it may indeed be more effective to combine macroscale systems with nanoscale ones - an argument can be made that most animals and plants on the planet do this to one degree or another. But that isn't an argument against microscopic systems being used in others, nor is it an argument in support of the idea that 'drexlerian nanotech' (which is a rather imprecise term, as it happens) doesn't work.

And we're nowhere near making wormholes either, yet we know exactly what does and doesn't work.

No, we don't. We have theories about how wormholes might work, but those theories have changed numerous times over the years and probably will again before we ever get close to being able to make a WH. Also, there can be a large gap between having a theory about how something will work and actually creating a piece of hardware that will do something. The theory behind nuclear weapons was well established - yet it still took years of massive effort to actually make one and even today, it's not something that people can just whip up with no real effort. Also, the theories that OA wormholes are built on actually predict a vast number of different types of wormholes (think a 1 followed by tens or maybe hundreds of zeros), some stable, some not, some traversable, some not, and some with very weird properties, like turning anything that passes through them into antimatter or the like.

OA approaches this by saying that the different wormholes in use in the setting represent only those WH types that the archai have figured out how to create and stabilize (and presumably find useful - the EG doesn't know how many dud types they know how to create). But there are presumably a vast number of 'designs' that continue to elude them.

Finally, remember that nanoassembly in air is pretty difficult from a mobility point of view-they don't have little thrusters, after all. And finally: biological cells are a highly controlled environment! Would bionano work outside of them? Has anyone seriously analyzed its feasibility?

Plants and fungi seem to do quite well using nanotech while being immobile And biological cells essentially are nanotech. It should also be noted that Drexler has more than once said that nanotech would probably need a controlled environment in which to operate, unless the system in question was:

a) very advanced

b) explicitly designed to operate 'in the wild'

This point wasn't as emphasized in Engines of Creation, but was covered in more depth in Drexler's later works. In fact, Drexler has explicitly said that while he considered 'grey goo' to be a potentially serious problem when he wrote EoC, after thinking about it more he no longer does, at least in terms of such a thing happening accidentally - and if it was done on purpose then whoever did it would be employing very advanced and mature nanotech.

On a more general note, part of the issue here seems to be that we have different definitions of 'nanotechnology' running up against each other here. You seem to be defining it as only individual nanoscale robots operating independently and solely in an uncontrolled environment. I'm (roughly) defining it as tech that has components that have nanometer dimensions and that may encompass devices ranging from tens or hundreds of nanometers across to tens or hundreds of meters across (or larger) that employ various types of components all the way down to the nanoscale, including individual nanobots - but with the larger components built by or from or incorporating the smaller devices. I'm not sure how Rynn would define it, but perhaps he'll weigh in.

Todd