CryoNet #32965 - #32971

CryoNet - Fri 22 Oct 2010

    #32965: Re: CryoNet #32960 - #32964 [Gerald Monroe]
    #32966: Re: CryoNet #32960 - #32964 [Freeposity]
    #32967: Can Mark Plus give a coherent technical argument here? [Perry E. Metzger]
    #32968: Can Mark Plus tell us what the "Physically Dubious Assumption... [Perry E. Metzger]
    #32969: laserology [John de Rivaz]
    #32970: Re: Charles Babbage analogy [Keith Henson]
    #32971: A somewhat on topic book recommendation, "The Rational Optimi... [Rudi Hoffman]

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Message #32965
References: <[email protected]>
From: Gerald Monroe <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 06:03:07 -0500
Subject: Re: CryoNet #32960 - #32964

--00163630f18bb5d2a704931e792e

Well, to extend the analogy : this would be a world where lasers DID exist,
albeit weaker than synthetic ones.  Maybe in this world sharks really are
equipped with lasers to harm their prey.  After all, nanotechnology is real
: you and every other living thing has been built through flat out nanotech.
 Every atom of every part of every cell was precisely placed using molecular
manufacturing and convergent assembly.  All following a digital blueprint.
 Part of the problem IS religious : most people don't believe that blind
chance created these complex systems, and that we will someday be able to
duplicate and exceed their capabilities synthetically.

I've been reading nanosystems, and I do see what you mean by "physically
dubious assumptions".  Drexler fills the pages with math that is both
incredibly difficult to check, and numerous times he mentions exceptions to
the exceptions that he believes will result in a workable system.
 Nevertheless, it can be done - every living organism on the planet does it.
 Using some mechanism will be able to build a computer controlled system
that can create atomically precise structures and scan atomically precise
structures of a large size and complexity.  We already can do the scanning
extremely slowly, and nature already does the molecular assembly every
millisecond of every day.  Those of us in the "cult" would like to see that
age, even if it means undergoing a process that modern society sees as no
different than death.  I don't think anyone with an education who doesn't
have another agenda can deny the technology we will need to resurrect
cryonics patients will eventually exist : the only question is how long it
will take, and if the patients are still frozen that many decades or
centuries hence.

An assembly of a few thousand atomically precise gears and motors and rods
and pistons doesn't sound like sci fi.  Sure, it'll require tons of trial
and error to get designs that work at the nanoscale, and assembly of the
first prototype might be agonzingly slow.  But the whole point - the whole
reason that nanotechnology is attracts a cult following rather than the
fields of fusion or better chemistry or better batteries or better vaccines
or better computer chips - is that once you build the first working
assembler you can have it build more and with exponential growth nanotech
assemblers will be common and as cheap as dirt in a few months.  Nearly
every other science breakthrough typically results in a high cost product
that may not even be worth the incremental improvement over the previous
generation.

Also, nanotech promises to solve the main bottleneck that is stalling nearly
every other field of science.  The real reason we don't have flying cars is
because we DO have them - they are called helicopters and they cost millions
of dollars to produce a single quality aircraft.  We cannot replace bad
human organs with good replacements because we have no tools that work at
the level of cells, which requires atomically precise assembly.  The reason
we don't have artificial intelligence is because we cannot map the trillions
of synapses in a working human mind to see what it is doing in order to copy
it, because again there are too many synapses and they are too small.  We
don't have mass space travel for the same reason as well - the manufacturing
cost of a spacecraft is so high that it requires hundreds of human lifetimes
of labor to put a single astronaut in orbit.

Heck, the reason that people are dying in Africa is because the food and
medicine those people need isn't nearly free like it would be if you had an
effectively limitless supply of automated tools for manufacturing products.
 Ditto for why we don't have a defense system against a major nuclear
attack.

One final comment : the military and financial advantage of such a
technology is hard to overstate.  Effective molecular manufacturing is a
weapon more powerful than the hydrogen bomb.  In fact, a nation armed with
it and enough time to develop their infrastructure could probably build
enough defenses to neutralize enemy nuclear arsenals.  The United States has
such a defense - but each missile costs the government the lifetime work of
hundreds of people to manufacture.  A hermetic shield would need thousands
of these missiles, more than the economy can afford.  But if missile
components could be 'printed out' by automated equipment, with a separate
molecular manufacturing system making each individual missile thus creating
thousands of them in parallel, that capability could be reached in a matter
of months.

