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Brian Wang has some additional thoughts on potential technologies for starship propulsion. There’s no shortage of possible approaches, that’s for sure. It turns out that the star drive used in Avatar is a plausible choice — who knew?

While some are dismissing interstellar travel as hopelessly unrealistic and/or pointless, Brian begs to differ. We need to be at a different level of technological and economic development in order to seriously consider mounting such an effort, but Brian says there’s a way to get there. It begins with, of all things, weather control:

If we have moderate levels of molecular nanotech or really push non-molecular nanotech so that we can make 20 million tons of the balloons for the Hall Weather control machine

The balloon needs to be somewhere between a millimeter and a centimeter
in size. It has a very thin shell of diamond, maybe just a nanometer
thick. It’s round, and it has inside it an equatorial plane that is a
mirror. If you squished it flat, you would only have a few nanometers
thick of material. Although you could build a balloon out of materials
that we build balloons out of now, it would not be economical for what
I’m going to use it for.

Then that also gives us Kardashev level 1. Current world energy
usage and generation is at about 20 terawatts. Getting all solar power
means about 2000-5000 times current power levels. We would be 1000
times richer and able to spend 1000 times more on space without
increasing the fraction of the overall economy to space. The overall
fraction is about 2 million to 20 million times less than overall
energy and resources.

Currently about 12% of the respondents to our survey on motivations for star travel say that we’ll never go. Presumably, several of these folks are transhumanists who predict that the singularity will give us new projects to work on and that implementing the mega-engineering required to achieve the Kardashev levels will be thought a poor use of resources.

And they could be on to something. If we’re all uploaded cyber beings, there are easier ways of getting around in deep space than building massive starships. But then we may not all go that direction. A remnant of mostly original substrate humanity might decide to develop such technology — if their robot / transhuman overlords allow them to, that is.

Well, to prove that, here’s one development that was announced the day of our show – cancer-killing “Biofunctionalized magnetic-vortex microdiscs.” These 60 nanometer metallic discs are paired with biological molecules that apparently help the discs find the cancer. When a magnetic field is applied, the disc spin oscillates. This assaults the cancer cell in an entirely new way – not by heat or mechanically, but electrically.

We [the research team] show that the spin-vortex-mediated stimulus creates two dramatic effects: compromised integrity of the cellular membrane, and initiation of programmed cell death. A low-frequency field of a few tens of hertz applied for only ten minutes was sufficient to achieve 90% cancer-cell destruction in vitro.

The fact that the magnetic field required is “low-frequency” is important. The idea of using magnetic fields to kill cancer is not new to this team. But in the past the frequency required to kill cancer caused problems with nearby healthy tissue.

I know. That’s like saying that Santa hates reindeer, but this comes straight from the man himself. And he lists some pretty good reasons for feeling the way he does.

Moreover, he points out an unfortunate general tendency:

Some widespread ideas about research objectives

* are bad
* seem absurd to most scientists
* are inconsistent with my ideas and publications
* are nonetheless widely attributed to me

Drexler’s blog is a great read. When he’s not busy setting the record straight, he takes the time to explain things like how to understand everything.

Very useful!

This very cute and clever song features a soprano with a very happy voice, puppets that look and talk a lot like muppets, and a song with a very bouncy tune with lyrics that explain nanotechnology with surprising clarity. Showing this video to children and to adults who have little knowledge of nanotechnology would be an excellent way to introduce them to the concept.

Nanotubes and space elevators are mentioned. And so is the iPod Nano, “That’s not nano!” “The Nano Song” won a contest for the best song about nanotechnology.

Morphing programmable matter gadgets could soon be a reality

MAGINE a bracelet or a watch that morphs into something else when you take it off. Perhaps it becomes a phone, or perhaps a small computer screen and keyboard.

Researchers are just a few years away from bringing to life revolutionary morphing devices known as programmable matter which can change size, shape and function.

Programmable matter, or “claytronics,” involves creating devices made of millions of microscopic robots that are to 3D objects what pixels are to a screen.

