Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future has written a thoughtful post on a variety of issues that may have to be solved before molecular manufacturing works as projected. He discusses Richard Jones's challenges; although he agrees that more research is needed on some of them, others appear to be less critical-path. Michael's analysis looks pretty good to me.
Michael also has a couple of other interesting links. One is an expanded and, I think, improved list of challenges, compiled by Robert Freitas. The other is an interesting blog that describes attempts to design molecular "hard machines" with NanoRex's NanoEngineer-1 software.
As NanoEngineer-1 becomes available to more people, and computers continue to improve, and designs accumulate, I expect to see a rapid increase in interest and design skill. NanoEngineer-1 can deal with DNA as well as diamondoid, so it also may be useful for investigating hybrid or bootstrapping designs.
Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/06/speeding-up-computational-chemistry.html
I speculate on the expected hardware of the remainder of this year out to the end of 2009 and how it will speed up computational chemistry.
Posted by: Brian Wang | June 22, 2007 at 03:26 PM
nice article..
Posted by: Makina | October 10, 2007 at 02:29 AM