Pictures of nanobots

From: hal@finney.org
Date: Sat Jun 17 2000 - 14:50:34 MDT


Robert Freitas has gathered a collection of images of nanotech medical
devices at http://www.foresight.org/Nanomedicine/Gallery/index.html.
Some are recent and others go back a decade or more.

Somehow none of the pictures look right to me. It's hard to put my
finger on what is wrong, though.

Maybe it is the whole idea of trying to render images as though visible
light would work, at a realm where it really doesn't work very well.
The images of red cells in arteries don't show the fluid, which should be
full of gunk; they don't show any significant translucence in the cells;
they don't show any detail on the cell surfaces. It's like there is an
arbitrary decision that we will treat certain objects as visible and all
the rest as invisible. Since Nature doesn't make the distinction for us,
we have to do it ourselves. The result always looks wrong.

Hal



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