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Science Technology

The Law of Disassembly 195

Posted by michael from the let-no-man-put-asunder dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Smalltimes has a story by Douglas Mulhall, author of Our Molecular Future, which discusses molecular nanotechnology (MNT) disassembly, and argues for what he calls the 'Law of Disassembly,' that 'every MNT product must be disassemblable by at least one [of several possible methods].' The article ends with some good suggestions for raising awareness of this important issue. Gratuitous quote: This is disturbingly reminiscent of "nuclear power will give us clean limitless energy, and don't worry, we'll deal with the byproducts later because we'll have the tools by then.""
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The Law of Disassembly More

The Law of Disassembly

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  • The other day I saw... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Beolach ( 518512 ) <{beolach} {at} {juno.com}> on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:17PM (#8208701) Homepage Journal
    A show (I think it was on the History Channel) about nano-technology. It had a pretty funny interview with the guy who created a single molecule motor. He admitted it was a pointless endeaver because there's really no way to use a single molecule motor, but he did it "mostly because it's cool." That's how I define a geek.
    • He may be an ubergeek, but he's still a shortsighted tool.

      Writing your own bootloader is a pointless endeavour.

      Writing your own OS is pointless.

      Rebuilding a 1970s MOPAR classic is pointless.

      In the first days of crude oil refinement, gasoline was considered a waste product. People eventually found a use for it.

      There are literally thousands of exapmles in history of a product being completely useless (or producing a useless by-product) that later turned out to be more valuable than what the inventor ori
    • The disassembly law reminds me of an interesting technothriller book called Acts of the Apostles [wetmachine.com] in which a major character is begged to build such a weakness in his nano-machine for fear it may be used as a weapon.

      It was quite the fun book for those paranoid about technology, especially nano/bio stuff.

  • Clarify (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Chess_the_cat ( 653159 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:17PM (#8208707) Homepage
    This is disturbingly reminiscent of "nuclear power will give us clean limitless energy, and don't worry, we'll deal with the byproducts later because we'll have the tools by then."

    And weren't they right? Nuclear power does give us clean, limitless engery and we can deal with the byproducts no problem.

    • Re:Clarify (Score:4, Insightful)

      by furballphat ( 514726 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:27PM (#8208780)
      If by 'deal with' you mean dump in a hole in the ground and hope no one goes near it for a few millenia, then yes.

      • Re:Clarify (Score:3, Interesting)

        by LostCluster ( 625375 ) *
        If by 'deal with' you mean dump in a hole in the ground and hope no one goes near it for a few millenia, then yes.

        And we have said hole in the ground selected, and already have the security tech and plans to make sure nobody goes near it for a few millenia.

        What's interesting about the protests about the project is that the political types that represent the area where the hole is are fine with the project... it brings plenty of jobs to their area, and they're convinced of the safety. Therefore, the FUD-s

        • Nuclear waste issue and The Bomb (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Latent Heat ( 558884 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @11:08PM (#8209578)
          Part of the Yucca Mountain fiasco has to do with President Carter's decision not to reprocess spent nuclear fuel rods -- the idea was to do a once-through fuel cycle, leaving the spent fuel rods chock full of radioactive, yes, but potentially valuable chemicals and radioactive elements. Heck, there is still a lot of usable uranium (not all U-235 in the partially-enriched fuel is "burnt up") in those rods not to mention plutonium, radioactive strontium that could be used for an atomic heat source (the Russians did that kind of thing that feeds into "dirty bomb" scares).

          Now President Carter has had his share of critics, but his worry about reprocessing is opening up more avenues for diversion of atomic materials and making the Bomb available to more people. Yeah, yeah, the plutonium that is cooked in a LWR is the wrong isotope for the Bomb compared to the plutonium cooked for shorter times under different conditions up at the old Hanford reactor. I guess there is some controversy as to whether with enough technical smarts you could make a bomb from LWR plutonium.

          I say we forget about Yucca Mountain and just store the spent fuel rods "on site" and build more storage, whether it is more "swimming pools" or perhaps "dry cask storage."

          OK wait, would everyone here agree that compact fluorescent lamps (CFL's) are a Good Thing -- saving on coal and nuclear power and saving the Earth and everything? Is there any Amory Lovins disciple out there with anything bad to say about CFL's? Guess what, they have mercury in them, and no, they don't last forever -- I have had enough of them long enough to see them burn out. For years, the City of Madison wouldn't take them in the garbage, telling us to pile them up in our basements. Oh, and I have dropped more than one of those things, so I suppose I am brain damaged from the mercury by now.

          The City of Madison now collects CFL's and fluorescent tubes if you wrap them and separate them from other garbage -- have no idea what happens to them. I say lets just stockpile spent fuel rods until some future markets develop for what is in them.


          • Now President Carter has had his share of critics

            His biggest liability was that he couldn't delegate properly (because of staff bickering, he ma.

            On the plus side, apart from his humanitarian effors, because of his nuclear submarine background and training he was the only president that knew what a Bessel function was.

        • Re:Clarify? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by acxr is wasted ( 653126 ) *
          What's interesting about the protests about the project is that the political types that represent the area where the hole is are fine with the project... it brings plenty of jobs to their area, and they're convinced of the safety.

          You are so fucking wrong it boggles the mind. I'll challenge you to read this article [ewg.org] and think before you support bullshit like this in the future.

          And as a resident of Las Vegas, may I personally say, fuck you.

      • Re:Clarify (Score:5, Insightful)

        by steveha ( 103154 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:36PM (#8208840) Homepage
        Which is more dangerous: a few kilograms of nuclear waste, packed up in (for example) ceramic blocks; or thousands of kilograms of coal smoke, dispersed into the air we breathe? And by the way, how many people get hurt or killed mining coal (and let's be sure to count "black lung")? (People get hurt and killed mining uranium, too, but you don't need anywhere near as much for a power plant, compared with coal.)

