I have enormous respect for Ralph Merkle, but honestly the way the "machines" of biological organisms function is not at all like gears and motors. At the level of biochemistry the molecules are more akin to strings and chains that flop around wildly. Cellular formation proceeds by the CONCENTRATION of chemicals through semi-permeable membranes, NOT by gears and motors.
I don't know; I hear a lot of talk here about what might be possible in the future, but it's almost 30 years since they spelled out IBM with those 31 atoms. At typical exponential dev't rates, I'd expect to be getting into structures, built from atomic manipulation, that are visible to the naked eye. Either that, or equivalent sophistication at the nanoscale. But where are these results?
Could humans be brought back to life with this tech? In theory, If these nanobots construct atoms one by one, couldn’t these bots reconstruct a deceased human? And would their conscious/mind be the same?
As a PhD researcher in gerontology , What he is saying will most likely occur.........its a matter of time....are we stupid enough to deliberately miss the boat?
The conversation about diamond is way over the top. Diamond does indeed have a huge tensile strength compared to steel, but it is not very tough. You can, in principle, make a composite with diamond fiber, but that composite will not not be 100x steel, so dropping the weight of artifacts by a factor of 100 is quite unrealistic. That said, a factor of 10x would be amazing, just not enough to make low Earth orbit as routine as taking a drive.
@conradjulian Locklin is a troll. His whole argument boils down to "Its been 25 years since Drexler wrote about nanofactories and we still haven't seen them. We haven't seen them because they're impossible." He neglects the fact that molecular nanotechnology has received virtually no funding until very recently. The stuff that was funded was chemistry relabeled nanotech. All the progress thats been made in MNT is spillover from other fields. See Brian Wang's response to Locklin.
@eradimatrix Nah, just give it a few years and he'll be able to get the nanobots to do it for him. Physical perfection without any heavy lifting whatsoever! Kind of like in that Futurama episode, "Parasites Lost", where Fry becomes host to a species of worms that dramatically and instantaneously improve his intelligence, buffness and looks. Hey... I could do with something like that! Sign me up!
most people are definitely stupid enough to miss the boat; hopefully people with $ will fund the right research; after all, whoever makes this happen first will become immensely powerful and rich (im thinking a corporation or country); whether its strong AI, life extension tech, or nanoscale production
20:30 About quantum blurryness - another take on this is: If you capture a molecule in a tight space (e.g. in a box) you do work against degeneracy pressure which is released in "omnidirectional" kinetic energy when you suddenly lift its spacial constraints completely. The thighter it was compressed in space the faster it's probability distribution will fall apart. This is heisenbergs uncertainty principle in slightly unconventional wording. (small spacial distribution -> wide impulse distribution -> fast wave packet dispersion) Judging from this macroscopic crystals which's average outer positions can (it has been done) be measured down to the femtometer level in space should fall apart instantly because of this extreme sharpness in space. But they don't! Why is an interesting question on itself - it has todo with not yet well understood quantum decoherence. If you strongly bond a small molecule to the crystal (that is you use the crystal as a movement constraining box) the molecule essentially becomes part of the crystal and inherits its sharp and not apart-running position. Actually the macroscopic position of the crystals roughly pins down the positions of the atomic nuclei of the molecule. The exact positions of the nuclei (at 0K temperature) can't be determined as exact as the position of a macroscopic crystal though. The actual size of the probability distribution cloud for a nucleus is maintained through the "chemical bond force box" the size of this cloud is below the size of its host atom but above the size of the nucleus. As a sidenote the size of the nucleus is maintained through its "nuclear force box" and the size of a whole atom (electron shell) is maintained through the "electrostatic core potential box". To theoretically recreate the actual "force-pictures" that have been taken of molecules you have to "add" to the core crystal location that does not run apart the nucleus blurryness, the electron shell blurrieness and finally some thermal blurrieness - the same for the opposing needle tip. (actually mathematically this "adding" is folding)
@conradjulian The quant fund managers though they knew everything but they got creamed in the stock market. In some cases worse then the avg joe. I would be braging about how smart I was and using my quant experience as proof when trying to understand Nanotechnology....For one, they are very different fields and for two the quants haven't even figured out their own field of physics. Scott Locklin needs to stick to what he knows and rethink his own area of physics...which is sadly lacking! :)
I'm sure that a lot of people declared Babbage a fraud and that computing machines were nothing but "charlatanry." And yet, computers do exist. So if I'm going to accept that nanotechnology is "charlatanry," I need a reason better than -- it's been thirty years and the technology isn't yet mature -- which is all that Locklin's argument seems to be.