These devices sound like pure science fiction, but they might be closer than anyone would have dreamed. And that includes Jason Campbell, one of the key members of the research team developing the technology at the Intel Research Centre.

“It’s a really challenging research vision, but we are making steady progress and we’re now more convinced that we are actually going to do it,” says Mr Campbell.

“My estimates of how long it is going to take have gone from 50 years down to just a couple more years. That has changed over the four years I’ve been working on the project.”

Can utility fog and true replicators be far behind? I don’t think so.

On the podcast the other night there was some chat about George Jetson’s flying car which he could pack up in a briefcase. We’re not quite there yet, but stay tuned.

Morphing programmable matter gadgets could soon be a reality

MAGINE a bracelet or a watch that morphs into something else when you take it off. Perhaps it becomes a phone, or perhaps a small computer screen and keyboard.

Researchers are just a few years away from bringing to life revolutionary morphing devices known as programmable matter which can change size, shape and function.

Programmable matter, or “claytronics,” involves creating devices made of millions of microscopic robots that are to 3D objects what pixels are to a screen.

These devices sound like pure science fiction, but they might be closer than anyone would have dreamed. And that includes Jason Campbell, one of the key members of the research team developing the technology at the Intel Research Centre.

“It’s a really challenging research vision, but we are making steady progress and we’re now more convinced that we are actually going to do it,” says Mr Campbell.

“My estimates of how long it is going to take have gone from 50 years down to just a couple more years. That has changed over the four years I’ve been working on the project.”

Can utility fog and true replicators be far behind? I don’t think so.

On the podcast the other night there was some chat about George Jetson’s flying car which he could pack up in a briefcase. We’re not quite there yet, but stay tuned.

And to Foresight Nanotech for making an excellent choice for its leadership team. Christine Peterson comments:

With Dr. Hall’s expertise, Foresight’s range can broaden to include a wider variety of coming technologies
His integrated vision of how nanotech interacts with other advanced fields will enable us to more effectively promote technology’s benefits and head off potential downsides.

Sounds good. We caught up with Josh on a recent edition of FastForward Radio.

Tiny science makes socks that don’t smell and windows that clean themselves

Of course, it’s not just socks — entire wardrobes will never need laundering or dry cleaning. And it won’t just be windows — we’ll have whole self-cleaning houses. But even that’s just the beginning. How about food that cooks itself? Machines that repair and maintain themselves? Even human bodies that never get sick and never get old.

Still, you have to start somewhere when introducing the subject, and I guess clean glass and non-stinky socks represent as good a place to start as any.

UPDATE:Paul Rothemund has pioneered the field of DNA origami. He uses special CAD software to come up with a design:

He then orders long DNA strands with short “staple” DNA strands. He mixes it together and they self-assemble:

The result – 50 Billion smileys floating around in a single drop of water. In other experiments he’s put circuit components on the staples and the DNA self-assembles a switch.

In order to scale this up, DNA oragami produces tiles that then bind together in predictable ways. These tiles can also count themselves. This will be handy so that the process will know when to stop. If you ask it to grow a cell phone, it has to know when to stop.

This is beyond fab-labs. This is the enabling technology for nano-factories.

On a couple of occasions Christine Peterson stated that some problems might not be worth the cost of developing nanotech solutions.

I’d be foolish to disagree. She is, afterall, the president of the Foresight Nanotech Institute, and she’s been in the nanotech industry since its infancy. But it seems to me that her answer is likely addressed to the present and near future.

[Editor: Phil has pointed out, correctly, that it was Dr. Pearl Chin, not Christine Peterson who argued that expensive nanotech solutions might not be economically feasible for some simple tasks.]

It’s not likely, for example, that anyone will spend billions to market a mouthwash manufactured to molecular precision anytime soon. Expensive solutions will be applied to important – which another way of saying well-funded – problems. Curing halitosis (and improving dental health) might seem pretty important before a hot date, but it won’t draw the same research dollars as curing cancer.

But long-term, this situation might change. And we have a good model to base this on – the development of computers.