        Which is more dangerous: a few kilograms of nuclear waste, or a few kilograms of concentrated weird chemical byproducts from heavy industry?

        It would be a good idea to really look at the whole cost/benefit analysis for nuclear power vs. other things we have that don't contain the word "nuclear".

        steveha

        • Re:Clarify (Score:4, Interesting)

          by mbasyro13 ( 250640 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @09:17PM (#8209056)
          I once read an article that claimed that if you calculate the amount of trace uranium in the coal we burn each year, it adds up to far more than all our nuclear waste combined...and of course it ends up in the air we breathe. Not sure if it's really true, but an interesting thought.

          I guess it comes down to which is better: A 100% chance your health is being harmed slowly, or small chance your health could be harmed drastically.

          Dave

          • Re:Clarify (Score:3, Insightful)

            by sketerpot ( 454020 )
            I'll take the small chance. Especially since what we do with nuclear waste is a bit more complex than just sticking it in a hole in the ground. We do geological studies to ensure that the hole won't change much, we build fancy containment facilities, and have the whole thing carefully managed and guarded. I much prefer that to just releasing all that pollution into the air, water, and whatever else you can think of.

          • Re:Clarify (Score:3, Interesting)

            by vidnet ( 580068 )
            So let's find out:

            Googling a bit gives us the statistics [friendsofcoal.org] of West Virginia Coal association (around 164 million tons in 2003), and trace info [wvnet.edu] on west virginian trace amounts of uranium in coal (1.59ppm mean value). This might be a small fraction, but it's probably accurate.

            So we have 1.59 mol uranium per million mol coal. I'll also assume that a ton is a metric ton and that coal exists entirely of carbon.

            164M tons at 12.0107 g/mol gives us 13654491411824 mol. At 1.59ppm, we have 21710641 mol of uraniu

    • What I don't understand is this:

      If the rods are still radioactive, then why are they considered waste?

      The material in these rods has been in the ground for longer than man has been on the planet. Why are they considered waste after a year of being in a reactor?

      At the very least, we could have smaller reactors designed to deal with the lower energy output.

      If people weren't such tools about plutonium, we could use breeder reactors. Build one amd run it till it produced enough waste to power a second. T

  • Open Source? (Score:5, Informative)

    by dekashizl ( 663505 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:18PM (#8208710) Journal
    From the article summary, I thought he meant "disassemble" as in reverse engineer and figure out how the things work, and I was thinking "cool, like open source nanotech."

    But in reading the article, I found this is not what he's talking about. Instead he is talking about how to decommission various molecular nanotechnology (MNT) creations, and e.g. the difficulties that are created by shields and shells created around various small scale entities.

    I think both of these sides to "disassembly" seem pretty damn important.

  • Nuclear plants are just fine... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NotQuiteReal ( 608241 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:18PM (#8208716) Journal
    Why don't they bury the waste on a downward going subduction plate?

    All those isotopes came from somewhere down there anyhow, right?

    Nuclear power seems pretty damn clean to me, and I live about 15 miles from a nuc plant that produces my power, far cheaper (per Kwh) than anything else with no polution that I can see.

    • Yup, we have the means to deal with the products right now, just bury in the right place & manner. Even the plates that aren't downward going in the near term with have their stuff go downward eventually - that's why one can't find rocks on the earth that date as old the earth! Heck, anything we call "the environment" is going to be destroyed anyway.

    • Re:Nuclear plants are just fine... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jarran ( 91204 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:41PM (#8208866)
      Why don't they bury the waste on a downward going subduction plate?

      Because to get it in an effective locations, you'd have to bury it insanely deep, and it would still only get drawn down below the plate at an incredibly slow rate. The plates move at most an inch or so a year.

      I live about 15 miles from a nuc plant that produces my power, far cheaper (per Kwh) than anything else

      Your doing better than we are here in the UK then. The entire nuclear industry would be bankrupt if it weren't for the government pouring millions and millions of pounds of taxpayers money into privately owned companies. And even then, it's still virtually bankrupt, and producing power that's more expensive per Kwh than virtually any other method. If we had a true free market in the UK power industry, we'd have no nuclear power.

      with no polution that I can see

      Yeah, you can't see it, but that's because it's really dangerous, and it's therefore stowed away under armed guard somewhere. Still, it will give your children a good steady job keeping it safe. And your childrens children. And your childrens childrens children. And your childrens childrens childrens children. And so on and so forth for the next ten thousand or so generations.

      • People keep forgetting that all this so called waste is recycleable, for more power than the orignal action to produce it.

        I know nothing about the state of UK's power, but I find it hard to belive that you couldn't make a profit in the free market with nuclear power. What other choices do you have for your power? Wind and tide sound like good ideas, but just don't produce that much. Import coal/gas/oil? Not enough sun to make solar worth trying on a large scale. Not enough land to grow a renewable

        • (I'm a USian but I'm going to have a guess anyway)

          The problem with trying to make a profit on nuclear power is, I'd imagine, mostly a problem of PR. Nuclear energy has such a horrible reputation with the average person (with people I know, at least) that it'd be an uphill battle to get anyone to buy power from you.