I wonder what this says to all the naysayers and detractors of Cryonics? If you could rearrange matter at the molecular scale with percission and all at once ie convergent assembly then you could reverse aging, disease, and even people frozen in liquid notrogen if they were frozen soon enough after death...I imagine a day or 2 depending on temps and conditions.
Patents wouldn't be a problem if they only lasted for fourteen years, with a possibility of a seven-year extension. The same with copyrights. That's the way they were way back when. But now copyrights last for the writer's entire lifetime plus a generation, and patents last for twenty years or more.
Yes at the moment their is not a nano-tech engineering major alone because if your major is physics you will basically know all the basics of the technology.
1:07:22 Guy in the audience: "So, Bill Joy wrote that we where doomed, Smalley sayed we where not, and Smalley was wrong does that mean Joy was right?"
This is how life has evolved to do it, and I'll be quite surprised if we DON'T do some of that ourselves. There may well be certain procedures where a semi-permeable membrane and wriggling cilia work best. But some things may work better with gears and motors, and if they can work, then they'll be used if they're the best thing to use. It may just be that gears and motors are hard to evolve.
probably some1 has already posed this concern : isn't this a rather dangerous and potentially deadly way to enhance life ? Singularity?? Re-arranging "atoms" of nearly everything? Hmm.. it scares the hell out of me! What would biological warfare become with this approach? (child's play, hey!), Nuclear weaponry => child's play too! Terrorists could put the entire planet at risk of Nano-weaponry destruction. I really don't know what to imagine about the devastating possibilities of this!!! :))
things like nuclear weapons need certain elements that are restricted, if you don't have te elements to make the atoms of those elements, you can't make those products. for biological warfare, the diseases need to be alive diseases, otherwise they won't work, they'll just be non-living molecules...also, I don't think this technology can have any influence on biology and living systems and obviously like explained previously, it would be easier to fight diseases and prevent those same biological warfares.
Smalley's position was a response to Eric K. Drexler's book "Engines of Creation" published in 1987. Smalley argued that the 'sticky fingers' problem made things like molecular motors and self-assembly impossible. He was opposed to taking designs which work for bulk materials and applying them to the nano-scale.
When Charles Babbage designed his analytical engine in 1835, he couldn't get the funding to build it. Thirty years later and many of the people who first read of it could say, and honestly so, that an analytical engine was no closer to being built than in the 1830s. In fact it wasn't until 1941 that a computer, electronic rather than mechanical, did what Babbage described over a hundred years earlier. Over a hundred years. Not 30 -- 106. durned character limit
@eradimatrix Not necessarily. It depends on what level of nanotechnology you're thinking about. I read in a book an interview with one of Merkle's students (admittedly the book was published nearly 10 years ago), who predicted the development and commercial application of carbon nanotubes - a form of "nanotechnology" - to arrive by 2013. "Full" nanotech might be a couple decades off, though, in the same way that "full" AI won't be around until 2030, even though we have basic AI now.
I'm marking this "Not Spam" because, while PinkProgram is asking for a look at his playlists, he WAS asked for a link. I don't think it's spam when somebody asks you for a link and you provide it. I won't be linking anything of mine because a) there isn't much to link to, b) what little there is has nothing to do with this subject, and c) nobody asked me to.