The first microchip computer was designed by MIT in 1964. Here’s the specs:

ROM: 12K,
RAM: 1K,
Clock: 1.024 MHz,
Computing: 11 instructions, 16 bit word Logic: ~5000 ICs (3-input NOR gates, RTL logic)

Puny huh? Well, this was the Apollo Guidance Computer. It took us to the Moon and back. Back then we went to huge expense to create a very simple computer to accomplish great things.

Now we go to little expense to create complex computers to accomplish trivial things. A computer as powerful as the AGC is practically disposable now. We find them in Happy Meal toys or in singing birthday cards.

The year after MIT designed the Apollo Guidance Computer, Gordon Moore made his famous prediction about the development of integrated circuits. Even at that early date Moore was able to see that integrated circuits were being improved exponentially. The computer is an intelligence tool. Each step aids the development of the next step.

I suspect that nanotech will develop the same way. We’ll develop a simple set of nanotech-buiding tools that will help us develop better second generation tools and on and on – exponentially. Can we call this the “More Gordon Law?” No? Well… it was worth a shot.

President Kennedy was right about the Moon:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills…

Organizing “the best of our energies and skills” produced the world’s first microchip computer. Perhaps a similarly great and challenging undertaking will usher in the Nanotech Industrial Revolution.

And 20 years after that I’ll be gargling nanobots.

It’s a point that’s been made before, most famously in the Drexler-Smalley debates, but it bears repeating. Single celled life is “the ultimate existence proof of the feasibility of a molecular assembler.” This is not a metaphor. Life is nanotech, literally. Our future nanobots may bear a striking resemblance to yeasts and other single celled life.

Here’s a great example:

Salmonella Bacteria Turned Into Cancer Fighting ‘Robots’

KurzweilAI.net, Mar. 31, 2008

[Notice this is dated March 31 and not the day after.]

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers are turning Salmonella bacteria into tumor killing “robots” that use their flagella to go deep into tumors where conventional chemotherapy can’t reach, and once in place, manufacture drugs that trigger cancer cells to kill themselves.

Normally, mice with tumors all die within 30 days. After receiving this bacterial system and getting a dose of radiation, all the mice in their lab tests survived beyond the 30 days, which could translate into months or years in people.

The conference half included the following:

A talk from David Friedman on how the technologies of public key encryption and surveillance work together and in opposition to each other to make for some very interesting possible futures.

A presentation from Matthew Francis from the department of chemistry at UC Berkley on using biology to build nanoscale materials. We talked on a recent FFR about how proteins are being used as nano-medical delivery devices. Matt showed how both protiens and viruses can serve as the first generation of true molecular technology. Medicine is part of it, but the really amazing stuff was the example of using a tobacco virus to create nano-solar panels. Wow.

Chris Heyward of Kronos Labs gave a thorough overview of current scientific research in the field of longevity.

A talk from Christine Peterson on the complex relationship between privacy, security, and transparency. Chris makes the case that the tech community — Silicon Valley in particular — has the responsibility to keep Washington from overreaching.

The conference portion was the morning half of each day. The sessions were top-notch: fascinating and thought-provoking. But things really got interesting in the afternoon, where the unconference format kicked in. Under the guidance of unconference guru Kaliya Hamlin, those of us who were interested in leading a session announced a topic and put it on the schedule. Here’s the list of topics that were discussed. It was quite a challenge deciding which sessions to sit in on!

My talk was during Session 5. It was an expansion of my recent rework of the map of the emerging technology development space. I’ll be doing some additional updates based on the great discussion we had over the next few days.

I’ve never been completely satisfied with the axes of that diagram. I wanted to show how some developments have this immediate overwhelming impact, while others set the stage to allow for further developments that ultimately have that kind of impact. Still others look like there’s something major happening, but it’s less than meets the eye. In its new iteration, I am replacing the vertical axis with disruption and the horizontal axis with transformation. Here’s my new draft version:

Researchers in California today report development of the world’s first working radio system that receives radio waves wirelessly and converts them to sound signals through a nano-sized detector made of carbon nanotubes.

Our cellphones, MP3 players, and radios are already integrating into one device. We’ll still have that device – or its equivalent – in twenty years. It’ll just be hard to see.