          I'm playing armchair sociologist here, but I'd wager it might be due in part to the current generation of power buyers having grown up under the spectre of the cold war. I mean, sure, it's prob
        • Let's see. The UK is generally a bit farther north than France, and has more rainy days. That means passive solar and active solar technologies have more problems. Growing Rapeseed for fuel-oil or Gasahol grade corn both have lower yields than France too, and per hectare prices for farm land are higher in the UK. The UK has depleted its coal reserves faster and more thoroughly than France as well, largely because they started this industrial revolution stuff earlier.
          Despite having less incentive than th
      • And nuclear power would be a whole lot cheaper without a government to impose silly regulations on them and prevent new plants being built: I believe that most nuclear plants in the UK are old ones that have pretty much reached their planned lifetime, and many were built primarily to produce plutonium for British bombs, with power just a useful sideline.

        "Yeah, you can't see it, but that's because it's really dangerous,"

        Yeah, that nuclear waste might just come creeping through my bedroom window and night a
    • Not those particular isotopes. Nuclear reactions tend to create new less stable and hence more radioactive isotopes. The once that decay quickly are initially most dangerous, but it is the once with half-times in excess of a couple of thousand years that cause long term headache.

      You're idea is nevertheless charming, but in order to get them into a region that really gets subducted completly you would have to dig a very deep hole. It'll be very expansive if at all doable. If you don't get deep enough y

  • nanotechnology (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 56ker ( 566853 )
    Much as I like learning about cutting edge research - and can appreciate some of the supercomputer applications that would only be economical with nanotechnology I wondered what the other practical applications of this field were?

    Apart from making computers smaller and making tasks that previously required either parallel processing or supercomputers - eg modelling nuclear explosions, weather prediction, orbital calculations, areas of mathematical research - what are the future applications of this researc
    • it will be great when i can email myself to paris or mars or make a xerox of myself before getting risky surgery or going skydiving. that's all, really.
      • Only problem with this is that you still die.

        Some other guy that looks remarkably like you doesn't.

        And if you're the xerox, you don't remember going sky diving... or you still need risky surgery...

    • Industrial revolution (Score:5, Interesting)

      by wurp ( 51446 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @09:07PM (#8209007) Homepage
      If we can get a nanobot that can make a basic computing element, a basic structural element, and a basic actuator element, as well as reproduce itself, from water and air (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, the same stuff you and diamonds are made of) it would make the industrial revolution pale by comparison.

      Imagine having a factory unit that fits in your hand and with a supply of air and water it could make more of itself or make any structure or electronics gizmo you have a program for. Connect yourself to the internet and get free programs to build housing, greenhouses, furniture, computers, wireless nodes for the new internet, cars, solar cells, all without significant human intervention and costing nothing more than water, air, and power, or for the extra cheap using only your own solar cells.

      This is the extremely conservative vision, assuming that we will only be able to produce a few basic things with nanomachines (but assuming we can build a nanofactory that reproduces itself), not assuming we will be able to make foodstuffs, cybernetic enhancements, or any of the obvious things that would be handy to have as microscopic machines (blood cleaning & oxygenating machines, cancer finding & eating machines, machines to be the roto-rooter to your clogged arteries, etc).

      Oh yeah, and once the technology is mature enough that a self-reproducing version escapes the lab, imagine getting all of this for next to nothing, and giving them away to your friends just because it costs you basically nothing to do so. Oh yeah, and don't forget to save the third world while you're at it.

      And don't forget, that's the conservative vision. I cannot imagine that within the next 50 years we won't have nanomachines that do that. If we can avoid everyone killing everyone else in the power struggle that ensues, we will be trading in virtually all of the old problems that aren't social for new ones.

      • Re:Industrial revolution (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I wouldn't consider that vision conservative in the least.

        Considering it is imposssible to create macrobots that can reproduce themselves, the prospect of microbots that can do it is practically inconceivable to me.

        As a chemist who works in the area of nano-composites and nano-patterning the smallest self replicating robots I can imagine already exist...they are called single celled organisms. The chemistry involved in making nanobots is equally as complicated as that of organic life, no matter what elem
        • Considering it is imposssible to create macrobots that can reproduce themselves, the prospect of microbots that can do it is practically inconceivable to me.

          I'm sorry, what? You are a self-replicating macrobot. (Well, ok, you are self-replicating given a fertile member of the opposite sex.) Nature is full of self-replicating machines of all sizes. By example, we know that it is physically possible to construct self-replicating machines at least as small as the smallest bacteria and at least as large as a
    • Amazingly precise surgery. Imagine tiny robots that could destro cancer cells, but leave healthy cells alone. Imagine if solid sheets of clear diamond were cheaper than glass.

      Imagine if the only real cost to build a product (such as a rocket engine or a child's toy) were only the design (and then self-replicating nano-bots would take-over given a supply of common elements).

      Yes, yes. This seems to be a long way off, but the scientific principles are sound even if we don't have the engineering know h
  • to take other bugs apart, for raw material to build other bugs, which are also seek-and-destroy bugs to bite bad bugs back and beat them to bits. But what if the seek-and-destroy bugs have programming bugs that causes them to break out of their methods and go completely bugfuck?

  • Some nanotech shouldn't be disassembled. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Behrooz ( 302401 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:25PM (#8208764)
    An interesting goal, and an innovative approach to the gray goo problem... but I take issue with his statement that *every* nanotech item should be easy to disassemble.

    Some nanotech shouldn't be disassembled, and we should know how to make it that way.

    There are some nanotech applications where this "Law Of Disassembly" would be a generally bad plan, because there are some things that we want to stay made.

    Space elevators and other similar tech come to mind... leaving easy dissassembly possibilities in megastructures is a pretty horrendous risk from a security perspective.

    Or... to toss his own ideas back at him, the possibility of long-term nuclear waste storage in virtually-indestructible nanotech containers.

    We don't want them breakable, and we don't want them to have flaws that can be exploited by unscrupulous individuals or groups.

    An analogous situation would be the single-molecule spacecraft hull postulated by Larry Niven-- completely invulnerable to nearly any conceivable force until it encountered enough antimatter to destabilize the structure and reduce the entire hull to powder. In interstellar space, unfortunately...

