The Future of Warfare

An insightful and frightening article from the Ottawa Citizen tells us:

Since Mideast fighting erupted a week ago, Hezbollah missiles have smashed into an Israeli warship in the Mediterranean and rained down on Haifa, Israel's third-largest city, causing death and seemingly well-targeted destruction.

In a fight with the far mightier Israeli military, the Lebanese guerrilla group has surprised many with its resilience -- and the range of its rockets.

Military might is no longer the exclusive province of nations. Extra-national groups now can mount significant fights against conventional armies.

Experts say Hezbollah is a formidable fighting force, growing ever more sophisticated and in recent years augmenting its missile arsenal with innovative technology including submersibles and unmanned drone aircraft.

The boost to Hezbollah's military capabilities raises questions about whether other militant organizations -- from Chechnya to Iraq -- are also getting their hands on increasingly cutting-edge weaponry, as the barriers to the spread of technology come down.

This unsettling development is sometimes called the "democratization of violence." Rapidly improving communications technologies have the unfortunate effect of allowing far more destructive power to fall into the hands of smaller groups than ever before.

Access to military secrets through the Internet and rapid advances in nanotechnology and computer-guided missiles may be leading to a certain levelling of the military playing field -- creating unprecedented opportunity for groups like Hezbollah and Hamas to inflict damage on wealthier and better-equipped adversaries.

Helped by the ease of e-mail, it also has passed logistical and strategic information to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, sparking fears in Israel that Hamas could move beyond the inaccurate, homemade Qassam rockets it regularly lobs into Israel.

Hezbollah also reportedly has been experimenting with pilotless drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, to survey northern Israel.

And amid fears that Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb, many experts are also concerned that terrorist organizations may acquire the ability to build a rudimentary "dirty bomb" -- with nuclear, chemical, or biological capabilities -- that could extract a massive death toll.

One of CRN's greatest concerns is that molecular manufacturing, in the form of personal nanofactories, could vastly expand this growing potential for asymmetric destructive capability. It seems clear to us that existing modes of settling disputes can only lead to huge losses of human life and grave suffering for countless numbers.

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Comments

[Brian Wang]

4. additional comment.
So what are the peaceful objectives that Iran is trying to achieve? It would be better for everyone if objectives can be achieved through peaceful means. As you pointed out the enrichment program can be viewed as a threat to the west because it can enable thousands of dirty bombs.
Also, who would the targets of the dirty bombs be? Military targets or civilians ? I do not get indignant or upset about the morality of warfare. I think morality and justifications are in regards to warfare are mostly public relations / propoganda.
I would expect combatants to try to use tactics that would put any war into a mode that is to the advantage of their side.

2. additional comment.
You are stating that 1 in 7 iranians (10 million out of 70 million) would be militarily threatening and possibly effective asymetric fighters. If there was an opponent that wanted to be effective against those 10 million, it would appear that fighting those 10 million would result in a lot of casualities for iran.

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

People, if it could be enforced, I would make a rule: People can only post after realizing these things:

1) We're not going to settle anything here.
2) We're not going to agree on all the facts.
3) We are way more partisan than we realize.

Meanwhile, I have a suggestion. Instead of arguing by assertion, ask questions. That can lead to a much more open and insightful discussion.

For example, Brian's question: Why would Iran want an enrichment program if not for a fission bomb?
Possible answers: 1) National pride. 2) To annoy the US. 3) To make it easier to get a bomb later. 4) To sell enriched uranium to others (licit and/or illicit).

New question, inspired by Brian's: If Iran actually got a bomb, what would they do with it? Possible answers: 1) Wipe out Israel. 2) Give it to a terrorist group. (But I think bombs are traceable by isotope analysis, so this wouldn't be very deniable.) 3) Deter aggression.

Questions I'm curious about:
1) Did Iran encourage Hizbollah to attack Israel and kidnap the soldiers?
2) If so, did Iran want Lebanon to be attacked for some reason?

But here's the big question:
What does this have to do with molecular manufacturing? What big-picture lessons about geopolitics can we derive from this by discussing it here?

If the answer is "nothing" and "none" then we should end this discussion.

Chris

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

Brian, "If a group, like Hezbollah did not want their civilians to become casualties they have control of that when they are initiating the war."

