RE: jeff's cyborg cells

Billy Brown (ewbrownv@mindspring.com)
Thu, 3 Jun 1999 03:09:21 -0500

On Wednesday, June 02, 1999 9:27 PM, Spike Jones [SMTP:spike66@ibm.net] wrote:
> > Billy Brown wrote: Sorry, but it won't be that easy. Living tissue can
be
> > severely damaged by
> > even very modest amounts of excess heat. Implanted devices are limited
to
> > radiating <2 mW per square cm of surface area, and I expect nanotech
> > devices would face the same constraint.
>
> With this I agree. I imagined that the meticlorians would devour one
hundredth
> of one percent of the ATP, releasing almost negligible heat. Im thinking
waay
> less than 2 mW/cm^2. More like a microwatt/cm^2. The host would
> never notice. spike

I thought the idea was to provide an energy source significantly larger than the normal supply of free-floating ATP, so that you could run lots of other nano-gadgets?

All of the more advanced uses of Drextech will give you a serious heat dissipation problem. I've seen energy dissipation figures as high as several hundred kilowatts per cc for the more ambitious devices (fast assembler systems, computers, synthetic muscles, etc.). In particular, medical assembler / dissassembler systems that work significantly faster than normal metabolic functions are going to quickly run into problems.

What kinds of low-power applications are you thinking of?

Billy Brown
ewbrownv@mindspring.com