  A nation with self - replicating manufacturing tools could make drone
aircraft and missiles by the hundreds of thousands, maybe the millions.  So
I expect that once it is clear a self-replicating assembler can be built, we
will see global efforts comparable to the Manhattan project to make it
happen.  This could be a bad thing for cryonics, however - the technology
might be carefully controlled and restricted like nuclear secrets were,
and/or if a major war were to break out it could cause obvious consequences
as well.

Suppose someone published a description of the laser as a theoretical
> possibility in 1960, but nobody could build one despite all the
> impressive calculations and illustrations. What would we think of the
> laser idea if, 50 years later, we still didn't have lasers, but we had
> "laserololgists" who referred to the original text as something like
> scripture, wrote and talked about all the marvelous things they
> thought lasers could do if we could build them, held conferences on
> dealing with the social impact of lasers' arrival, warned the U.S. not
> to fall behind other countries' laser programs, solicited grants for
> more theoretical studies of "laserology," etc?
>
> A rational person who witnessed such a circus in 2010 would dismiss
> lasers as a fantasy and an exercise in rent-seeking, most likely.
> One, Babbage's machine would probably work because its design doesn't
> make physically dubious assumptions.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_engine
>
> Two, Babbage's ideas didn't lead to a cult movement in the 19th
> Century which wasted decades of other people's lives speculating about
> the miracles his invention would bring about. Instead the technically
> inclined people in the 19th Century directed their efforts towards
> more immediately practical things like railroads, applied chemistry
> and telegraphy. (I wonder how many "nanotechnologists" also consider
> themselves economically sophisticated, yet don't see their own
> diseconomic behavior?)
>
> Three, what about comparing nanotechnology to more apposite cases
> where the original conceptions led to new technologies quickly?
>
>

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Message #32966
References: <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 07:01:15 -0500
Subject: Re: CryoNet #32960 - #32964
From: Freeposity <[email protected]>

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 4:00 AM, CryoNet <[email protected]> wrote:
From: MARK PLUS <[email protected]>

>Suppose someone published a description of the laser as a theoretical
>possibility in 1960, but nobody could build one despite all the
>impressive calculations and illustrations. What would we think of the
>laser idea if, 50 years later, we still didn't have lasers, but we had
>"laserololgists" who referred to the original text as something like
>scripture, wrote and talked about all the marvelous things they
>thought lasers could do if we could build them, held conferences on
>dealing with the social impact of lasers' arrival, warned the U.S. not
>to fall behind other countries' laser programs, solicited grants for
>more theoretical studies of "laserology," etc?

>A rational person who witnessed such a circus in 2010 would dismiss
>lasers as a fantasy and an exercise in rent-seeking, most likely.

That really depends on whether the rational person was a professional
in a technological or scientific field, what kind of biases he held
and whether the math was correct.



--
-- 
Money isn't speech.
A Corporation isn't a person.
http://www.movetoamend.org/

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Message #32967
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 10:55:00 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email protected]>
Subject: Can Mark Plus give a coherent technical argument here?
References: <[email protected]>

> From: MARK PLUS <[email protected]>
> 
> Suppose someone published a description of the laser as a
> theoretical possibility in 1960, but nobody could build one despite
> all the impressive calculations and illustrations. What would we
> think of the laser idea if, 50 years later, we still didn't have
> lasers, but we had "laserololgists" who referred to the original
> text as something like scripture,

The Navier-Stokes equations of fluid dynamics were published
significantly longer than 50 years before the Wright Brothers.

Therefore, there are no airplanes, and those equations are clearly
wrong.

Want to know why we have no MNT? Because it is going to take thousands
of people working on the problem full time, and we have about
ten.

Imagine if there had been ten people working on nuclear technology
during WW-II instead of the thousands that were devoted to the problem
-- would we have gotten nuclear technology? We needed people refining
uranium ore, people building enrichment plants, people doing vast
numbers of calculations, even people doing things like building power
lines in to Los Alamos. Ten people couldn't have managed it.

The MNT problem is much harder, and we have only enough people to do
very basic analysis, not real design and implementation, so all you
get is basic analysis. We're at the stage of Szilard and a couple of
buddies doing back of the envelope calculations saying "this can be
done", not at the stage of people figuring out how many screws are
needed to clamp down a tube going into a centrifuge in the enrichment
facility.