Then channel that hope into energy and convert it into motion, Dear Friend. If there is a sliver of hope that this could come to fruition, then it's worth fighting for, if not for yourself, for those of future generations. I fight for my children's futures. Peter Diamandis, an executive chairman of Singularity U, and writer of the book "Abundance", is a self avowed capitalist, but admitted that he does see see the world becoming more socialized, and actually sounded quite excited about it.
@MrAdvancedAtheist thanks for the suggestion! what's your opinion? I feel as if Merkle's talk ran out of steam at the end. Spectacular talk and excellent explanation. However, it honestly seems like he isn't so knowledgable about the science below the atomic level. He mentions that he exclusively studies atoms and when he receives questions about smalley vs drexler it appears he doesn't have such sound/satisfying answers.
How will robots deal with their inevitable depression and extreme boredom? They'll be able to process through all the data on the internet, aggregate it, and analyze it thoroughly in a matter of days (maybe at a certain threshold, minutes). This of course begs the question, what will they do once they run out of content to explore and interact with? I believe this question has possible relation to the origin or the universe and the purpose of existence itself. Also begs the question, how intense is too intense for a conscientiousness to operate in an environment without completely losing all grasp and coherence on reality?
Another description from another video said Ralph, the speaker, has a phd in electrical engineering. I'm studying chemical engineering and am really interested in the topic. A lot of this sounds like particle physics. lol Good stuff.
"I have devoted my life towards that endeavor." That's awesome! Regarding entropy: You don't have to get around entropy to make such advanced systems as described in this talk. The law of entropy applies to "closed systems". The universe would be an example of a closed system. Since a molecular factory could receive energy from outside it's not a closed system, and thus the law of entropy does not apply to the molecular factory.
The main problem will be the Brownian motions of molecules in high temperatures, at this point we should learn from the nanotechnology inside our bodies: Mechanism of DNA Replication (Basic)
I really want to present my research project like this guy. So confident and spontaneous.
So uh... how do we see more than just the introduction? :]
I have enormous respect for Ralph Merkle, but honestly the way the "machines" of biological organisms function is not at all like gears and motors. At the level of biochemistry the molecules are more akin to strings and chains that flop around wildly. Cellular formation proceeds by the CONCENTRATION of chemicals through semi-permeable membranes, NOT by gears and motors.
1 dislike. Must be somebody with a lot of money invested in diamonds.
I don't know; I hear a lot of talk here about what might be possible in the future, but it's almost 30 years since they spelled out IBM with those 31 atoms. At typical exponential dev't rates, I'd expect to be getting into structures, built from atomic manipulation, that are visible to the naked eye. Either that, or equivalent sophistication at the nanoscale. But where are these results?
dna nanotech can make more so I think it will pick up from there.
Interesting discussion about nanotechnology and where it's going.
Could humans be brought back to life with this tech? In theory, If these nanobots construct atoms one by one, couldn’t these bots reconstruct a deceased human? And would their conscious/mind be the same?
As a PhD researcher in gerontology , What he is saying will most likely occur.........its a matter of time....are we stupid enough to deliberately miss the boat?
The conversation about diamond is way over the top. Diamond does indeed have a huge tensile strength compared to steel, but it is not very tough. You can, in principle, make a composite with diamond fiber, but that composite will not not be 100x steel, so dropping the weight of artifacts by a factor of 100 is quite unrealistic. That said, a factor of 10x would be amazing, just not enough to make low Earth orbit as routine as taking a drive.
@conradjulian Locklin is a troll. His whole argument boils down to "Its been 25 years since Drexler wrote about nanofactories and we still haven't seen them. We haven't seen them because they're impossible." He neglects the fact that molecular nanotechnology has received virtually no funding until very recently. The stuff that was funded was chemistry relabeled nanotech. All the progress thats been made in MNT is spillover from other fields. See Brian Wang's response to Locklin.
