Tribe.net. Local Connections Mike http://CRNano.tribe.net/thread/ff01454f-4a68-4482-b0c4-d685fd6ddccd#1c1e08a4-2f86-4d93-9316-ed2eb90f9a3e 2005-07-14T14:29:03Z 2005-07-14T14:29:03Z

To read this on the Web, with nice formatting and hyperlinks, go to http://www.crnano.org/archive05.htm#32 CONTENTS - Nanotech Roadmap Initiative - New Nano Movie - Russian CRN Site Online - Nanotech Q&A for Russia - Nano-techno-logy - State of the Future 2005 - Nanotechnology Workshop Webcast - CRN goes to Chicago - Feature Essay: Fast Development of Molecular Manufacturing Products ========== Things are moving very quickly throughout the nano-world and at CRN. We’ll recap some of the highlights here — but to keep up with the latest developments, be sure to check our Responsible Nanotechnology weblog at http://CRNano.typepad.com/ NOTE: In the items below, links are indicated with [brackets], and shown at the end of each paragraph. Nanotech Roadmap Initiative Foresight Nanotech Institute, in cooperation with Battelle, a global research organization, [has announced] its intent to develop a "Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems." CRN strongly encourages a cooperative program to map all the steps that will lead to molecular manufacturing. We have even outlined a [series of studies] that could go a long way toward meeting this goal. A combined effort — involving business, government, academic, and nonprofit participants — appears safest to us. This is especially true if numerous international partners are included, the more the better. In principle, [we support the idea] of a collaborative technical roadmap project. It’s not yet clear, however, if the Foresight announcement meets our description. We look forward to hearing more about it in the near future. http://www.foresight.org/roadmaps/prod_nano.html http://www.crnano.org/studies.htm http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2005/06/nanotech_roadma.html New Nano Movie A new “must-see” short film has been produced using computer animation to assist in visualizing nanosystems and molecular manufacturing. Productive Nanosystems: from Molecules to Superproducts, is a collaborative effort of animator and engineer [John Burch] and pioneer nanotechnologist [Dr. K. Eric Drexler], made possible through a challenge grant from [Mark Sims and NanoRex]. The four-minute film depicts an animated view of a nanofactory and demonstrates key steps in a process that converts simple molecules into a billion-CPU laptop computer. The movie file is 86.1 MB, [available here]. It will take a while to download, but it’s definitely worth it. http://www.lizardfire.com/ http://www.foresight.org/FI/Drexler.html http://www.nanorex.com/ http://www.nanoengineer-1.com/mambo/ Russian CRN Site Online CRN is very pleased to announce that several pages from our main website have been translated into the Russian language and [are posted] on the Internet. [Denis Tarasov], a Research Scientist in the Biology Department of [Kazan State University] in Russia, did most of the translation work. We are grateful for his assistance. We now have CRN web pages available in five languages: [English], [Chinese], [Spanish], [Portuguese], and [Russian]. If you think you can help with other languages, please [let us know]. http://www.compnera.com/crnanorus/index.htm http://www.compnera.com/sybin/index.html http://www.ksu.ru/ http://www.crnano.org/index.html http://www.tainano.com/CCRN/index.htm http://babyurl.com/TUPH61 http://babyurl.com/ajVOfb http://www.compnera.com/crnanorus/index.htm Email to: info@CRNano.org Nanotech Q&A for Russia Last month, NanoNewsNet, a web portal for nanotechnology news and research in Russia, interviewed CRN Executive Director [Mike Treder] for their site. The interview is [posted online] in the Russian language. We have an English translation [here]. http://crnano.org/about_us.htm#Principals http://babyurl.com/Wkrf37 http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2005/07/a_few.html Nano-techno-logy Three Greek words — nano (dwarf or tiny), techne (craft or skill), and logos (science or learning) — combine to make nano-techno-logy: applying science at a tiny scale to the craft or skill of building. Miracle predictions about nanotech’s potential are common, as are dire warnings about the technology’s risks. So, are the pessimists or the optimists right? To find out, read this [new essay] by Mike Treder, published by Future Brief. http://www.futurebrief.com/miketrederchanges003.asp State of the Future 2005 Many people still do not appreciate how fast science and technology will change over the next 25 years, and given this rapid development along several different fronts, the possibility of technology growing beyond human control must now be taken seriously, according to [a new report] produced by the United Nations University's [Millennium Project]. “State of the Future 2005” analyzes current global trends and examines in detail some of the present and future challenges facing the world. As a consultant to the UN University's Millennium Project, CRN’s Mike Treder was involved with developing [some of the findings] contained in the report. http://babyurl.com/EzQHoR http://www.acunu.org/millennium/ http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2005/06/state_of_the_fu.html Nanotechnology Workshop Webcast The Terasem Movement, Inc., a non-profit foundation focused on geoethical nanotechnology, has announced that an [interactive webcast] featuring Ray Kurzweil, Frank Tipler, James Hughes, Max More, Doug Mulhall, Mike Treder and others at its [Geoethical Nanotechnology Workshop] will be openly accessible from 8AM-6PM EST on Wednesday, July 20th. Viewers of the interactive webcast are invited to email or IM (instant-message) questions directed to the presenters throughout the meeting. Each hour, some of these will be selected