I don't think that sentence implies that the civilians are proto-terrorists. I do think it implies that the civilians are somehow controlled by, protected by, or affiliated with Hezbollah.

Question: Do you think Hezbollah has any interest in keeping Lebanese civilians safe? Or will Hezbollah's interests better be served by inciting a foreign power to attack the civilians, thus radicalizing at least some of them?

Question: How does the percentage of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon compare with the percentage of Mafia in Chicago, or drug dealers in any large inner city?

Question: Even if as many as 10% of Lebanese had been willing to risk their lives to denounce Hezbollah's people and uncover their operations... would that actually have accomplished much in the way of driving Hezbollah out of Lebanon?

MM tie-in: If it turns out that nanofactories are a major security risk, will entire populations have to suffer in order to keep a few bad people from using MM?

Chris

[Brian Wang]

Hezbollah and the people of Lebanon are living in the same place. What happens to each of them is closely correlated. Just as the people in the US who live near military bases have lives that are closely correlated to what happens to those bases and to the military people within.

risking lives question: That was part of what was being attempted in the civil war that they had. They had the option to disassociate themselves. they could have split the country. The Lebanese had a bad deal, they were used by outside forces to fight a proxy war. It would seem to be in their interest to find a way not be used in that way.

the last MM tie in question: It seems very possible to me that bad people could place populations at risk to an opponent that is views the risk that they pose as high.

[Brian Wang]

some online articles related to the questions posed by Chris.

Loose talk from Iran

Time magazine article. Relatively mainstream US points of view

Other analysis of Iran/Hizbollah connection and possible Iranian intent

If the US feels threatened then what will they do (even if the threat is not as great as they think)? There may be those on either side who want the broader population to feel threatened.

If either side miscalculates what happens?

How can things be structured to reduce the risks? How can technology be used to reduce the risks?

[Asib]

Your problem is that your only source of information is US/CAN/AUS mainstream media. When a paper starts by calling Iran President as Mullah Khatami or Israel as Zionist regime, I would waste my time to even finish my sentence.

[Phillip Huggan]

The lesson to be learned here is that military actors who do not respect civilian populations ouside of their own borders, are not fit to administer military diamondoid MNT weaponry. If someone reading this invents a diamondoid nanofac or has influence over a nanofac invention, don't give it to Israel, Hezbollah, Iran, or an American Republican theocracy. All have been traumatized by conflict and can't function humanely.

I don't define terrorism as a synonym of an IED or asymmetrical warfare. Such a definition basically says it is okay for a Hezbollah fighter to use RPGs, but to put down the suicide vest. Such a defintion says it is okay for Israel to nuke Beirut. Terorism is the act of killing innocent civilians. In this present conflict the state of Isreal is a far greater terrorist organization than is Hezbollah.

[Janessa Ravenwood]

Well, fortunately I sincerely doubt the US will be able to be prevented from getting its hands on MNT just about as soon as it becomes available (if through espionage if no other means), and of course I'm in favor of sharing it with our staunch allies the UK and Israel. As for the current tiff in Lebanon, I've said for years that Israel's enemies should be glad I'm not in charge of the IDF - I'd give them something to *really* whine about. I fully support Israel inflicting maximum carnage on its enemies. Go IDF!

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

Janessa, if you weren't a longtime contributor, I'd delete your comment for a troll. Show some respect for other points of view, and for the death of totally innocent civilians. The next one like that, I will delete.

Everyone else, please don't feed the troll.

Phillip, your point about respecting civilians outside one's borders is a very fruitful one. First observation: Not all governments respect civilians even inside their borders. Sadly, examples include the pre-Civil War U.S., and a number of U.S. states even well into the 20th century. Obviously Hezbollah doesn't respect the civilians it operates next to, and we could add a large number of modern nations and paramilitaries to the list.

So respecting other people's civilians is a very high standard, by today's standards. The US hasn't had a great track record there: Latin America during the 80's, for example. My impression is that the US is better than average. We at least expect it of ourselves.

I'm trying to formulate a question about trans-national anti-terrorist policing. The question is whether trans-national policing is sustainable, or will it inevitably lead to checkpoint syndrome, insurrection, etc.?

Obviously, a nation that doesn't respect others' civilians can just do a military action of whatever force they can get away with. But if they want to avoid warlike activity (for whatever reason--it doesn't have to be altruistic), is there any way they can put boots on the ground without eventually getting sucked into a spiral?