    I still agree that easy disassembly is a good idea for most purposes, but there are few laws that should always be applied without exception.

    • Re:Some nanotech shouldn't be disassembled. (Score:5, Funny)

      by 24-bit Voxel ( 672674 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:43PM (#8208880) Journal
      You know the world's in the shitter when a drive by molecular disassembling becomes a valid survival concern.

      As for waste storage, I'm all for the ago old plan of sending it to Jersey COD.

    • >Some nanotech shouldn't be disassembled, and we should know how to make it that way.

      That is only true if we depend on static structures. If nanomachines are dynamically maintaining a structure, it should be possible to have it be both extremely strong and degradable.

      Nanotechnology is probably only feasible through the use of self-reproducing (or mutually-reproducing) machines. For such machines to be at all safe, we'll have to create entire "ecosystems" of such machines such that the actions of any
    • Nuff said.

      Terrorist unleashes rogue disassemblers. Biggest obvious threat would be structures, as you say. But IMHO the more logical early use of nano would be medical diagnosis and implants. (There's already the M2A camera, named for the ingress and egress points.) Imagine unleashing disassemblers on diabetics with nano-based implanted insulin dosers, or cancer patients with nano-based, self-targeting chemo dosers. In the former case, they'd probably figure out something's wrong soon, hopefully before goi
      • That's not likely to be a goal of the present crop of terrorists, unless they know of some specific political figures with a targetable medical condition. On the other hand, a new crop of Marxist types might well want to target new medical breakthroughs, as a way of aiming at the "Oligarchs". "Greens" with terrorist ambitions might see this as a version of infrastructure hits.
        Short form, we shouldn't be worried about the next generation of UBL'oids thinking along these lines, but that still leaves the n

    • There are some nanotech applications where this "Law Of Disassembly" would be a generally bad plan, because there are some things that we want to stay made.

      I don't believe that your examples (space elevator, nuclear waste repositories) apply to the article. What he is arguing is that self-replicating devices be dissambleable (If I just coined that word, I'm sorry cause it is way ugly). If I'm wrong and such examples would require self-replicating devices to construct, them I'd have to say sorry, b

      • Nah, he's also talking about the difficulties of dealing with any given nano-engineered material. PCBs and dioxin aren't self-replicating, but they're incredibly nasty in the environment and incredibly expensive to ameliorate once they're there.

        Given that the entire idea of nanotechnology is designer molecules and tiny particles with interesting properties, it's a very valid concern.

  • The 3 laws of Nanotechnology (Score:5, Funny)

    by servognome ( 738846 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:27PM (#8208779)

    1. A nanite may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
    2. A nanite must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
    3. A nanite must be microwavable and explode in a flurry of sparks and smoke

  • Nano-pollution (Score:5, Interesting)

    by steveha ( 103154 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:28PM (#8208787) Homepage
    Right now we have teen-age kids writing viruses, spyware, and worms--and releasing them into the Internet. Right now I need to run a spam filter on my email, because I get about 20 real emails and 150 spams every day.

    Imagine, in the future, teen-age kids creating badly-designed nano-assemblers and turning them loose into the wild. I'm a bit worried about this.

    One of the first things we will try to do with assemblers is make medical nanites that make us all live longer. It may turn out that resistance to natural diseases isn't as important as resistance to brand-new designed diseases.

    The flawed but interesting novel The Diamond Age pictured cities in the future as pockets of safety, ringed with clouds of defensive nanites that were constantly repulsing attacks by destructive nanites. Poor kids would try to make a little bit of money by running out into the clouds with capture devices, trying to bring back interesting/useful samples of nanites, to sell to researchers. (Breath masks recommended, if you didn't want to die young with nano-scale junk in your lungs.)

    That may never happen, but we can already make artificial diamonds for use on tools. Imagine diamond-tipped chisels. Imagine tiny flakes of diamond dust in the air... tiny, sharp flakes of diamond. Could this be a problem in the near future? (Not a rhetorical question; I don't know enough about artificial diamonds, or the properties of diamond dust, to answer it.)

    steveha

    • Re:Nano-pollution (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) *
      Another problem is that nanotech could possibly have the ability to create a human-infecting virus, since they'd be able to manipulate things at a molecular level... we don't want anybody going there.

      • Re:Nano-pollution (Score:2, Interesting)

        by 77Punker ( 673758 )
        Just like the Borg on Star Trek, really. Just a few nanoprobes in the blood...bam! An hour later you're connected to the Borg network and assimilating by the thousands. Far worse than grey goo.

    • Re:Nano-pollution (Score:5, Interesting)

      by strider_starslayer ( 730294 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @09:02PM (#8208978)
      Diamond flakes and small bits of glass are simmilar enough at scales that small that you can compare them (I guess). If you work with stained glass the next few days you cough up blood once or twice, then as I understand it, your better (I felt better the next day and no longer couged up blood, my understanding is the that blood carries the glass powder); at least, I've not encoutnered anyone who works with stained glass who has serious respatory problems (People who work with stained glass often do so without masks, perhaps unwise, but none of the people in the teaching classes use masks either, and those tiny grinders definatly make powdered glass in the air).

      Another 'big if' I keep seeing that seems somewhat unfounded is the 'won't the nanomachines kill us once we breath them in'- Laser toner is molecular scale, while that stuff isin't great for you (possible carcinogin) you don't get 'black lung' from getting a whiff of it, it dosen't poke millions of tiny holes in your cellular system, and it's actually the fact that it's easy to break down that makes it dangerous (your cells can process it, and that's where the carcinogen factor comes in).

