RE: jeff's cyborg cells

Billy Brown (ewbrownv@mindspring.com)
Sat, 10 Jul 1999 17:44:11 -0500

Spike Jones wrote:
> Billy Brown wrote:
>
> > 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 ...
> >
> > What kinds of low-power applications are you thinking of?
>
> Billy sorry about the slow answer. Ive been on the road a lot
> this summer and just now found this in my unanswered inbox.
>
> The Star Wars movie got me to thinking that strong nanotech
> could result in a device that is kinda analogous to a neuron, except
> much smaller. I imagined that a number of them could interconnect
> themselves with carbon nanotubes, thereby forming a webby
> cocoon around a mitochondrion, living on a small amount of
> excess ATP. If each of these nanoneurons and its interconnection
> were made of, say sixty thousand carbon atoms, and there were a
> billion of them on the surface of a mitochondrion, the mitochondrion
> would never know they were there. The combined mass of the
> billion nanoneurons would be about one nanogram. Peach
> fuzz on an elephant.

Hmm. Yes, you should be able to do usefull amounts of computation without any problems. Couple that with passive sensors, and you could have a very powerful metabolic monitoring system. Add a few digitally-controlled ribosomes to the cell and you could do a lot of interesting biological manipulations. You could also do a lot of immune system enhancements with this technology (based on improved ability to detect invaders and co-ordinate immune responses).

Billy Brown, MCSE+I
ewbrownv@mindspring.com