Where I'm getting stuck is: Which states need external policing? It seems easy at first to say that Iraq needs it, because they can't police themselves, and Lebanon needs it because Hezbollah is there. But Spain has had ETA for decades; the Irish conflict lasted for decades; even Japan has its Aum Shinrikyo, and the US had the Rajneeshees (who used salmonella). For that matter, I just saw a news story (on Fox) that Al Qaeda has been engaged in multi-million dollar illegal moneymaking activities in the US. Does the US need external police?

Even if a nation tries to advise and reinforce other nations, rather than deploy police, they're likely to get into reputational and ethical problems. Again, US in 80's Latin America, with continuing controversy around the School of the Americas. Also, it's a great way to start a proxy war.

MM tie-in: If it's so hard to shut down terrorist orgs today, if even the US can't keep them from operating internally and gaining massive financial support, how hard will it be to keep MM under wraps? And what kind of international cooperation and coordination will be necessary? Apparently, a purely US empire won't work--we can't even police Iraq--but will the US be willing to play well with others?

Chris

[Janessa Ravenwood]

Chris: a point, I suppose. Phillip does have a knack for getting under my skin. However, Israel doesn't have a lot of friends around the world as anti-semitism is rampant. When someone calls Israel a greater terrorist organization than Hezbollah, I am - shall we say - extremely disinclined to let that pass unchallenged especially when no one else here apparently felt like disagreeing with it.

[craig]

Of course Israel practices terrorism. They even admit it themselves.

On a basic level, terrorism is the act of intentionally targeting the civilian population of a country in order to achieve political or military objectives. In order to prove that Israel practices terrorism, one needs to prove they intentionally target civilians as a military objective.

Israeli Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur admitted in 1978 that Israel targetted civilian populations: "For 30 years, from the War of Independence until today, we have been fighting against a population that lives in villages and cities". Commenting on his admission, Israeli military analyst Zeev Schiff remarked: “In South Lebanon we struck the civilian population consciously, because they deserved it…[T]he importance of Gur’s remarks is the admission that the Israeli army has always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously…the army, he said, has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets…[but] purposely attacked civilian targets even when Israeli settlements had not been struck.”

The reasons for this strategy were clearly expressed by Israeli diplomat Abba Eban in 1981 when he defended Israeli bombing of civilians in Beirut, saying that “there was a rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that afflicted populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities.”

In the present conflict, we see reams and reams of print commenting on the aims of the Israeli attack. For example, Olmert was quite clear that “The Lebanese government is responsible. Lebanon will pay the price.” Lebanon will pay the price? Not Hezbollah, but Lebanon. In addition, Philip H. Gordon at the Washington Post says that “Jerusalem and Washington” hope “that the Israeli bombing campaign will put Hezbollah out of business or somehow lead the Lebanese people and army to turn against it”. The head of the Chaim Herzog Institute for Media, Politics and Society at Tel Aviv University, Professor Yoram Peri also explains: “Israel wants to make Hezbollah a liability to the Lebanese people and the Lebanese government. Israel wants to tell them that the price for Hezbollah’s attacks is too heavy and they need to put pressure on Hezbollah to disarm or to change its policies vis-à-vis Israel.”

In all cases, the military objective is to affect the civilian population, a core requirement of terrorism. This is also why the majority of targets in Lebanon have been pieces of civilian infrastructure: "According to the [Lebanese] government, 62 bridges--two-thirds of the country's total--have been destroyed, along with 85 percent of the main roads as well as 72 overpasses; 160 factories, farms and commercial ventures; 23 gas stations; 27 'vital points,' including ports, airports and power stations; and 6,200 apartments. The count probably is an underestimate, because officials say many areas are beyond reach of the government's limited resources." (Chicago Tribune)

The two most startling things I've read so far about the current conflict are:

1. The Yesha Rabbinical Council defended the IDF attack in Kfar Qanna that "according to Jewish law, during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as 'innocents' of the enemy. All of the discussions on Christian morality are weakening the spirit of the army and the nation and are costing us in the blood of our soldiers and civilians."