      As for worries about bizarr 'grey goo' scenarios- EMP, and if that dosen't work; Nuke with associated EMP- then all you have are a bunch of inert bits of metal dust that'll rust soon enough, and otherwise pass harmlessly through your system.
    • I think sharp is a concept that really only applies to things on a macro-scale... even if dust is made out of diamonds, it's still not sharp.

  • Inevitable Evolution of Explosive Growth (Score:5, Insightful)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:29PM (#8208792)
    Absolutely any thing that can self-replicate will be subject to the laws of evolution. So if some supposedly self-limiting replicator has any variants that can replicate faster (and pass on that variation), then that variant will become more prevalent. With each succeeding faster variant comes the potential for run-away population growth (to the limit of available resources). And any variant that can consume alternative resources (having consumed the initial set of resources ) will also become more populous. The result is the gray goo disaster that people fear.

    Attempts to build in self-limiting features (replication delay clocks, kill switches, error-correcting DNA ROMs, special only-replicates with a special nutrient, etc.) will only present an obstacle to evolution, not an insurmountable barrier. You can add 9s to the probablity that gray goo won't happen, but you can never get to 100% if self-replication is permitted.

    That said, you could also create a balanced nano-organism ecosystem with both predators and prey and boost human/animal/plant immune system to fight off nanoorganism attacks. (There is a reason that bacteria have never taken over the world.)

    • Re:Inevitable Evolution of Explosive Growth (Score:5, Interesting)

      by steveha ( 103154 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:48PM (#8208896) Homepage
      The concept of grey goo is a nanite that can eat anything and build copies of itself. I'm not too worried about that.

      But it would be bad enough if someone designed a nanite that was very efficient at eating, say, grass and making copies of itself. Call it Nanite.MyDoom.A. Next is Nanite.MyDoom.B, that eats trees. Next...

      You know, I'm much more worried about humans designing bad nanites, than about nanites evolving in scary ways. If we design a nanite to make solid-diamond rocket motors by swimming around in a vat full of special chemicals, what are the odds it will suddenly evolve to be able to live outside the vat? Not too scary. (What was K. Eric Drexler's comment? It would be like our cars suddenly evolving to drive themselves and run off of tree sap instead of gasoline.)

      But nanites actually designed to live on their own in the wild could be just a mutation or two away from a "cancer" form that runs wild.

      I'm actually hoping that some large, responsible organization will release defensive nanites before the ability to make nanites becomes generally available.

      steveha
      • Just wondering if a Nanite complex enough to survive in the wild on it's own would be too big to be a Nanite.

        I think maybe I'm more worried that someone will genetically engineer some bacteria and give them machine tools.

        (Of course, the bacteria must hold some vague resemblance to sharks and the tools must be lasers attached to their heads...)
      • What was K. Eric Drexler's comment? It would be like our cars suddenly evolving to drive themselves and run off of tree sap instead of gasoline

        Cars are made of hundreds of thousands of parts and hundreds of materials. Cars are not designed to build things, much less themselves.

        Ergo...stupid example.

        • Anything self replicating is also made of hundreds of thousands of parts, or more. Usually, they're called genes and proteins. Cars are also capable of some elements of reproduction - a car CAN typically transport all of the parts to assemble another car to bring those parts together in the same location, even if it has to make several trips - cars ARE quite deliberately designed to do some stages of building themselves, and not to have anything to do with other stages.
          Cars exist in small numbers. There'
      • Nature has done a really excellent job of building a large variety of self-replicating nanomachines. The way I see it, if none of them have managed to turn the world into gray goo or kill off all the grass or make an explosive precipitate at the bottom of any available lake, then it's probably harder than it sounds. Any human-designed nanomachine will be ripped apart by the fierce natural nanotechnological competition if it ever escapes into the wild.
    • Current organisms are DESIGNED to evolve; DNA and its replication system are subject to all sorts of interesting errors, and there are even mechanisms in place that control the error rate. A mechanical replicator can be designed with sufficient redundancy that it would be practically impossible for evolution to take place.
      • Organisms are not DESIGNED to do anything. They EVOLVED that way. That includes evolving optimal replication error rates (if a mutation resulted in too little or too few future mutations, that strain dies out or stagnates).

        I think once you have replication, the possibility of at least some mutation occuring, albeit very infrequently, and an environmental selection mechanism, then you have all the ingredients for evolution to occur. That doesn't mean these things are going to evolve into something interesti
        • Actually, there's reasons to think that a low rate of errors makes evolution proceed faster (Counter-intuitive though that sounds). Very infrequently is good.
          Nature doesn't seem to be "trying" to avoid evolving better copying, it's just gotten as good at it as it can, and there's only so much one can do to avoid errors with a chemical encoding method, when most of those errors proceed from more fundamental physics. (In simpler words, when a carbon 14 atom that is actually part of a DNA molecule decays, or

      • You have to keep in mind that the "mutation rate" of a nanite would be subject to evolution as well as all of the other morphological features discussed earlier. Nanites designed to replicate with 100% fidelity could easily evolve to mutate at a constant, favorable rate. It might take a million generations, but if the doubling time for the nanites is on the order of seconds or minutes, a million generations isn't inconcievable.

    • Re:Inevitable Evolution of Explosive Growth (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rcastro0 ( 241450 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @09:09PM (#8209017) Homepage
      Absolutely any thing that can self-replicate will be subject to the laws of evolution. (...)

      The laws of darwinian evolution require random mutation as well as replication. Computer viruses, which are perfectly able to self replicate, for example, don't evolve. New computer viruses (virii?) are designed by someone and let loose, but old ones do not randomly mutate and transfer mutations down to descendents. They do not evolve into more efficient virii by themselves or by the laws of evolution you imply.
    • There are already tiny self-replicating things out there in the wild.

