At the current time I see this is front page and has reasonable upvotes, but not one comment.
My guess is that this is highly useful for either:
* Building chips (but it's on a silicon surface, not with silicon)
* Carbon nanotubes (looking forward to a space elevator, folks, one day ;))
* It's a more notable movement forward in nano construction in general and I just know too little to understand its impact.
Given the zero comments to date: would someone who knows this area like to accept an invitation to share something really interesting about this paper, please? :)
This seems to be the galena cat whisker stage of developing Drexler's "eutactic chemistry". It may be a parlor trick forever, or it might be the humble beginnings of mechanosynthesis, the first working tool-tips for a Drexler arm.
Off-topic, these days information just goes in circles from subreddits, X, YouTube, and Hacker News to countless secondary sources, and then back again to the same original sources.
precision is to aprox 1/3 the diameter of a carbon² molecule, and are effectivly printing matter at the atomic level, but too slowly for manufacturing at any scale large enough for a practicle use other than perhaps, creating test circuits for.....more testing and ,maybe labeling and logos
This is the experimental science behind the Eric Drexler mechanosynthesis->nanomachines ideas from the 90's and 2000's. We got decades of pop sci-fi and memes (and the Borg) out of this idea, and a hazy vision of the future singularity where AI would control the material world.
Well, we didn't need AI to start down the path. The core 'can this be done' science is done. Yes, we can control chemical reactions by manipulating reactant position.
Next the question is how do we scale it? We need LOTS of manipulators. We're... not actually great at building lots of manipulators. We might use this atomically precise tech to build manipulators and have them make copies of themselves.
Or we might leverage other technologies like protein engineering, DNA origami, and nanoelectronics to make less effective manipulators that we could build today and use to bootstrap toward the nanotech that CAN build everything atom-by-atom.
6 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 21.3 ms ] threadMy guess is that this is highly useful for either:
* Building chips (but it's on a silicon surface, not with silicon)
* Carbon nanotubes (looking forward to a space elevator, folks, one day ;))
* It's a more notable movement forward in nano construction in general and I just know too little to understand its impact.
Given the zero comments to date: would someone who knows this area like to accept an invitation to share something really interesting about this paper, please? :)
https://wiki.reprap.org/wiki/Drexler_Arm
and put a post-it between them with COMPUTONIUM???? written on it
Can we please keep it together for a modest number of decades longer please.
Well, we didn't need AI to start down the path. The core 'can this be done' science is done. Yes, we can control chemical reactions by manipulating reactant position.
Next the question is how do we scale it? We need LOTS of manipulators. We're... not actually great at building lots of manipulators. We might use this atomically precise tech to build manipulators and have them make copies of themselves.
Or we might leverage other technologies like protein engineering, DNA origami, and nanoelectronics to make less effective manipulators that we could build today and use to bootstrap toward the nanotech that CAN build everything atom-by-atom.
Either way, things are accelerating. Finally.