2. Professor Asa Kasher - author of the IDF code of ethics - said the IDF may be "morally justified" to destroy regions where terrorists are even if they kill civilians. "I don't know what the truth is about the circumstances," Kasher stressed. "But assuming that we warned the civilians and gave them enough time to leave, and that the civilians who remained chose, themselves, not to leave, then there is no reason to jeopardize the lives of the troops." (Of course, with most of the roads and bridges gone, it's nearly impossible for people to leave, never mind that Israel have also been targeting fleeing cars).

Why is this startling? Because bin Laden himself has repeatedly justified his actions in very similar language. He has, for example, said that he is justified in killing citizens of democratic countries because they support their government's actions, and they are are therefore complicit in what he sees as a war against Islam. He has also repeatedly warned the citizens of Western democracies about the consequences of their actions.

I wonder if these same supporters of Israel nodded sagely in agreement to this, or would murmer their support if Hamas and Hezbollah said they were "morally justified" in bombing Haifa because they had "warned the civilians and gave them enough time to leave, and that the civilians who remained chose, themselves, not to leave", while also claiming that there were military targets like bridges, apartments, highways, power stations and the like in Haifa, and that they regret the civilian loss of life, but it's Israel's responsibility for the deaths of its citizens. What would the reaction be if they also claimed that they held Israel responsible, that Israel must pay the price?

There are no sides in this conflict that practice some sort of moral code or purity of arms - both are guilty of massive war crimes and terrorism. To claim that either side has not done so, or that terrorism is not wining, is sheer folly in the face of the facts.

[Phillip Huggan]

Janessa I qualified my statement with: In the present conflict (3 1/2 weeks old) the government of Israel is a greater terrorist organization than is Hezbollah. This conflict is not about annexing a one-sided 7 km wide buffer-zone to mitigate the threat of WWII era 150 km range *homemade* (easily replenishible) missiles. It is not about the kidnapping of two soldiers.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was about modernizing her oil infrastructures and securing favourable business contracts and bids, but I honestly don't yet know what Israel's objectives are with this incursion. This option has been left open since last year when the bulk of the Syrian army was forced out of Lebanon and Israel's new leader is garnering 60-70% approval ratings for destroying the economy of Lebanon and damaging his own.

Chris, as craig said terrorist orgs have diverse goals, beliefs and modus operandi. My first suggestion is that western nations stop training mercanaries. The history of Hezbollah is cloudy but I get the impression Israel initially provided funding and training for some of their activities in the 1980s hoping Hezbollah would actually function as a bulwark against Iran. Al Qaeda is just a loose collection of leftover fighters from the Soviet-Afghani conflict. Before the question of Transnational policing can be answered, the question of whom is to be targetted for policing must be addressed. It is not fair to lump Hamas, an organization which uses brutal tactics but seeks limited ends (Gaza Strip), together with wacko cults that seek to cease humanity. You can't just target all Arabs who hate Western values.

I say only use diamondoid MNT to distribute (somehow) sensors to make transparent other diamond MNT scale-ups (and long after maybe deal with biolabs and after that maybe radical space weapons or AGI); leave MNT out of the War on Terror race to the bottom. There are one or two dozen nations with strong militaries who will not sit idly by while diamondoid machines populate their territories. A sensor treaty of sorts will be necessary.

[Phillip Huggan]

Implicit in my above post is the idea I don't think terrorism matters to MNT. Modern militaries are the only actors that can oppose MNTed sensors and the associate national non-military actors also represent the only solutions to make MNT workable, by virtue of their ability to assemble large diamondoid product engineering teams and form political bodies.

[Tom Craver]

Phillip:
"I don't think terrorism matters to MNT. Modern militaries are the only actors that can oppose MNTed sensors and the associate national non-military actors also represent the only solutions to make MNT workable"

Even if governments can get a universal sensor network in place, what will it watch for? Without intelligently examining a device in extremely fine and comprehensive detail, how do you decide whether it is a computer or food factory, or a weapon in disguise? Maybe with GAI you could let machines watch every human - but that is just asking for a "Terminator" scenario.

The best scenario would be to have terrorism mostly under control before MNT. Clearly the current approach simply doesn't work. A basic problem of a "war on terrorism" is that conventional military tactics can't work - they generate about as many new terrorists (or more) as they kill, by alienating previously neutral or friendly civilians.

A modest start at winning the war would mean changing our tactics in Iraq. Immediately pull all troops out of all cities and towns. Stay in Iraq, ready to act, militarily, only if a regional government is about to be taken over by force, or the federal government is about to fall to civil war or invasion.

