The story at PhysOrg.com: "Thousands of barges could save Europe from deep freeze."
There is some evidence that "the ocean currents that bring warm water to the oceans off northern Europe may be weakening," apparently published in the journal Climatic Change recently. And there's a theory that if these currents shut down, which they might due to climate change in the Arctic, then Europe will get a lot colder. Seems the currents are driven by near-freezing water sinking down 'way up north, and this depends on a rather sensitive set of conditions.
So a researcher who studies these currents, Peter Flynn (the Poole Chair in Management for Engineers at the University of Alberta), evaluated seven possible interventions to keep these currents flowing. He and his grad student found one that could be "far more cost effective than the others." Send 8,000 barges up north in the fall to spray seawater in the air and make ice. A lot of ice -- seven meters thick. Then, in the spring, spray on even more water to melt the ice and create the cold salty water that's needed to keep the current flowing.
The cost of this relatively inexpensive project? $50 billion. That's about $500 apiece for 100 million Europeans who would be affected by the current shutting down. Put that way, it almost seems reasonable.
However, $50 billion is probably at least an order of magnitude more than the cost of developing molecular manufacturing (MM) and then using that to solve the problem. MM, for those just joining us, is expected to achieve exponential manufacturing (automated factories building more factories, quickly, on demand), as well as extremely high-performance products. Those 8,000 barges would be much easier to build with even a basic molecular manufacturing technology. And there might be better solutions, such as fleets of millions of small solar-energy-gathering airplanes to shade the ocean and help ice form, while feeding power grids and reducing fossil fuel use.
As long as we're planning extreme engineering solutions to planet-scale problems, it's worth thinking just a bit outside the box.
Chris Phoenix
Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog
Excellent blog entry. If molecular manufacturing can be developed for $5,000,000,000 or less, this shows how bad the budget allocation process is. We spend $100 billion (probably more) to have a few people go back to the moon (which I support with molecular manufacturing) and won't spend 5% of that for something far, far better.
There are many other ginormous wastes of money that could easily pay for MM development. Maybe someday people with the money will start to pay attention.
John Akers
P.S. Chris, what is your best estimate for the price of a MM program?
Posted by: John Akers | May 29, 2006 at 07:48 AM
The cost of the development of a pick and place diamond latish molecular manufacturing device, capable of self-replication, and production of a wide variety of general-purpose products is a very good ? . Assuming this is the final goal of the project and assuming the complete and detailed plan for the device is at this point unknown. We are left with a scenario of possibilities and probabilities. As we will need to bootstrap the device from our current level and understanding in many tear approach is most likely to succeed. That is to say we should approach the problem from every direction simultaneously with multiple independent labs pursuing specific components used in the device. It can be generally stated that a great deal of the technology needed for the development of the device is currently under development. As computers continue to advance our understanding of molecular modeling continues to increase. Indeed many aspects of computer science, chemistry, and physics are and have become intertwined. These interdisciplinary studies will continue to evolve in the years in decades to come bringing us ever closer to the eventual goal.
The real issue today is how to best fund limited resources we have on the projects that demonstrate the greatest potential good. As I am only partly in play and only somewhat reasonably well read I can only comment on a few areas of interest. There is an ongoing discussion from the bootstraping standpoint of either utilizing a wet or dry road map to the molecular manufacturing device. For the handful of individuals reading this who are not familiar with the two scenarios I will briefly cover them here. In the wet scenario we utilize a solution filled device currently DNA appears to be the best Ave. to this approach. One would simply use the DNA structure to move individual molecules across an open plain and at some point begin the construction of central block stability. Where individual blocks are produced these blocks are then joined together and so on and so on and so on. In the dry scenario we simply use a series of conveyor belts overhead cranes bulldozers and a variety of other equipment prebuilt on the factory floor to manipulate individual carbon molecules to produce blocks of many sizes these blocks are then joined together and together and together and eventually form the useful product design.