@eradimatrix Nah, just give it a few years and he'll be able to get the nanobots to do it for him. Physical perfection without any heavy lifting whatsoever! Kind of like in that Futurama episode, "Parasites Lost", where Fry becomes host to a species of worms that dramatically and instantaneously improve his intelligence, buffness and looks. Hey... I could do with something like that! Sign me up!
most people are definitely stupid enough to miss the boat; hopefully people with $ will fund the right research; after all, whoever makes this happen first will become immensely powerful and rich (im thinking a corporation or country); whether its strong AI, life extension tech, or nanoscale production
20:30 About quantum blurryness - another take on this is:
If you capture a molecule in a tight space (e.g. in a box) you do work against degeneracy pressure which is released in "omnidirectional" kinetic energy when you suddenly lift its spacial constraints completely. The thighter it was compressed in space the faster it's probability distribution will fall apart. This is heisenbergs uncertainty principle in slightly unconventional wording. (small spacial distribution -> wide impulse distribution -> fast wave packet dispersion)
Judging from this macroscopic crystals which's average outer positions can (it has been done) be measured down to the femtometer level in space should fall apart instantly because of this extreme sharpness in space.
But they don't! Why is an interesting question on itself - it has todo with not yet well understood quantum decoherence.
If you strongly bond a small molecule to the crystal (that is you use the crystal as a movement constraining box) the molecule essentially becomes part of the crystal and inherits its sharp and not apart-running position. Actually the macroscopic position of the crystals roughly pins down the positions of the atomic nuclei of the molecule.
The exact positions of the nuclei (at 0K temperature) can't be determined as exact as the position of a macroscopic crystal though. The actual size of the probability distribution cloud for a nucleus is maintained through the "chemical bond force box" the size of this cloud is below the size of its host atom but above the size of the nucleus. As a sidenote the size of the nucleus is maintained through its "nuclear force box" and the size of a whole atom (electron shell) is maintained through the "electrostatic core potential box".
To theoretically recreate the actual "force-pictures" that have been taken of molecules you have to "add" to the core crystal location that does not run apart the nucleus blurryness, the electron shell blurrieness and finally some thermal blurrieness - the same for the opposing needle tip. (actually mathematically this "adding" is folding)
@conradjulian The quant fund managers though they knew everything but they got creamed in the stock market. In some cases worse then the avg joe. I would be braging about how smart I was and using my quant experience as proof when trying to understand Nanotechnology....For one, they are very different fields and for two the quants haven't even figured out their own field of physics. Scott Locklin needs to stick to what he knows and rethink his own area of physics...which is sadly lacking! :)
I'm sure that a lot of people declared Babbage a fraud and that computing machines were nothing but "charlatanry." And yet, computers do exist.
So if I'm going to accept that nanotechnology is "charlatanry," I need a reason better than -- it's been thirty years and the technology isn't yet mature -- which is all that Locklin's argument seems to be.
I wonder what this says to all the naysayers and detractors of Cryonics? If you could rearrange matter at the molecular scale with percission and all at once ie convergent assembly then you could reverse aging, disease, and even people frozen in liquid notrogen if they were frozen soon enough after death...I imagine a day or 2 depending on temps and conditions.
Patents wouldn't be a problem if they only lasted for fourteen years, with a possibility of a seven-year extension. The same with copyrights. That's the way they were way back when. But now copyrights last for the writer's entire lifetime plus a generation, and patents last for twenty years or more.
Yes at the moment their is not a nano-tech engineering major alone because if your major is physics you will basically know all the basics of the technology.
1:07:22
Guy in the audience: "So, Bill Joy wrote that we where doomed, Smalley sayed we where not, and Smalley was wrong does that mean Joy was right?"
This is how life has evolved to do it, and I'll be quite surprised if we DON'T do some of that ourselves. There may well be certain procedures where a semi-permeable membrane and wriggling cilia work best. But some things may work better with gears and motors, and if they can work, then they'll be used if they're the best thing to use.