This stops most civilian casualties at the hands of US troops, and eliminates most sympathy for terrorist attacks against the Iraqi governments. Insurgents and terrorists can still leave the cities to attack the US - they will be dealt with.

[Phillip Huggan]

My 150km homemade Lebanese rocket comment was erroneous. The 70-100km range Fajir-5 knockoff only has a homemade chassis. The max range of homemade (parts made in metal shops) rockets in Lebanon is maybe a 30-50 km Fajir-3 imitation. The model rocket 7km range designs are trivial to construct.

The 9-11 attackers were funded by Osama, housed within Taliban conquered Afghanistan.. Lebanon and Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11 (no terrorists in Iraq pre-2003). The *War on Terror* is merely Conservative governments consolidating geo-political power. Israel has justified crushing Lebanon via the excuse of a very minor border skirmish with Hezbollah, the type of skirmish that has happened at least weekly since Israel was established as a State. Forgetting whether a given specific invasion is justified, you win the fight even with conventional military tactics if you win the local population (locals are either spies for you or for your adversary). Something like 10% of Iraq Police Forces recruits are hostile, so that exit strategy is flawed. Maybe the country can be split up into Kurd, Shiite and Sunni regions, but you'd need huge buffer zones and Turkey wouldn't be happy with an autonomous Kurdish state. And the USA's Shiite "allies" have ties with Iran...

I don't know the best sensor technology to lay down. Definity not a GAI-controlled infrastructure. I'm thinking a network of dumb dust-mote machines that relay a communication to the world's news agencies or to a WHO-ish organization, when the motes find whatever it is they're looking for. The network would have to be all-inclusive. For instance, if a government laying down the network claimed immunity from the network, it is a recipe for tyranny. The world's entire liquid helium reserves (28 bcm) could be monitored, but that won't work if only liquid nitrogen temps are needed for diamond MNT. UHV pumps emit a sound that could be traced via a network a microphones, but the pumps could probably be damped.

The best bet may be surface temperature sensors and air-pressure sensors. A low-temp SPM gets very cold; needs an insulating "thermos" to disguise this. I am thinking it would require a computer monitor sized object to enclose such a device. So there is an initial deployment of "thermometer motes" (designed to stick to surfaces) and the co-ordinates of suspect objects are noted. Then a less massive deployment of air-pressure motes commences, designed to penetrate all enclosed (potentially UHV) volumes. Anywhere a suspect object was previously noted, that object gets an air-pressure mote inside it. Any super low temps or UHV conditions observed by the motes are relayed to an IAEA-type watchdog agency for closer scrutiny. This way the Participatory Panoptician is avoided (preserves privacy) and an Orwellian dystopia is not a concern. Okay so Big Brother knows all the UHV and ultra low tempature conditions on earth, but who cares. Like I said, this only works if all nations with modern (2030-era) aerospace armaments are onboard: no exceptions.

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

Phillip, it's not at all certain that low-temp SPMs will be needed for MM bootstrapping. There may be an approach (or more than one) through biopolymers. In such a case, you'd have to monitor... well, almost everything.

Also note that a nanoscale sensor can't tell the difference between a sealed volume and an ordinary sheet of glass. (Not my insight; someone pointed out on sci.nanotech a long time ago.)

If you want to shut down all possibility of MM, you basically have to monitor vast ranges of science and engineering, and watch a lot of ordinary activity to make sure that it's not a covert development program. How do you know whether someone is cooking a meal or genetically engineering a bacterium? It might be possible to tell the difference, usually, with pattern-matching software. Under this scheme, only the most unusual fraction of activity would be flagged for human attention.

Chris

[Phillip Huggan]

I haven't yet purchased Nanosystems so I can't comment on any specific polymer pathway arguments; the idea seems rather silly to me. I can see how self-assembly might be useful for prepping a feedstock reservoir. But to actually place a carbon dimer on a diamond lattice with sub-angstrom precision and enough force (3-8eV?) using self-assembly? Puh-lease. We are making precision diamond parts here, not soap. I agree if a bio/polymer pathway works, there are too many targets to monitor (the Orwellian Big Brother danger becomes too pronounced).