I could draw analogies to lots of other problems in science and
engineering, but the point here is dead simple.

It isn't like people have been trying desperately for decades to make
these things work and their experiments are failing. No one is
performing any experiments. We don't have enough people to conduct the
experiments. We don't have the people needed to build the tools to
conduct the experiments either. We have enough people to figure out
what is possible and do very general high level studies.

To make this thing happen, we'll need to solve tens of thousands of
small engineering problems, just like the Manhattan Project had
to. Most of them will not look terribly much like work on MNT just
like figuring out the lubrication needed for the coolant pumps for the
breeder reactors at Oak Ridge did not look terribly much like nuclear
weapons design.

We'll need to make many specialized tools that don't exist to get from
here to there. We need CAD software, CAM software, various kinds of
ultra-high vacuum equipment, SPMs capable of repeatedly moving a probe
tip to the same sub-angstrom spot after traveling a couple of cm away,
conventional synthetic procedures for large numbers of precursor
molecules, metrology and sensing equipment, and the list goes on and
on and on and on.

It isn't even that hard to build many of the tools, just as it wasn't
that hard to figure out how to pump coolant into a breeder reactor,
but someone has to work on all these niggling little problems, and we
don't have those people.

Equally bad, there were a lot of good physicists that the Manhattan
Project folks could draw on to do the actual engineering of the device
and figure out all the little problems they needed other people to
work on, and we don't have enough of the equivalent people -- yet.

So, MNT can't be said to have "failed" as it has not yet been tried
for real. You can't call a field of engineering a failure until it has
actually been attempted.

There are other, quite similar cases I can apply. By your logic, the
Higgs Boson, which was postulated to exist almost 50 years ago, can't
possibly exist because until recently we didn't build a machine to
check. You would call all the writing on it "scripture" and say that
you had no obligation to explain what was wrong with the ideas because
after fifty years no one had actually found a Higgs Boson.  You would
doubtless say, as you have on MNT, that you found no need to even try
reading the papers since you could tell they were clearly wrong
without reading them -- a dubious proposition to say the least.

Now, the Higgs might or might not exist, of course, but your logic
would be worthless.

The internal combustion engine was a simple enough invention that,
given machine tools, several people build the things on their own in a
few months. Consider instead the LHC at CERN. Unlike the internal
combustion engine, building the tools to check if the Higgs is there
has taken thousands of smart people tens of years of hard work. People
have had to do things like designing control systems for
superconducting magnets, software to drive massive disk arrays for
data collection, etc. The mere lack of such tools in, say, 1980, would
not have been reason to think that the work from 1964 on the Higgs
mechanism was necessarily wrong. The LHC wasn't the sort of thing five
people could go out into the shop and build over a weekend. It isn't
like an internal combustion engine or an improved bicycle helmet.

So, lets circle back to the core here. When we can't settle an
argument like this with demonstrations -- one can't, for example,
determine if black holes are possible by handing someone a black hole
you made in the lab -- we calculate.

Drexler and others have done lots of good calculations based on
extremely straightforward physics. Again, can you tell me what's wrong
with Drexler's papers, or for that matter Merkle's, or Freitas', or
anyone else in the field? If you can present reasonable arguments, we
can take you seriously.

A stream of logical fallacies is not an argument against a scientific
paper. "This hasn't been built so it can't be" is not an
argument. "Drexler's work is treated like scripture" is not an
argument against the content even if it were true, and it isn't even
true. "I can't believe you have the gall to ask a fiftyish guy who
manages a hotel to read a book as boring and stupid as Nanosystems"
(nearly a quote from you) is not a valid argument, either.

If you can't state specific issues with the work that has been done,
why should we take your complaints seriously?

Until then, you're just behaving like a politician, not a scientist.

Anyway, I think the final and inarguable rebuttal is a mirror.  If
molecular manufacturing is impossible, how come you, an object made by
molecular manufacturing, are there? What is it that is looking at you
in a mirror if molecular manufacturing is impossible?

> A rational person who witnessed such a circus in 2010 would dismiss
> lasers as a fantasy and an exercise in rent-seeking, most likely.