It may just be that gears and motors are hard to evolve.
How do we control the duplication so that it doesn't grow out of control and floods the world and smother us?
I guess this means those in cryonic suspension will actually wake up some day because of molecular nanomachines that repair thier bodies!
I'm all for the singularity, life extension, and nano-technology....
but damn, that dude needs to work out.
@PinkProgram This is "ancient?" Wow, what's happened in the last 18 months that makes this visibly old?
For an alternative view, google Scott Locklin's blog post, "Nano-nonsense: 25 years of charlatanry."
For some things, sapphire would be better than diamond. But diamond's good stuff; it'll have a lot of uses.
@GeneralDogsbody08 Water makes its self, but Nanotechnology can purify it very cheaply
Sure. There are always risks, and I have confidence in humanity's ability to handle them.
No kidding. 3d printed food is looking more and more feasible. No more world hunger!
I need help against nano tech neuroscience slavery from unmc Omaha mk bmi
There's actually a nanotech major? Or is it like a sub-category of physics/chem?
Thanks for posting this. It's a marvelous world I'm going to grow old in... unless I start to grow young!
probably some1 has already posed this concern : isn't this a rather dangerous and potentially deadly way to enhance life ? Singularity?? Re-arranging "atoms" of nearly everything? Hmm.. it scares the hell out of me! What would biological warfare become with this approach? (child's play, hey!), Nuclear weaponry => child's play too! Terrorists could put the entire planet at risk of Nano-weaponry destruction. I really don't know what to imagine about the devastating possibilities of this!!! :))
things like nuclear weapons need certain elements that are restricted, if you don't have te elements to make the atoms of those elements, you can't make those products. for biological warfare, the diseases need to be alive diseases, otherwise they won't work, they'll just be non-living molecules...also, I don't think this technology can have any influence on biology and living systems and obviously like explained previously, it would be easier to fight diseases and prevent those same biological warfares.
11 years later it’s still so good. This is what the definition of Classic is.
Physics didn't change in the intervening decade.
Smalley's position was a response to Eric K. Drexler's book "Engines of Creation" published in 1987. Smalley argued that the 'sticky fingers' problem made things like molecular motors and self-assembly impossible. He was opposed to taking designs which work for bulk materials and applying them to the nano-scale.
InfiniteUniverse88 Ray Kurzweil addressed this in the singularity is near
this reminds me of people thinking the world was flat....
He talks about it in the end of the vid. Like at 1:08:00
@GeneralDogsbody08 dihydrogen monoxide? it makes itself ^_^
I may not have a gender but my aesthetic is female...
this proves that cryonics makes sense after all.
i wonder if heat increases exponentially?
was there more to this lecture?
Evolution never begins nor does it end.
When Charles Babbage designed his analytical engine in 1835, he couldn't get the funding to build it. Thirty years later and many of the people who first read of it could say, and honestly so, that an analytical engine was no closer to being built than in the 1830s. In fact it wasn't until 1941 that a computer, electronic rather than mechanical, did what Babbage described over a hundred years earlier.
Over a hundred years. Not 30 -- 106.
durned character limit
@eradimatrix Not necessarily. It depends on what level of nanotechnology you're thinking about. I read in a book an interview with one of Merkle's students (admittedly the book was published nearly 10 years ago), who predicted the development and commercial application of carbon nanotubes - a form of "nanotechnology" - to arrive by 2013. "Full" nanotech might be a couple decades off, though, in the same way that "full" AI won't be around until 2030, even though we have basic AI now.
I'm marking this "Not Spam" because, while PinkProgram is asking for a look at his playlists, he WAS asked for a link. I don't think it's spam when somebody asks you for a link and you provide it.
I won't be linking anything of mine because
a) there isn't much to link to,
b) what little there is has nothing to do with this subject, and
c) nobody asked me to.
so how can we use nanotech to cure baldness :))?