Glass isn't a problem. In the extreme there are macroscopic sensor systems that can see through many wall substrates. Sensors with accelerometers and/or RFID tags can draft a 3D "map" of the biosphere (and instantaneously destroy the map as long as no super low-temps/UHV conditions are discovered). If there is glass on all sides of an object, A "dead spot" will exist within the map. Toss an air-pressure sensor within this volume. These sensors should have no memory or we get 1984. The beauty of a sensor network is in the utility of the network as a whole, not in the achivement of any specific sensor-mote. You might be able to make a bio-sensor network work for airports/airplanes pre-MNT (I hope someone wealthy like Bill Joy works towards this), but to get a global network of distributed motes requires an exponential manufacturing technology such as MNT.

I think working towards the process of enforcing a sensor network treaty is the diamondoid MNT administrative solution CRNano was founded to seek. It is superior to the arms-race spiral diffusing the technology to multiple parties presents, provided the sensor network can be effected across all jurisdictions (including all territories of the initial MNT inventors) within the Earth's biosphere, space stations, underwater habitats and deep underground bunkers without triggering a war with a *major* military actor.

[Tom Craver]

Phillip - How do you "toss" a pressure sensor into a sealed container?

If you are assuming the motes drill into things - penetrating into rocks, vacuum-sealed containers, human beings, etc, you run into an issue of stored power. Power storage drops with volume (cube of diameter scaling) while drilling a hole drops only as square of diameter.

Biological parasites can eat their hosts as they drill through them - I don't think we want that solution for motes, and it wouldn't work for stuff like glass anyhow. Maybe you could use relatively long thread motes - making power storage scale proportional to the hole you need to drill.

How fine-grained is this 3D map going to be, to identify significant voids? Once MNT is available to build things, a fully-equipped nanolab would fit in a cubic millimeter - probably even a cubic micron, if it relied on an external computer, power and feedstock supply. It might be only marginally larger than your motes, given how complex the motes will need to be.

Then there's the temporal dimension - how often will you sample a volume? What if an illegal nanofactory is in continuous motion - say swimming in an innocent aquarium, and avoiding contact/detection by the motes?

Or what if the nanofactory is disguised as a mote? Or if the bad guys develop their own motes that ignore their nanofactories, but report that they have that volume of space fully examined?

I guess I'm basically saying I don't think this is at all an easy solution to make work, and once it works, it'll be fairly easy to defeat it. It might be continuously upgraded to patch security holes - but that'll be much harder than anti-virus software, for example - because the anti-nano motes will first have to figure out that they're being fooled, before they can be modified to see past the deception.

It'd probably be easier to implement universal surveillance of humans - and if that's a lot easier, governments may well take that direction.

[Phillip Huggan]

I don't know the best way to toss a sensor inside a sealed container. For pressurized gas cylinders and nuclear submarines, you couldn't simply drill. I suppose all newly created sealed containers can be contructed with sensors inside of them already. Coolants eventually run out and need to vent periodically, so merely monitoring the outer atmospheric environment of the container should suffice. Drlling isn't necessary for rocks. A technology called ground penetrating radar will work.

This automated 3D map of all UHV and low temperature environments (doesn't record anything else) will need to be as fine-grained as the smallest self-contained pre-MNT mechanosynthetic lab is. Right now cutting edge low temp UHV SPMs are refridgerator sized objects. I guestimated the minimum resolution will be a computer monitor sized volume, but I don't know for sure. This solution would only buy a few decades to a century of time. As you say Tom, a mature nanolab could be microscopic. I don't think present administrative bodies can manage that sort of utility fog responsibly.

The sensor grid of motes are designed always be on. The co-ordinates to all UHV volumes, all low temp objects, and all "unknown volumes" are made known to some administrative body. NO OTHER SENSOR INFO IS FORWARDED. Kind of a better version of the way weapons grade plutonium is handled now. A potential lab-in-fishy can be tracked using sonar. Some sort of interceptor torpedo can dangle krill or algae laced with a few sensors, to be consumed by the fishy. UHV cryogenic SPM systems are bulky/heavy, so in practise a whale or a coral reef may be a concern. If the motes are continually replenished there shouldn't be any hijacing for a significant length of time. Encryption and reliable communication technologies will be key here. A party with MNTed computation resources will have a comparative advantage here (I hope it is enough).

