What can be added to blood to increase it's thermal conductivity? Or maybe a biological appendage that could increase or decrease it's surface area to aid in heat dissipation?
The Spikester wrote:
>
>> Jeff! This is a masterpiece! Thanks. {8^]
Thank you, Spike, but really, all I'm doin' is playin' in my head with these nano tinker toys. You got your tubes--for transport of fluids, and slurries, and electric currents--and your ball shaped containers--for all the things containers do: store stuff, transport stuff, serve as a site for combining and reacting stuff. I mean nothing really NEW here, just, well, you know, smaller. There'll be motors for driving mechanical motion, and pumps for pushing fluids and fluid-borne solids around, and for generating electrical effects by pumping fluids containing ions. And what all...
The next step: what do the synaptic sites look like, and by what mechanism do you get nano-neurons to generate new sites so as to achieve an equivalent dynamic to that of bio neurons? (Big fancy-ass question sends Jeff back to his tinker toy set.)
Then Lee Daniel wrote:
>Fuel cells; ethanol is cheap and convenient. "I'm not drinking, honey, I'm
refueling."
Hmmm. Let me see if I understand you. First you tank up. Then you get tanked up. Then the nano-neurons of your enhanced brain use it for fuel for enhanced thinking, sparing your liver the wear and tear associated with the normal mode of disposal, and your brain pan the crapulence of "the morning after".
Sounds very extropian to me. Make it so.
> Getting rid
>of waste heat is more of a problem.
Getting rid of waste heat is clearly a real-world engineering concern. At what nano-neuron density it will prove to be limiting is more than I can say. Depends on the operating efficiency, ie power consumption per nano-neuron, and packing density.
The limiting factor for biological neurons is--well, I don't know what it is. Metabolic rate? ie mitochondrial atp production rate? Intracellular transport rate? ie, atp or "other stuff" transport? Trans-membrane ion-pumping rates? (Nerve cells function electrically, regenerating discharged potentials by pumping ions into or out of the cell against electrical or osmotic gradients.) Food or oxidizer delivery rates (from blood flow)?
Because of the high heat capacity and therefore heat transport capability of the water-based slurry which is blood, I'd guess there to be maybe two orders of magnitude more heat-disposal capacity than currently required. Just a guess. Anybody know the blood flow rate to the brain?
Best, Jeff Davis