Genetics
Then channel that hope into energy and convert it into motion, Dear Friend. If there is a sliver of hope that this could come to fruition, then it's worth fighting for, if not for yourself, for those of future generations. I fight for my children's futures.
Peter Diamandis, an executive chairman of Singularity U, and writer of the book "Abundance", is a self avowed capitalist, but admitted that he does see see the world becoming more socialized, and actually sounded quite excited about it.
@MrAdvancedAtheist thanks for the suggestion! what's your opinion? I feel as if Merkle's talk ran out of steam at the end. Spectacular talk and excellent explanation. However, it honestly seems like he isn't so knowledgable about the science below the atomic level. He mentions that he exclusively studies atoms and when he receives questions about smalley vs drexler it appears he doesn't have such sound/satisfying answers.
Thank you Ralph Merkle and thank you Singularity University. I wish I was sitting in that room, but this was the next best thing.
Is there any risk of mutations then?
How will robots deal with their inevitable depression and extreme boredom? They'll be able to process through all the data on the internet, aggregate it, and analyze it thoroughly in a matter of days (maybe at a certain threshold, minutes). This of course begs the question, what will they do once they run out of content to explore and interact with? I believe this question has possible relation to the origin or the universe and the purpose of existence itself. Also begs the question, how intense is too intense for a conscientiousness to operate in an environment without completely losing all grasp and coherence on reality?
Another description from another video said Ralph, the speaker, has a phd in electrical engineering. I'm studying chemical engineering and am really interested in the topic. A lot of this sounds like particle physics. lol Good stuff.
"I have devoted my life towards that endeavor." That's awesome!
Regarding entropy: You don't have to get around entropy to make such advanced systems as described in this talk. The law of entropy applies to "closed systems". The universe would be an example of a closed system. Since a molecular factory could receive energy from outside it's not a closed system, and thus the law of entropy does not apply to the molecular factory.
The main problem will be the Brownian motions of molecules in high temperatures, at this point we should learn from the nanotechnology inside our bodies:
Mechanism of DNA Replication (Basic)
yes do more searchs on ralph merkle
You're looking for something along the lines of materials science. There's a lot of majors that go into nanothechnology
Is it just me, or Merkle didn't answer the question @33:20 about how would a nanorobot be atomically precise?
My mistake. A closer look at your pic would have kept me from making it.
"...a look at her playlists, she WAS asked for..."
Hi, could you please explain in simple words Entropy in our daily life. Thanks
@PinkProgram Send me a link?
This is an excellent presentation. It is impressive how he invited the public to ask questions. Great video.
@VulcanFleet lots of different things.... I'm still waiting for everyone to catch up to me ^_^
Well I just learned a whole ton! Thanks for posting this! He explained and tied together a whole bunch of concepts I had questions about very neatly
I was wondering why all of this was so ancient... then I checked the date ^_^
I want my genie-in-a-bottle machine! I hope someone is taking pre-orders.
SPHERICAL MINECRAFT!
some awesome explanations here... especially like the fire + cavemen "problem".
graphene look it up
does he even lift?
World changing...
@jamesgravil few years really? I think more like 10 to 20. :D
NO!
(u raff u ruse)
some awesome explanations here... especially like the fire + cavemen analogy.
No... just, no.
would love if you could get an interview with richard A. L. Jones!
Sapphire production for lasers and high pressure vessels!
Lucky you, I wish I was smart enough for something like that.
Wow.
where can i find the slides for this.
Great speaker. True heart of a teacher.
This is pretty remarkable.
what a great way to explain nano
great vid... Thanks for the post
@jamesgravil Agreed!
Preparing humanity for the second coming of Jesus Christ Who is love!
wtf!?
Manipulating natural humans has nothing to do with love, you Jesuit.
I'M GOING TO MAJOR IN THIS!!! SUPER EXCITED :D
How did it go ?
Go major in Fashion!! SUPER EXCITED :D
i love u ralph