RE: jeff's cyborg cells

Billy Brown (ewbrownv@mindspring.com)
Wed, 2 Jun 1999 11:12:00 -0500

On Wednesday, June 02, 1999 12:40 AM, Spike Jones [SMTP:spike66@ibm.net] wrote:
> With low level nanometabolism (nanobolism?) the host
> organism takes care of the task of carrying away excess
> heat. What a wonderful temperature controlled environment
> we could supply to some meticlorians, should they choose
> to reside within us. spike

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.

If you want to implement anything that consumes significantly more energy than normal tissue, you'll have to build a cooling system to carry off the excess heat. That's going to be a difficult task, since we can't use a traditional thermal heat-exchange system. My best idea at the moment would be to look for a fancy chemcal solution, but that could take a lot of searching. We'd need a strongly endothermic reaction that takes place easily in the environment of living tissue, and is easily reversed in an environment exposed to open air.

Billy Brown
ewbrownv@mindspring.com