for the featured speakers to answer. The webcast will feature simultaneous transmission of audio, video, and PowerPoint presentations. Geoethical nanotechnology is the development and implementation under a global regulatory framework of machines capable of assembling molecules into a wide variety of objects, in a broad range of sizes, and in potentially vast quantities. http://www.terasemfoundation.org/workshop.htm www.terasemfoundation.org/webcast CRN goes to Chicago CRN’s Mike Treder is speaking at two events in Chicago later this month. On Friday, July 29, at a special [Symposium on Nanotechnology], Mike will deliver a presentation called “The Flat Horizon Problem: Nanotechnology on an Upward Slope.” The next day, Saturday, July 30, during the annual conference of the World Future Society, Mike is giving a talk titled, “Do Sweat the Small Stuff: Why Everyone Should Care About Nanotechnology.” The conference, [WorldFuture 2005: Foresight, Innovation, and Strategy], is at the Chicago Hilton and Towers. If you’re going to be there, make sure to say hello to Mike. http://www.crnano.org/SymposiumonNanotechnology_July05,Chicago_.pdf http://www.wfs.org/2005main.htm Feature Essay: Fast Development of Molecular Manufacturing Products Chris Phoenix, Director of Research, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology The extremely high performance of the products of molecular manufacturing will make the technology transformative—but it is the potential for fast development that will make it truly disruptive. If it took decades of research to produce breakthrough products, we would have time to adjust. But if breakthrough products can be developed quickly, their effects can pile up too quickly to allow wise policymaking or adjustment. As if that weren't bad enough, the anticipation of rapid development could cause additional problems. How quick is “quickly?” Given a programmable factory that can make a product from its design file in a few hours, a designer could create a newly improved version every day. Today, building prototypes of a product can take weeks, so designers have to take extra time to double-check their work. If building a prototype takes less than a day, it will often be more efficient to build and test the product rather than taking time to double-check the theoretical design. (Of course, if taken to extremes, this can encourage sloppy work that costs more time to fix in the long run.) In addition to being faster, prototyping also would be far cheaper. A nanofactory would go through the same automated operations for a single prototype copy as for a production run, so the prototype should cost no more per unit than the final product. That's quite a contrast with today, where rapid prototyping can cost thousands of dollars per component. And it means that destructive testing will be far less painful. Let's take an example. Today, a research rocket might cost hundreds of dollars to fuel, but hundreds of thousands to build. At that rate, tests must be held to a minimum number, and expensive and time-consuming efforts must be made to eliminate all possible sources of failure and gather as much data as possible from each test. But if the rocket cost only hundreds of dollars to build—if a test flight cost less than $1000, not counting support infrastructure—then tests could be run as often as convenient, requiring far less support infrastructure, saving costs there as well. The savings ripple out: with less at stake in every test, designers could use more advanced and less well-proved technologies, some of which would fail but others of which would increase performance. Not only would the product be developed faster, but it also would be more advanced, and have a lot more testing. The equivalence between prototype and production manufacturing has an additional benefit. Today, products must be designed for two different manufacturing processes—prototyping and scaled-up production. Ramping up production has its own costs, such as rearranging production lines and training workers. But with direct-from-blueprint building, there would be no need to keep two designs in mind, and also no need to expend time and money ramping up production. When a design was finalized, it could immediately be shipped to as many nanofactories as desired, to be built efficiently and almost immediately. (For those just joining us, the reason nanofactories aren't scarce is that a nanofactory would be able to build another nanofactory on command, needing only data and supplies of a few refined chemicals.) A product design isn't really proved until people buy it, and rolling out a new product is expensive and risky today—after manufacture, the product must be shipped and stored in quantity, waiting for people to buy it. With last-minute nanofactory manufacturing, the product rollout cost could be much lower, reducing the overhead and risk of market-testing new ideas. There are several other technical reasons why products could be easier to design. Today's products are often crammed full of functionality, causing severe headaches for designers trying to make one more thing fit inside the package. Anyone who's looked under the hood of a 1960 station wagon and compared it with a modern car's engine, or studied the way chips and wires are packed into every last nook and cranny of a cell phone, knows how crowded products can get. But molecular manufactured products will be many orders of magnitude more compact; this is true for sensors, actuators, data processing, energy transformation, and even physical structure. What this means is that any human-scale product will be almost entirely empty space. Designers will be able to include functions without worrying much about where they will physically fit into the product. This ability to focus on function will simplify the designer's task. The high