      They're called bacteria. Amazingly, they've been around and evolving for billions of years. Yet, somehow, the planet has not already become grey goo (or black goo, or blue goo, or green goo, or what-goo-have-you). They're subject to all the various evolutionary pressures that you speculate would influence nanomachines.

      If grey goo were as likely as some alarmists have predicted, then I'd think it would have already have occured. The f

  • No! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Surlyboi ( 96917 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:32PM (#8208825) Homepage Journal
    Nanobot Five is alive! No disassemble!

  • Nuclear power (Score:3, Insightful)

    by G-funk ( 22712 ) <josh@gfunk007.com> on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:40PM (#8208865) Homepage Journal
    This is disturbingly reminiscent of "nuclear power will give us clean limitless energy, and don't worry, we'll deal with the byproducts later because we'll have the tools by then."

    Hey cummon, nuclear power will provide us will clean limitless power, once we have fusion. And if the-powers-that-protest hadn't given the world nuclear such an ugly stain, we'd probably have it by now, as there'd be a shed-load more research being done.

    • Re:Nuclear power (Score:2, Interesting)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 )
      Do the amount of damage that all the nuclear accidents over the years (chernobyl, 3 mile island, etc) even come close to the amount of damage the fossil fuel industry has done?

  • Nuclear waste solution (Score:2, Interesting)

    by BigMike ( 122378 )
    So why can't the solution to nuclear waste disposal be as easy as this: Simply reverse the uranium mining and refining process, to where you're decomposing the material into less and less refined material, until you get to the point where you are mixing it with 1000's of tons of dirt and putting it back into hugh open pits ... Shouldn't cost any more than getting it in the first place ...
    • I'm frankly not sure where to start. Let's start at the end.

      "Shouldn't cost any more than getting [uranium ore] in the first place."

      And what do you suppose mining uranium costs? Yellowcake currently sells for about $10 a pound, and at that price the world's uranium producers are making a very decent profit.

      I know many dozens of people in the industry from exploration crews to miners to management.

      By "Reversing the mining process" I assume you mean burying it in the ground. Well, that's exactly what they
    • You need to understand the concept of half-life. The radioactive U-235 that we mine has a half-life of hundreds of millions of years. We put that in a reactor, and smash it up into bits that have half-lives of decades or centuries.

      The amount of radiation emitted by a mole of material is inversely proportional to its half-life. Thus, the stuff you put in the ground is a million times more radioactive than what was pulled out.

  • Assembling [slashdot.org], Disassembling [slashdot.org], why havent we taken over the world yet? for one million dollars?

  • This is idiotic (Score:5, Informative)

    by MarkusQ ( 450076 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:51PM (#8208911) Journal

    and argues for what he calls the 'Law of Disassembly,' that 'every MNT product must be disassemblable by at least one [of several possible methods].' The article ends with some good suggestions for raising awareness of this important issue. Gratuitous quote: This is disturbingly reminiscent of "nuclear power will give us clean limitless energy, and don't worry, we'll deal with the byproducts later because we'll have the tools by then.

    This is idiotic. Any reasonable MNT device will be mostly carbon in a form very like diamond. Yes, diamond is cool; it's hard, light weight, etc. But it isn't some SciFi ubermatter. For instance, it burns pretty much the same way coal and graphite do.

    As for the products of MNT, it depends a heck of a lot on what is beeing made. Is he seriously suggesting that we shouldn't be allowed to use MNT to produce clean drinking water for third world countries unless we have a way to disassemble it? Or he just techo-fearmongering without bothering to be serious?

    I will agree though, it is disturbingly reminiscent of the FUD that was spread about nuclear power by the fossil fuel industry that has done so much for the environment (not to mention world peace).

    -- MarkusQ

  • practicality (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:55PM (#8208934) Homepage
    We don't even really know how to build nanobots and already we're talking about failsafes. I agree that adding a failsafe is a good idea, even in a nanobot that can't replicate, but unless you know how you're going to build something you can't know the best way to throw a wrench in the works. It may not even be possible to add a particular failsafe to a nanobot because of engineering constraints. First build a few, THEN figure out where to stick the self-destruct.

  • Some useful methods (Score:5, Interesting)

    by -dsr- ( 6188 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @09:00PM (#8208964) Homepage Journal
    Several methods spring to mind immediately as useful safeguards:
    • Sunlight-intensity ultraviolet light - your nanite is only usable in the dark because UV breaks a chemical bond necessary for functioning.
    • Dissolves in moderate acid - pouring a cup of strong vinegar ought to lock up the bugs. In fact, requiring a narrow pH range is a good idea in itself.
    • Requires an environmental nutrient - how do you get power to nanites anyway? Make them dependent on a fuel that has to be added to their environment.
    • Requires an unusual temperature - if they need oven-like temperatures to function, there's not much danger keeping them at roomtemp


    Just a few thoughts. Basically, if you keep the nanites dependent on an unusual environment or disrupted by an easily-achieved environment, you'll be going a long ways toward preventing a grey goo disaster.

    • Re:Some useful methods (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jerf ( 17166 )
      LOL, you act as if these features are going to have to be designed in, rather then designed out!

      Nanotech bends a few of the rules, but it doesn't bend all of them. While you can make nano-scale machines hard to physically destroy, it's going to be a lot of generations before we have a machine that is still "nano", and can function in direct sunlight, a wide range of pH, and a wide range of temperatures. (It is unlikely that we'll ever get away from "environmental nutrient" as a requirement, ever; that's a

  • we WILL know how to decommission them (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Friday February 06, 2004 @09:16PM (#8209047) Homepage Journal

    From the article:

    Why can't this discussion wait? Here's why: Primitive non-MNT nanotechnologies are already creating products that cannot yet be disassembled in such pathways. Complex coatings and integrated nanomaterials that are hard to take apart are being manufactured now, albeit in smaller quantities that so far have negligible impacts. We can't blindly continue to say that someday we'll know how to decommission them.