The "rent seeking" concept is laughable given how little money is
devoted to the field. However, even discussing "rent seeking" in this
context is a logical fallacy. Even if the field was populated by
nothing but charlatans, that does not mean anything about whether the
ideas are correct, or incorrect. Truth or falsehood is independent of
the people doing the arguing. You are, again, resorting to the
techniques of the politician, not the ones of the scientist.

When you resort to the methods of science and not those of someone
seeking office, we can take you seriously.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		[email protected]

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Message #32968
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:06:22 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email protected]>
Subject: Can Mark Plus tell us what the "Physically Dubious Assumption...
References: <[email protected]>

> Subject: Charles Babbage analogy
> From: MARK PLUS <[email protected]>
> 
> In Cryonet #32949, Gerald Monroe writes:
> 
> http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=32951
> 
> >How many years typically passed between when writers and
> >scientists of the past accurately described a technology and when
> >it was first prototyped?  For instance, Babbage's analytical
> >engine was described in 1837 (refined until his death in 1871) and
> >the first mechanical computer that was comparable was the German
> >Z1, completed 1938. 101 years.
> 
> One, Babbage's machine would probably work because its design
> doesn't make physically dubious assumptions.

Can you specifically state the EXACT physically dubious assumptions
made by those who believe molecular manufacturing is possible?
Asserting they exist is not sufficient. Those making a scientific
claim are obligated to state that claim sufficiently clearly that
others can verify or refute the claim.

Drexler, Merkle, Freitas, Allis and others who have published in this
field have stated their claims clearly enough that others can verify
or refute them. If you believe there is a problem in any of their
papers, lets hear it stated clearly.

So what are these exact "physically dubious assumptions"? Tell us
EXACTLY. After a dozen or so exchanges in this thread, you haven't yet
told us.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		[email protected]

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Message #32969
From: "John de Rivaz" <[email protected]>
Subject: laserology
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 16:27:49 +0100

I was amused by the concept of "laserology" as proposed for an alternate universe by Mark Plus.

Our universe is the exact opposite of this, quite weirdly so, in fact.

I attended a meeting in a telecommunication laboratory in the early 1960s where the subject of (ruby) lasers and their uses was discussed. 

I suggested printing (albeit by scorching the surface of the paper) and recording on a plastic disc or plastic tape (by punching tiny holes in it to represent digits rather than by the much more sophisticated method it is really done). These suggestions were rejected, not because of the practicality of them, but on the basis that there would be no economic market for them. Making holographic 3D videos for educational purposes was about the only thing I can recollect my elders and betters coming up with. (But their ability to record them would have been even more limited than mine to produce the laser printer and DVD at the time.) It was generally decided that lasers weren't that important to telecommunications. 

A couple of years later the optical fibre and semiconductor laser were invented, and this did provide a use and led to the development of optical telecommunications spread over the next 30 or 40 years, the spin off from which enabled the Japanese to develop and manufacture the mass entertainment technologies we all know about.

Nanotechnology is different. There is no shortage of either applications or companies claiming to be developing them. If you type "feynman" into http://www.youtube.com you can see the start.

As an irrelevant aside, Feynman's paper "Room at the Bottom" was known to the leader of the laser meeting.
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html
(Although he had to get it from the firm's library rather than download it over the Internet :-)

Assembler nanotechnology will happen, for that there can be no doubt. 

However there is doubt as to whether assembler nanotechnology will have the same impact as lasers within the lifetime of Mark Plus or many readers of this list. Mark Plus could quote quantum mechanics: it hasn't happened unless he observes it. If the many world interpretation applies, then he can only observe a world in which both it happens, and he is cryopreserved.

-- 
Sincerely, John de Rivaz:  http://John.deRivaz.com for websites including
Cryonics Europe, Longevity Report, The Venturists, Porthtowan, Alec Harley
Reeves - inventor, Arthur Bowker - potter, de Rivaz genealogy,  Nomad .. and
more

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Message #32970
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 09:45:51 -0700
Subject: Re: Charles Babbage analogy
From: Keith Henson <[email protected]>

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 2:00 AM, MARK PLUS <[email protected]> wrote:

snip

> One, Babbage's machine would probably work because its design doesn't
> make physically dubious assumptions.

This is equal to a direct statement that Drexler makes "physically
dubious assumptions."

If you have a reason for making this statement, what is it?

I would be *most* interested in hearing your reason(s).