To clarify where we are in the curve today in any of the approach is given above is somewhat unclear. This is the most likely reason why we do not today possess a molecular manufacturing device. So to continue to answer the question as to what the cost will be for the device we should first calculate a five-year study of all related fields that can be clearly defined today. Each of these fields should be fully funded at least three independent labs to be in play studying each of the related issues within each of the fields. For example if in a wet bootstrapping scenario it is identified that specific DNA structures would be more beneficial in manipulating perhaps aluminum over Diamond then each of these approaches should be independently confirmed by labs. There are at leased a few dozen examples that can be given of specific advances to approach is currently in play that should be pursued. Another good example is the electron tunneling microscope currently used to bulldoze molecules around a specific plain in a dry environment this technology should be pursued to the goal of producing complete two-dimensional products based on software input. The next step as stated by individuals earlier on a post is to construct three-dimensional objects such as cubes in a dry environment. I can see another step in the development of this technology would then be to manipulate these cubes in a dry environment to produce larger and larger cubes. This is very relevant technology as these cubes could be used for feedstock in and eventual molecular manufacturing device.
I cannot say specifically what the cost of the development of the product is although certainly there are examples of five-year projects in individual labs where comparable specific well thought out goals were obtained in the fields of chemistry and DNA manipulation as well as computer science. Perhaps examples of this can be used to compute the specific cost for funding of such a project. Again in the best scenario we would simply approach all possible outcomes at the same time where all technologies continue to be researched by multiple labs with clearly defined goals and the eventual outcome of producing a molecular manufacturing device.
todd
Posted by: todd | May 29, 2006 at 09:18 AM
John, my best guesstimate for a "crash" (~5 year) program would be $1 billion, give or take an order of magnitude. For a ten-year program, I'd guess $100 million, again give or take an OOM.
The cost to *start* an MM program, meaning, to begin investigation of pathways and plans, is probably just a few hundred thousand. I'd probably start by hosting a series of three-day workshops.
I'd invite one or two dozen creative and accomplished researchers (but not the ones with big egos and fixed ideas) to a semi-planned problem-solving/brainstorming session, to propose development pathways and strategies. I'd take two months to review and digest the resulting info, then host more targeted workshops for the top three or five proposals. Maybe I'd have a separate CAD track, if initial results indicated that we could be within five years of a nanoscale fabricator.
I'd think that within half a year and half a million dollars (or less), it should be possible to come up with a pretty solid set of roadmaps and a cost/time tradeoff estimate that was accurate to within half an OOM. At least two factors would hold down the cost: teleconferencing and remote collaboration software are getting better all the time, and the right researchers to work on this would jump at the chance even with minimal compensation.
Chris
Posted by: Chris Phoenix, CRN | May 29, 2006 at 11:08 AM
I just watched the movie "The Corporation" and I noticed that one metaphor used in the movie related the current political/economic system to the pre-1903 efforts at manned heavier than air flight, considering both to be suicidal. This seemed to me to be a strange metaphor, as it seemed to me that without such dangerous, costly, humilitating efforts it would have been very difficult to develop flight, and it seemed obvious that flight was worth developing. This lead me to two thoughts.
a) Do the sort of people who make movies like "The Corporation" actually think that we *shouldn't* have developed flight?
b) Why were so many people able and willing to devote so much work and money to developing flight 100 years ago while so few people today work competently and enduringly to develop any sort of scientific or technological accomplishment outside of the extremely conservative and limiting academic system?
Any ideas?
Posted by: michael vassar | May 30, 2006 at 11:01 AM
Isn't even $10 Billion very optimistic? That would place MM in the reach of many, if not most countries, dozens or even hundreds of private corporations, and even within reach of the 50 most wealthy individuals worldwide. It's harder to imagine the price at 1 billion or even less. According to Forbes magazine, there are 746 individuals owning $1 billion or more.
As you know from my comments, I believe MM will be reality sooner or later. Still, it's really tough to wrap my mind around the possibility that MM could be achieved with such a low investment, yet, as a matter of fact, no one is publicly throwing serious money at it.
Posted by: Matt | May 30, 2006 at 01:58 PM
I'm wondering what sort of attempts have been made to get seriously wealthy backers on board with MM, for example, Bill Gates.
Someone of his background could probably be convinced of the possibility of fast-tracking MM, and he is on record as calling Drexler a "visionary" (Sciam interview in 2004), though I have heard nothing else.
Would this be "selling out", or are the gains to be made with MM - saving "millions of lives" - be worth the risk of bowing to the entrepreneurial gods?
Who else is there with a spare couple of billion?
Posted by: marko | May 30, 2006 at 05:54 PM
Okay everyone lets get serious hear for second, a lot of good ideas as to how one might raise money can be suggested here key sources of money other than the government would be one of the venture capitalists or the individual that could be convinced that this venture has merit. In general a ” business plan " and I'm not talking about a list of things that don't get done. Should be put together with the three fundamental issues given.
