I was thinking of “diamondoid mechanosynthesis”. I don’t see twenty more years being required to make freeliving nanomechanical replicators based on DMS.
You don’t? And what about the experts? (Or nobody is confident to stick their neck out long enough to make a prediction?)
The topic is somewhat controversial in that DMS and its products so far only exist in simulation. The only “experts” are people like Freitas, Merkle, and Drexler who have devoted years of their lives to design and modeling of DMS. So the very first issue, if you’re an outsider, is whether the DMS research community’s expertise pertains to anything real. The criticism is less prominent these days, there are a few more chemists from outside that core group taking an interest, and perhaps the zeitgeist inside the broader discipline of chemistry is friendlier to the concept. But it remains controversial.
Back in 1994, Drexler said we were ten to twenty years away from advanced nanotechnology. I’m not aware of these principal researchers making comparable predictions lately. But I suspect that, given their somewhat marginal position, they prefer to limit their claims to matters which in principle are computationally and physically verifiable. Though in this interview Freitas does agree with the interviewer that the design of an “ecophage … should be rather obvious to anyone who is “skilled in the art”.” I’m not a DMS expert, but I’ve studied the literature, and I agree that at least one type of replicator (the one I’ve thought the most about) looks dangerously easy to make (if you can call a decade or two of R&D “easy”).
Back in 1994, Drexler said we were ten to twenty years away from advanced nanotechnology.
It’s a rephrase by Steven C. Vetter of what he understood Drexler said, requoted by John K Clark partly out of context, so it was probably a prediction of some other event instead. But yeah, the idea is probably stretched too thin to seek a consensus opinion.
You don’t? And what about the experts? (Or nobody is confident to stick their neck out long enough to make a prediction?)
The topic is somewhat controversial in that DMS and its products so far only exist in simulation. The only “experts” are people like Freitas, Merkle, and Drexler who have devoted years of their lives to design and modeling of DMS. So the very first issue, if you’re an outsider, is whether the DMS research community’s expertise pertains to anything real. The criticism is less prominent these days, there are a few more chemists from outside that core group taking an interest, and perhaps the zeitgeist inside the broader discipline of chemistry is friendlier to the concept. But it remains controversial.
Back in 1994, Drexler said we were ten to twenty years away from advanced nanotechnology. I’m not aware of these principal researchers making comparable predictions lately. But I suspect that, given their somewhat marginal position, they prefer to limit their claims to matters which in principle are computationally and physically verifiable. Though in this interview Freitas does agree with the interviewer that the design of an “ecophage … should be rather obvious to anyone who is “skilled in the art”.” I’m not a DMS expert, but I’ve studied the literature, and I agree that at least one type of replicator (the one I’ve thought the most about) looks dangerously easy to make (if you can call a decade or two of R&D “easy”).
It’s a rephrase by Steven C. Vetter of what he understood Drexler said, requoted by John K Clark partly out of context, so it was probably a prediction of some other event instead. But yeah, the idea is probably stretched too thin to seek a consensus opinion.
I have substituted a link to Vetter’s original communication.