Keith

PS.  I think you are still signed up as are Eric Drexler, Perry
Metzger, Dave Pizer and a host of others including me.

If you don't think something equivalent to nanotechnogy will get you
back from suspension, how do you think it can be done?

Keith

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Message #32971
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 20:37:29 -0400
Subject: A somewhat on topic book recommendation, "The Rational Optimi...
From: Rudi Hoffman <[email protected]>

--0015175931d0ec656c049329d8fc

Dear Cryonetters:

I have been following the thread regarding progress/no progress idea with
interest.

To be fair, it is more of a "rapid progress, less rapid progress"
distinction and discussion.

Mark Plus is doing a fine job as a skeptic and curmudgeon...altho, Mark, I
am not sure you are old enough to be a real curmudgeon.   But parts of your
skepticism about "where's my flying car, dude?" may be understandable.

Here is my contribution to this discussion.

I had heard from several respected quarters good things about Matt Ridey's
"The Rational Optimist:  How Prosperity Evolves, " was a great read.

So, along with the 24 other mostly fabulous books in my iphone 4, I went to
Audible.com and invested a credit...15 bucks a month...great value....into
downloading "The Rational Optimist."

Wow...what a book!

As I mentioned on my review on Audible.com, this is the book I would like to
have written.

Ridley explains that by most ANY metric one uses, life is better for most
people on the planet than it has ever been.

By a significant degree.

In empirical, quantifiable, virtually unarguable terms.

I won't be doing a full review here, other than to say, THIS is worthwhile
listening/ reading.

Ridley has a pretty good TED talk you can google for...and it captures some
of the flavor of the book...but not all of it.

I especially liked the rather counterintuitive sections on "Green" energy
and lifestyle.  And why "organic" farming, and "local sourcing", two
buzzwords of the green movement, are astoundingly BAD for the environment
and create a larger ecological footprint.

The basic premise of the book, which most thinking people will agree with,
is that prosperity evolves DRAMATICALLY with the advent of specialization
and trade.

While this may seem obvious, the implications of the thought, which Ridley
cannily explores, include the conclusion that independence is
poverty...interdependence and specialization are what generates the win/win
transactions that make our lives orders of magnitude better than our
ancestors.

Nobody on the planet knows how to make a keyboard I am typing these words
on.  That is, no one could singlehandedly drill the oil that makes the
plastic, design the wireless keyboard I am writing this / these words on,
engineer and manufacture the piece of technology that I can buy for about
what amounts to about 8 minutes of my work.

Folks.  Including Mark Plus.

Can we not take a moment to acknowledge that our lifestyles...for most of
us, certainly not all...are something like what has been DREAMED about by
our ancestors?

As I write these words, I am being served by literally thousands of human
beings.  They have diligently worked to provide a stable office chair and
desk for me, they work to enable me to communicate via the internet to folks
spread around the globe effortlessly.  Electricity, transmitted via power
lines from all over the continent, is being magically encoded into symbols
on a screen made in Taiwan by specialists.

So, I won't try to restate or sell you on Ridley's thesis.

I won't even tell you that you aren't allowed an informed opinion on the
matter if you don't read the book...although this may be true!

Since I have about as good an idea of the demographics and orientation of
the folks who are interested in cryonics as anyone on the planet, based on
the fact that I LOVE to talks with you people, I just know most of you would
and will really dig this book.

Wife Dawn and I have about 88 people scheduled to come to our Halloween
party tomorrow...should be quite an event.  We are still getting things set
up for it...have about 48 Halloween icon "airblown" figures in our front
yard, the entire house decorated inside and out for the season...and we
aren't done yet.

So, I will close for now.  Check out Matt Ridley...you'll feel better about
your life.

Warm regards to all remarkably foresightful and deep thinking readers of
Cryonet...

For Centuries,

Rudi


-- 
Rudi Richard Hoffman CFP CLU ChFC

World's Leading Cryonics Insuror rudihoffman.com
Former Board Member Financial Planning Association fpafla.com
Board Member Salvation Army salvationarmy.org
Member Alcor Life Extension Foundation alcor.org,
Member Cryonics Institute cryonics.org
Certified Financial Planner(TM) CFP Board of Standards
Member World Transhumanist Association http://transhumanism.org/
Securities offered through Broker Dealer Financial Services Corp. Member
FINRA and SIPC.

--0015175931d0ec656c049329d8fc

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