By now mechanosynthesis has pretty much been proven, at least in the environment of computer simulations.
Not really my field of expertise, but if I understand correctly, this refers to scanning tunneling microscope tips for atom-by-atom assembly. While certainly interesting for research purposes, this doesn’t seem to be a scalable manufacturing technology.
I’m not sure about the scalability of mechanosynthesis, either (Massive parallelism gets thrown around a lot, but there may be something to convergent assembly) , but I was just talking about the basic tip chemistry.
Zyvex has a similar process called Patterned Atomic Layer Epitaxy which seems more promising as a large-scale manufacturing technology, but I have not seen designs for nanofactories of megadalton-scale products made using PALE.
Not really my field of expertise, but if I understand correctly, this refers to scanning tunneling microscope tips for atom-by-atom assembly. While certainly interesting for research purposes, this doesn’t seem to be a scalable manufacturing technology.
I’m not sure about the scalability of mechanosynthesis, either (Massive parallelism gets thrown around a lot, but there may be something to convergent assembly) , but I was just talking about the basic tip chemistry.
Zyvex has a similar process called Patterned Atomic Layer Epitaxy which seems more promising as a large-scale manufacturing technology, but I have not seen designs for nanofactories of megadalton-scale products made using PALE.