One where we currently stand today at the end of May 2006.
Two ware are we going in the next five years.
Three what the eventual goal is and what its capabilities are.
To elaborate further own position one we should be very clear or at least as clear as our level of security clearance grants us. Two our position with the current state of affairs of the perhaps top three choices for road maps to the molecular manufacturing device. We are perhaps at some point on the road that leads to the device that is a device capable of producing useful products a general-purpose device capable of self replication. We should attempt to avoid speculation on where we believe we are and be fairly specific as to where we actually are when discussing the technical aspects of technology available to us today and its merit towards the eventual goal. Furthermore we could request papers from key individuals already in the mix to clarify what technology is available today that directly corresponds to the roadmap leading to molecular manufacturing.
We should then speculate on the specific groups by each college is business is government agencies and other technically competent individuals and their roles in the second phase of the development of molecular manufacturing. In my opinion it would not be without merit to at least ask the individuals which we identify in this phase of the business plan as to their intent and willingness to work on and in the project regardless of salary. We are mostly simply speaking to availability the question could be no more complicated than if the project was available funding granted would you be willing to spend the next five years of your life on this endeavor. In addition a inventory of available sites where the required stability in the building as well as computer availability and proximity to a competent workforce should be gathered.
As part of the identification we should consider again the three most likely roadmaps leading to the eventual goal. It should also likely be pursued that the bootstrapping of any of the three roadmaps will likely require additional contributions from other specialties and these specialties will need to be equally funded in the beginning to insure that if any of the three roadmaps are to be successful that all contributing technologies are in play.
Once we have identified the current state of technology identified the individuals involved requests of the individuals assistance identified locations for the individuals to work and in general described what the individuals near-term projects all are. We can then begin discussing step two.
It would appear to me that in step two we will outline the different projects based on the resources we have notwithstanding capital. That is to say we should outline what we wish to do assuming we have a blank check to accomplish the task. Individual teams made up of 20-30 individuals would seem reasonable at perhaps 15 major lab facilities nationwide. Giving us some 450 individuals working on the project. It is not likely we can predict what advances will be made in the initial few years on specific goals but some attempt to outline these goals should be done based on reasonable assumptions of breakthroughs.
Perhaps a simple calculation of number of individuals average salary of individuals number of lab's average costs for facilities plus costs related to computer time and general equipment that will need to be acquired. Can we simply, clarify you in the business plan what the specific costs are related to specific lab's individuals and equipment necessary to begin the initial projects. It is my belief that we will not be required to complete all projects started in the beginning as some projects will lead to a obvious road of noncompliance. Whereas other projects will be more fruitful and giving of technology useful in the development roadmap. This is where the issue of whether the costs total runs $1 billion or $10 billion is directly related to how many of the individual projects need to be continued. After any one or some of the projects are completed. And their relationship to the eventual goal is clarified and certain projects then become redundant and unnecessary.
todd
Posted by: todd | May 30, 2006 at 07:32 PM
Matt, it has been very hard to wrap my brain around the fact that several major crash programs weren't started a decade ago. All I can figure is that people found the claimed potential so unbelievable that they simply resisted the implied change--resisted it so thoroughly that they never even were willing to consider whether MM might actually work as claimed.
Opinions vary on whether any covert programs have been started yet. It certainly seems strange that there's been no attempt in the US to build a civilian infrastructure that could use any aspect of MM technology--rather the opposite--everyone has been discouraged from learning about it.
I do think that MM is within the reach of quite a few actors today, and that number will grow rapidly; I expect the cost to fall roughly in line with Moore's Law.
As I've said before, we don't have much time left. This is true regardless of whether there's a covert program (or several) yet. A well-run program started in 2010 would likely finish in 2015.
Chris
Posted by: Chris Phoenix, CRN | May 30, 2006 at 11:13 PM
I don't think the diamond mechanosynthetic step will be achived for another decade and I don't think scale-up can realistically be completed until 15 years after that, but that could change if the semiconductors or chemicals become involved in SPM engineering. Valuable consumer products are much lighter diamondoid mass than are military take-over-the-world scenarios and scale-up will be expensively obvious during the final years. At least that will give the world a few years advance notice MNT is coming.