performance of molecularly precise nanosystems also means that designers can afford to waste a fair amount of performance in order to simplify the design. For example, instead of using a different size of motor for every different-sized task, designers might choose from only two or three standard sizes that might differ from each other by an order of magnitude or more. In today's products, using a thousand-watt motor to do a hundred-watt motor's job would be costly, heavy, bulky, and probably an inefficient use of energy besides. But nano-built motors have been calculated to be at least a million times as powerful. That thousand-watt motor would shrink to the size of a grain of sand. Running it at low power would not hurt its efficiency, and it wouldn't be in danger of overheating. It wouldn't cost significantly more to build than a carefully-sized hundred-watt motor. And at that size, it could be placed wherever in the product was most convenient for the designer. Another potential advantage of having more performance than needed is that design can be performed in stages. Instead of planning an entire product at once, integrated from top to bottom, designers could cobble together a product from a menu of lower-level solutions that were already designed and understood. For example, instead of a complicated system with lots of custom hardware to be individually specified, designers could find off-the-shelf modules that had more features than required, string them together, and tweak their specifications or programming to configure their functionality to the needed product—leaving a lot of other functionality unused. Like the larger-than-necessary motor, this approach would include a lot of extra stuff that was put in simply to save the designer's time; however, including all that extra stuff would cost almost nothing. This approach is used today in computers. A modern computer spends at least 99% of its time and energy on retroactively saving time for its designers. In other words, the design is horrendously inefficient, but because computer hardware is so extremely fast, it's better to use trillions of extra calculations than to pay the designer even $10 to spend time on making the program more efficient. A modern personal computer does trillions of calculations in a fraction of an hour. Modular design depends on predictable modules—things that work exactly as expected, at least within the range of conditions they are used in. This is certainly true in computers. It will also be true in molecular manufacturing, thanks to the digital nature of covalent bonds. Each copy of a design that has the same bond patterns between the atoms will have identical behavior. What this means is that once a modular design is characterized, designers can be quite confident that all subsequent copies of the design will be identical and predictable. (Advanced readers will note that isotopes can make a difference in a few cases, but isotope number is also discrete and isotopes can be sorted fairly easily as necessary to build sensitive designs. And although radiation damage can wipe out a module, straightforward redundancy algorithms can take care of that problem.) With all these advantages, development of nano-built products, at least to the point of competing with today's products, appears to be easier in some important ways than was development of today's products. It's worth spending some thought on the implications of that. What if the military could test-fire a new missile or rocket every day until they got it right? How fast would the strategic balance of power shift, and what is the chance that the mere possibility of such a shift could lead to pre-emptive military strikes? What if doctors could build new implanted sensor arrays as fast as they could find things to monitor, and then use the results to track the effects of experimental treatments (also nano-built rapid-prototyped technology) before they had a chance to cause serious injury? Would this enable doctors to be more aggressive—and simultaneously safer—in developing new lifesaving treatments? If new versions of popular consumer products came out every month—or even every week—and consumers were urged to trade up at every opportunity, what are the environmental implications? What if an arms race developed between nations, or between police and criminals? What if products of high personal desirability and low social desirability were being created right and left, too quickly for society to respond? A technical essay is not the best place to get into these questions, but these issues and more are directly raised by the possibility that molecular manufacturing nanofactories will open the door to true rapid prototyping. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * FUNDRAISING ALERT! Recent developments in efforts to roadmap the technological steps towards molecular manufacturing make the work of CRN even more important. It is critical that we examine the global implications of this rapidly emerging technology, and CRN continues to be in the forefront of this discussion. But we need to grow, and rapidly, to meet the expanding need. Your donation to CRN will help us to achieve that growth. We rely largely on individual donations and small grants for our survival. To make a contribution on-line click this link > https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=5594 . This is important work and we welcome your participation. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The Fine Print: The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology(TM) is an affiliate of World Care(R), an international, non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization. All donations to CRN are handled through World Care. The opinions expressed by CRN do not necessarily reflect those of World Care.

Mike 2005-07-14T14:29:03Z