"It'd probably be easier to implement universal surveillance of humans - and if that's a lot easier, governments may well take that direction."

The whole idea is to avoid this recipe for tyranny; it is only marginally better than is a MNT WWIII. Quite frankly my solution appears to be the best way to ensure progress and human survival are maintained post-MNT. Where others have gone wrong in assessing the feasibility of a sensor grid, is in assuming the sensors can't artifically be limited in their functions. But sensors can be made to look for signatures of MNT and only signatures of MNT.

[Phillip Huggan]

For the record, the main reason participatory panoptican and universal surveillence fail, is that the surveillence will not be universal. If it is it gives every person on earth the blueprints to all weapons and classified intelligence. Weapons researchers and intellegence agencies will exempt themselves from the surveillence, and they then become most likely new Stalins of the Brave New World.

Universal surveillence of low temps UHV environments may infringe on some classified DoD quantum computer research, but if the risk of MNT proliferation is identified and analyzed even the darkest government agencies may submit.

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

If I understand correctly, the polymer pathway is not intended to stay at self-assembly forever. Build more highly cross-linked structures, at some point dry it out or switch to liquid xenon, eventually build polymer-backbone structures that function as programmable SPMs, then build diamondoid with those.

Chris

[Phillip Huggan]

I don't know the specific polymer MNT pathway proposed in Nanosystems...
The idea of polymer SPMs seems rather silly to me for the simple reason that any non-diamond SPM is too sterically imprecise. You can make SPMs from whatever Periodic Table of Elements substrate you desire, but the SPM will only be appropriate for diamond MNT under a very specific set of conditions; conditions that exclude makeshift polymer assemblies... though maybe great photomasks or proton emission membranes could be templated with this process.

[Phillip Huggan]

I don't know the specific polymer MNT pathway proposed in Nanosystems...
The idea of polymer SPMs seems rather silly to me for the simple reason that any non-diamond SPM is too sterically imprecise. You can make SPMs from whatever Periodic Table of Elements substrate you desire, but the SPM will only be appropriate for diamond MNT under a very specific set of conditions; conditions that exclude makeshift polymer assemblies... though maybe great photomasks or proton emission membranes could be templated with this process.

[Phillip Huggan]

More on my criticism of the polymer pathway:
the goal of diamondoid MNT is to turn a hydrocarbon feedstock into an SPM almost entirely composed of diamond parts. For the tool-tip handles the geometry must be perfect. Maybe for the UHV walls and other components, there is room to cheat by using clunky diamond shards or something. But I still don't see how polymers help here. An sp2 carbon bond doesn't get you 66% or 75% of the material properties of an sp3 bond. It gets you an entirely different material. And I don't see any particular SPM components where it is useful to have polymers. But with sp3 diamonds, every critical SPM/UHV part save for the actuator, can easily be constructed with diamonds.

I'm coming from the diamondoid point of view here. Perhaps there is a way to "dry out" a polymer machine and have it act as an SPM or as a chemical polymer chain assembler, but I can't see any way diamond products can ever be reliably formed from a polymer SPM. Freitas's mechanosythesis computer simulations over the past three years have convinced me all of the important (MNT product) SPM components must have the precision of existing cutting edge SPMs (or else ugly surface reconstructs happen). I don't see any way of "building up" this precision. It is either there or it isn't.

If the chemistry works I have no problem with a sapphire pathway or boron-carbon. Polymers are too floppy. Lately I'm even pesimistic CNTs can be a diamond product, which sucks, because A.Zettl's nested CNT actuator is the best motor I've seen experimentally demonstrated yet.

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

Phillip:

You ask good questions, but you're forgetting one thing: temperature.

We need two measures of precision. One is whether the dimensions are what you expect, on average. The other is how much the dimensions deviate from the average due to thermal noise. (There's a related concept, which is how much they deviate due to applied stress, but that can frequently be compensated for in a well-characterized system.)

A polymer machine may deviate by far more than a bond length at room temperature, but cool it down enough and the deviations will decrease--a lot. Note that I'm not talking here about folded polymers that use entropic springs to maintain their structure--those might have unpredictable structures when the springs collapse. But a weakly-crosslinked material might still be adequate for DMS, if you cool it to liquid helium temperatures.

Of course once you've built the first diamondoid (strongly crosslinked) structure, then you don't need such low temperatures anymore.

Chris