I expect patenting timing to be key. Ideally you want to patent around the start of scale-up and achieve scale-up years before the patent expires. To realistically take over the world and not merely annihilate it, you will need a Manhattan team of product engineers. So only the Superpowers are a threat here. To try to use chemical weapons with MNTed delivery systems will still need a big engineering team. Bioweapons will by then be more of a threat than is MNT terror, initially. Perhaps Grey Goo really will be a viable worry, the equivalent of today's radioactive dirty bomb. There is a reasonable chance MNT will announce itself by a whole bunch of diamond products being dumped onto the world's economy and a few people suddenly getting a double-digit slice of the world's networth. If the MNT owners could be forced to pay an annual wealth tax on their networth, this doesn't seem like a bad scenario. But MNT sensor grids will need to evolve faster then does the diffusion of scale-up. It is almost certain there will be competing programmes so some metric of ranking them should be detailed by someone.
Posted by: Phillip Huggan | May 31, 2006 at 12:51 PM
What we need is a wiki, its a shame to keep losing all the good input I see here.
Posted by: Paul Nurse | June 01, 2006 at 04:54 AM
Paul, Wise-Nano.org was created by us for exactly that purpose.
Unfortunately, posters to this blog don't automatically release their work under GFDL license, so we can't copy stuff wholesale. But anyone (such as yourself) who wants to transport the ideas to the Wiki is welcome, nay encouraged, to do so.
Chris
Posted by: Chris Phoenix, CRN | June 01, 2006 at 07:24 AM
Any billionaire you might hope to get on board is going to consult with scientific experts before investing. The fact remains that mainstream physicists and chemists will tell him that Drexler's ideas are just science fiction and have essentially no chance of working. (Then they'll put in a pitch for him to fund their own research.) People don't get to be billionaires by giving their money away to every blue sky scheme that comes along. Regardless of the intrinsic merits of MM, as long as the mainstream science community says it won't work, you won't see major investment in it.
Posted by: Hal | June 01, 2006 at 10:42 AM
Small scale proof of concept research is what we need to have funded now. This should only take a few million, I seem to remember Ralph Merkle proposing 6 million to be spent in 6 years. Getting a billionaire to part with such a small sum is easier than half his fortune. If the specific experiments proposed would advance nanoscience no matter the outcome, and still have commercial spin-offs, it may be worth it even for a skeptic.
Posted by: NanoEnthusiast | June 01, 2006 at 01:20 PM
Hal, I have heard differently, recently, from a number of scientists. I think the political foundation of the opposition has largely evaporated in the last couple of years. There are still individual skeptics, but they tend to be a lot less bold, and they no longer hold a consensus.
NanoEnthusiast, you could be right about starting small. I'd guess that each year's delay in starting a crash program probably delays MM by a month or two--maybe more. A publicly acknowledged crash program would hopefully spark a lot of discussion about implications and policies. A private crash program could be pretty dangerous; I'd hope the developers would spend at least a few million (which is many times CRN's budget) in studying what they and others will do with the technology, but I'm not at all confident of that.
Chris
Posted by: Chris Phoenix, CRN | June 05, 2006 at 07:04 AM
Philip, somehow I missed your comment about scaleup 1) taking 15 years and 2) being expensively obvious.
When you say scaleup, do you mean from sub-micron fabricator to first nanofactor, or from first nanofactory to millions? The first won't necessarily be expensive or obvious, and the second certainly won't take 15 years (barring regulation).
Chris
Posted by: Chris Phoenix, CRN | June 05, 2006 at 07:14 AM
Is that an amino-acid on the new CRN banner?! A friggin amino acid does not capture the essence of MM. Change it to an adamantane cage ASAP.
The best AFM deposition experiment conditions are currently at around one surface alteration per minute. Of course this will be improved. I arbitrarily choose an average rate of 0.2 depositions per second for diamond mechanosynthesis. I (arbitrarily) assumed a micron sized diamond (the first product) assembler would have identical performance characteristics. Surely mature diamond asssemblers will go fast but I don't thin our first products will be especially high-performance.
This yields a diamond product volume rate of scale of 1000X annually, or an order of magnitude in length increase of a total diamond product's cube annually.
From one micron to 10 centimeters it should easy to service the scale-up. But when your product volume gets into the 10s of meters^3, you'll need large facilities and large expensive imputs. I think a real world confrontation is likely before scale-up is complete, unless one is a Nanhattan and has Manhattan Project style facilities.
Scale-up under these assumptions takes 8 or 9 years, I don't know why I said 15. I guess I am attempting to dispel the notion diamond MNT can be achieved in one's garage.