    We will know how to decomission them. This is not to say that it will be easy, or that the results between then and now will be pleasant, which if anything is the argument for this "law". (I think a "law" should be something that cannot be sidestepped. This is more of a rule that we wish would be a law. If anything, call it an edict. If you can get anyone to call it anything.

    Backing up a bit,

    This is disturbingly reminiscent of "nuclear power will give us clean limitless energy, and don't worry, we'll deal with the byproducts later because we'll have the tools by then."

    Another problem which should be easily solved by sufficient advances in nanotechnology :) You can take the stuff apart bit by bit and do whatever must be done to make it entirely safe. Also, it should let you build sufficiently advanced machines not necessarily small ones) to stop and contain a meltdown, should something that unnecessary occur. I think that the advances in materials technology would allow that, especially given a reasonable design to start with. I might be wrong here, but in general it does seem like something you could do. I know this is a broad dodge sideways but the real issue with nanotechnology is that someone somewhere who really should not have their hands on nanotechnology will one day get it. Arguably, the military or government of any current world power would be a bad force to have in control, but I guess it's inevitable and it will be better than some. Nothing could possibly be better or worse, however, than a lone genius who believes that it's their right to decide for everyone what path to take, with that kind of power.

    Given that it's bound to happen eventually, what can we do about it? The author is talking about a convention that he's expecting people to follow. Well, they won't. At the very least some military and paramilitary organizations, who will have nanotechnology, will use it without any controls like this whatsoever. Therefore, at the very least, organizations like this are going to be interested in the proper disassembly of these items. In short, the stuff of a large number of science fiction novels, and very peripherally, one or two episodes of a certain television show that had way too many episodes and changes of neckline.

    Aristoi [google.com], a book by Walter Jon Williams [thuntek.net] contains a lot of material on this topic. I haven't read any of the "official" literature on this topic but it sounded, at the very least thoughtful, and it was pretty entertaining. The question of how to make maximally efficient nanomachines while still keeping them under control, which is to say physically contained, at least during testing, is definitely of great interest.

    Regardless, we will have to know how to decommission them. Therefore we will know, or die trying to find out. I know it sounds overly dramatic, but it is certainly a real issue.

  • food for thought (Score:3, Informative)

    by benjonson ( 204985 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @09:16PM (#8209053)

    This monster called technology is a force we have to deal with. "Deal with" being the operative words: it is not something we control, at least not anymore. It is way too big, powerful, and important to be arbitrarily restricted, and any efforts to implement controls would have to be quick, effective, and global, i.e., practically impossible. In light of this, what the author of the article proposes is eminently reasonable and foresighted.

    There has been much talk of the dangers of nanotech, for example from Bill Joy and others, and it is, or should be, a point well-taken. What the author proposes is twofold: when designing replicable nanotech devices, implement constraints on reproduction rates, and second and probably most important, design in disassembly through, for example, the ability to take the thing apart, or by biodegradabilty, or by oxidation susceptibility. In other words, prepare in advance an "achille's heel" that would allow a dangerous development to be easily disabled. I would only argue here that mutliple achille's heels should be designed in.

    And, to quote from the article (yup, I read it, sorry):

    Why can't this discussion wait? Here's why: Primitive non-MNT nanotechnologies are already creating products that cannot yet be disassembled in such pathways. Complex coatings and integrated nanomaterials that are hard to take apart are being manufactured now, albeit in smaller quantities that so far have negligible impacts. We can't blindly continue to say that someday we'll know how to decommission them.
    No doubt there is much to argue with and discuss at this point, but that is the whole idea - let the discussion begin. The future is coming and the time to plan for it is now.
  • ************SPOILER ALERT*********

    Sentient mechlife (robots) has proliferated in the galaxy, and are driving biological life, including humans, toward extinction. Eventually it's discovered that there's a backdoor in the mechlife that rips through their 'sentience net' killing most of them and giving bio-life a chance to come back. Kind of a cross between disassemblers and the Iraqis' French Exocet missiles during GulfWarI.
  • We have ling since developed the capacity to reprocess and dispose of nuclear waste. And by dispose it of I don't just mean bury it in the ground. Breeder reactors and processing facilities that can turn high level radioactive waste into fissionable material and useful radioisotopes have been around for more than a decade. The DOE site at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratories alone could reprocess all the nuclear waste generated in the US, and well as by our NAVY. It is only the
  • 1. There are many ways to "disassemble" something.
    1.a. You can take something apart element by element.
    1.b. You can make it biodegradable.
    1.c. You can incinerate it.

    2. (1.a), (1.b) and (1.c) should be incorporated into a law which will be called "Law of Disassembly", which says every MNT product must be disassemblable by at least one of these three alternatives.

    Well... Easy, then to have a MNT pass the "Law of Disassembly". Throw MNT in question in a high temperature furnace, prove it gets dest
    • What doesn't burn (or melt, or vaporize, disassemble) when the temperature is high enough ?

      Carbon dioxide. How do you oxidate something that's *already* the product of oxidation?

