Suppose that someone announced the development of a set of molecules, organized into a computer-controlled machine, which could build every molecule in the set and combine them into a duplicate machine, as well as building a range of other products. Would this system be revolutionary?
In order to know if a self-duplicating molecular manufacturing system would be revolutionary, we would have to know several things about it.
- What types of products could it build?
- How fast does it work?
- How long does it take to build a duplicate system?
- How much does the feedstock cost?
- How easy is it to design new products?
- What inputs other than molecular feedstock are required to build a duplicate system?
For example, a system that was programmed by supplying DNA strands in meaningful sequences might require many minutes for each operation. If the system consisted of a mere 500 monomers, it might require a week to duplicate itself. It might not be able to build products that were too large to dissolve in water. Feedstock might cost thousands of dollars per gram. The plumbing to make it work might cost thousands of dollars per unit. This system probably would not be revolutionary. It might be useful, since it could probably be built (many copies in parallel) via ordinary chemistry, and then used to make new kinds of relatively large molecules that would be difficult to synthesize via ordinary chemistry.
A system built of small molecular building blocks, that worked in vacuum, using electrically controlled actuators, doing 100 operations per second, might be able to build a 100,000 block system in under an hour. If the blocks were fairly strong, then the system might be able to build vacuum-tight housings and other equipment so that duplicate systems could be mostly nano-built. This might well be a revolutionary system, depending on the range of products it could build and the cost of the feedstock. The cost of scaling up the system - using it to manufacture larger, highly parallelized versions of itself - might be low enough to be worth doing. The operation speed would support this scaleup. The range of products might be far higher than in the first example, since the product size could be far larger and some of the internal machinery could have significantly higher performance.
Are there any labs working on the above MM device? Assuming the answer is yes can we the reader follow the labs progress in some way? I am wondering if a roadmap for the device as been agreed on and by who. The universities are a good starting point for the device. I am concerned that the cost of the project and the numbers of players are such that we need a large government project. With that said “large government projects are not what they used to be “,in my opinion. What we need is a small group of dedicated people to make progress in the field. A team with a vision and some money with access to a lab and a leader. I have no lab no money and I am a critic not a leader. Well I have said enough for today I will look for other posts with some meaningful info.
Todd
Posted by: todd andersen | April 13, 2009 at 01:14 PM