Posted by: Phillip Huggan | June 05, 2006 at 11:12 AM
Typo: not 0.2 dimer depositions per second, above should read one deposition per 0.2 seconds, ie) 5 Hertz
Posted by: Phillip Huggan | June 05, 2006 at 11:14 AM
Phillip, the banner image -- borrowed, by permission, from Nanorex -- is of a cytosine molecule (colored to indicate the sign and magnitude of its electrostatic potential). Cytosine is a nucleobase used in storing and transporting genetic information within a cell in the nucleic acids DNA and RNA. One of the many paths to molecular manufacturing is through nucleic acid engineering, although it's still too early to know which approach will achieve success first.
Posted by: Mike Treder, CRN | June 05, 2006 at 03:06 PM
Phillip, I don't see any reason to assume the first nanoscale fabricator would be so slow. Scaling laws say it should be orders of magnitude faster. Once the bugs are worked out, it should be more predictable than larger devices--fewer sources of drift. And I'd certainly expect that if bootstrapping to cm scale took more than a year or two, much faster fabricators would be developed in the meantime.
If the first nanofactory requires 200 kWh/kg, then a ton per day would require about 10 MW. For comparison, you pump gasoline into your car at about 10 MW. Sourcing and cooling 10 MW wouldn't be trivial; office space takes about 100 W/m^2, and 100,000 m^2 is half the Empire State Building. So we're talking large-skyscraper territory here, but not Manhattan-project territory.
I'm not sure if it would be hard to hide; I think putting the whole thing on a small tanker ship would give you all the feedstock, cooling water, and isolation you need.
Chris
Posted by: Chris Phoenix, CRN | June 06, 2006 at 05:11 PM
I agree when the bugs are worked out diamond facs can destroy the performance specs of our present SPMs. But I'm more pesimistic that the bugs will be worked out during and not after MNT scale-up.
A coffee-maker sized SPM needs a variety of "shells" encasing it to screen out various environmental noises (if sub nm precision is desired); acoustic seismic, thermal, electrical, etc. I'm thinking a nanoassembler can be encased in a diamondoid version of these filters, but will initial use SPM industry shells as they could be many many orders in magnitude more massive than are the key mechanosynthetic components. I guess it depends on the material properties of the diamond. For my arbitrary scale-up timeline I was assuming the shells were not diamondoid products. This would severely slow down the later stages of scale-up and purchasing the world's inventory of clean-room supplies would raise a few eye-brows.
I don't know if my 5 Hertz deposition rate is fast or slow. It is painfully slow by a scaling laws measuring stick, but compared to our present AFM/STM achievements it is optimistic. My micron-sized diamondoid assembler is an arbitrary size estimate too. Make it 50 nanometers and scale-up is much quicker. Make it a 10 micron diamond cube and you'd better go faster than 5 Hertz.
To be really banal, I think an office environment or a tanker may be too "noisy". Suburbs and coastline instead. I'm reading papers about "SPM process control" now: http://www.minsocam.org/MSA/amMin/TOC/Articles_Free/2002/Henriksen_p5-16_02.pdf
In the first page here, it is mentioned drift happens for the first 40 mins after the SPM is turned on, and scaling progressively increases with time (scaling is when the Z-axis . This means diamondoid MNT is really diamond product engineering and SPM design. Two projects.
Posted by: Phillip Huggan | June 06, 2006 at 06:16 PM
Nanoscale SPM's shouldn't need acoustic (or seismic) isolation--their vibration resonance frequencies (and relaxation times) would be way too high.
Electrical and magnetic isolation may depend on whether they use electrical circuits or contain internal charges; I've never heard of using macro-scale electric fields to affect chemistry (energy introduction, and electrochemistry, are different animals) so I suspect that the mechanosynthetic reaction itself wouldn't be affected much.
Once you are building nanofactories, you have the clean environment inside the nanofactory's mechanical shell, and you can put shirtsleeve shielding outside that if necessary--no need for cleanroom apparatus.
In general, I'm just not very worried about macro-source noise affecting nanoscale machinery. I don't think I've seen anyone in the MM research community raise it as an issue.
I think your micron-size diamondoid fabricator is a good size--perhaps a bit large. Freitas and Merkle and Drexler have all estimated sub-micron fabricators. For what it's worth, bacteria are sub-micron.
Chris
Posted by: Chris Phoenix, CRN | June 06, 2006 at 07:34 PM