      To answer your forthcoming objection -- CO2 is obviously not a very complex compound, and presumably you *meant* "a sufficiently complex compound created by nanotechnology" when you referenced 'what'. But it *is* one of a class of compounds (like, say, the chlorides -- I'm thinking of dioxin) that has such a high binding ene

  • Although the grey goo is a problem that is constantly hovering about the use of nanotechnology, we have to consider that we have other far more developed methods of mass destruction. Nuclear, radiological, and especially biological weapons are potentially as destructive as the goo, and require far less technical expertise to manufacture and distribute. More troubling, they allow us to be destroyed with current technology, rather than a bothersome wait for nanotech to catch up. On the bright side, those s

  • Nanomaterials vs. Nanorobots (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mulescent ( 682036 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @09:43PM (#8209173)

    A crucial distinction that is not being made in this discussion is the one between nanomaterials in general and nanorobots particularly. It is possible that one day we will be able to build functional nanobots that can live freely and replicate. We can cross that bridge when we come to it.

    What is more relevant and has been less well-discussed by /. is nanomaterial remediation. Carbon nanotubes are very tough and have been demonstrated to be very toxic in mice [nih.gov]. Thought has not been given about how to dispose of materials such as these without creating a public health hazard. It is clear that nanomaterials will be used in greater and greater quantities due to their exceptional properties. Therefore, we can work to solve the inevitable disposal problem now or later. It will cost less to address disposal now.

  • Sorry, had to be said. ;-)

  • We did it! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Brandybuck ( 704397 )
    "nuclear power will give us clean limitless energy, and don't worry, we'll deal with the byproducts later because we'll have the tools by then."

    And we did it too! We now have ways to safely dispose of nuclear waste. Unfortunately, the politics of the situation means that we are forced to continue storing it in leaking metal drums...
  • A difficult but viable solution to the problem of nuclear waste has existed for decades. It has not been implemented for political reasons ranging from the politics of the cold war to the current politics of environmentalism.

    http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw79.html

  • I don't understand how so many slashdotters can be convinced that we will experence global armegeddon at the hands of nanomachines that will reduce us to 'grey goo'.

    I hope what I type here might help dispel some of this parasitic meeme!

    In the event that we mannage to make 'room temprature' nanmachines that are not instantly destroyed by a slight breeze, can break down even terminally simple matter for use in replication, and somehow get released into the world with a malicious intent (or through a gli

  • more immediate worries (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ajagci ( 737734 ) on Saturday February 07, 2004 @02:47AM (#8210404)
    There is already "nanotechnology" (and "picotechnology") that resists disassembly: compounds that take a long time to break down in the environment, compounds that cause harm to the environment when they break down, etc. You know, things like DDT, plastics, etc. If we can't even manage to get reliable biodegradability into shopping bags or computers, how does anybody expect to get it into nanotechnology?

    Fortunately, this particular worry is a marketing gimmick: we are about as likely to be overwhelmed by non-degradable nanomachines as we are to fall into a black hole. We don't need a "center for responsible nanotechnology" because there isn't any nanotechnology and there likely won't be, ever. Unless, of course, you are referring to paint manufacturers and biotechnology companies.

  • Technology "With" Sanity... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Genda ( 560240 ) <mariet@go[ ]et ['t.n' in gap]> on Saturday February 07, 2004 @04:46AM (#8210669) Journal
    If we look at the recent history of our species... let's say the last 500 years, it's clear that we have often thought about "How to do?" before thinking about either "What have we done?" or "How do we undo this?". Western history is rife with accidents, oversights, impatient follies, cost effective disasters, poorly implemented catastrophies, mistaken circumstances, and plain and simple, greedy shortcuts.

    In most cases, a little simple planning might have prevented these wrecks, in others, a thoughtful application of technology might have prevented the possibility of disaster. We're at the threshold of being able to do amazing things with matter and energy, and we've already been seriously burned by technodisasters from Chernobyl to Bhopal. The real possibility of global disaster, demands that the intelligence be put in the technology from the beginning. The technology must be;
    • able to be turned OFF.
    • clean up toxic byproducts.
    • bio-friendly (i.e. not leave residues that endanger ecological systems.)
    • able to be isolated, localized, and deactivated with ease and velocity.
    • a short lived in the wild, limited to the number of generations it can reproduce.


    We've already constructed technologies that have left behind environmental disasters. It's not like we don't already know how that process works. The threat is to do precisely the same thing with a technology that is perfectly capable of sterilizing a city, state, or nation. We can no longer afford the trade of expediency over sanity. The cost just got too high.

    Genda Bendte

    --"Don't come running to me when the gray goo eat's yer feet off!!!"

    • able to be turned OFF.

      Only if the customer wants to pay for it.

      clean up toxic byproducts.

      Too expensive.

      bio-friendly (i.e. not leave residues that endanger ecological systems.)

      Too expensive, but we'll be sure to run commercials about how we're working hard to clean up the environment.

      able to be isolated, localized, and deactivated with ease and velocity.

      Only if the customer wants to pay for it.

      a short lived in the wild, limited to the number of generations it can reproduce.

      Don't worry, free-mar

  • Generalise it to Reversability (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CrosbieFitch ( 694308 ) * <crosbie@cyberspaceengineers.org> on Saturday February 07, 2004 @06:48AM (#8210909) Homepage
    Needs to apply to genetic engineering too.

    Any autonomous/self-replicating device, organism or other material that is to be released into the environment, must be reversible, i.e. it must be at least possible to disable it within a reasonable period, and ideally possible to remove all significant traces of it from the environment.

    It is not enough to simply say "Well, we've done tests and it doesn't seem to harm anything as far as we can tell so far".

    If anything people need to learn how many times such statements have proved to be false from the software industry, e.g. "Well, we've done tests and the software seems to work fine - no bugs left as far as we can tell" - yeah... unleash it baby!

    This law should also apply to the Internet, i.e. release of autonomous/self-replicating software.

    Every potential poison we create must have an antidote.

    If anything we need to develop skills/technology at disabling these things just as much as the skills to create them in the first place.

    No doubt there will be those quite happy to unleash grey-goo...

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