From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Feb 24 2003 - 05:42:36 MST
On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 05:10:58AM -0500, Nathanael Allison wrote:
>
> How will Nano asseblers really work outside labs? It would be very
> difficult to build a nano assebler that would be able to deal with all the
> different evolutionary micro organism.
Yes. Most likely the "right" way of doing it would be to surround it
with a protective shell, or as you suggest, to house it within a
biological shell. One design I came up with when I was working on active
shield designs was to borrow the cell membrane of an ordinary cell as a
covering, placing the right glycoproteins on it to make it blend in with
the environment (be it the big outdoors or the human body).
The fact that biological organisms do survive on their own is a sign
that it is possible to make assemblers/mnt robots that can do it; it
just requires much more work than doing an "indoors" version. And for
most applications we only need the indoor versions, or variants that
extend their own environment (like Drexler's suggestion of a
termite-like aluminium covering) when they work in another environment.
> When they do get these nano asseblers up and running in labs it will be
> interesting to see their evolution occuring even at that level. Maybe after
> the first one replicates 10 to the 100th power they will evolve enough. But
> will they still be funtional? If we select the functional ones to survive
> will they evolve enough?
Do you want them to evolve at all? For most applications you want the
exact opposite (which is quite doable using multiple checksums), and the
Foresight Guidelines make a good point about not adding evolutionary
capabilities unless you really think about safety. Evolving
nanoreplicators in a closed environment where there is a fitness
advantage of being able to survive outdoors might be a great way of
coming up with good designs, but the experiment better be done in a safe
way.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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