psrc@pegasus.ATT.COM (Paul S. R. Chisholm) (10/06/89)
< BACK TO THE FUTURE PART 2: It's about time. No hoverboarding! > The nanotechnology described in "Evolution" (the third season premier of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION is, um, real speculative science. The most accessible source for laypersons is Eric Drexler's ENGINES OF CREATION. (There's a whole lot of other stuff in there about going beyond the current paradigm, such as science courts. Personally, I stopped or skimmed when it got boring, and still got a lot out of it.) Yes, they're so named because they work on the nanometer (billionths of a meter) level. Yes, they use "mechanical memories". (Anybody play with a Digilog-1? Think of a tiny, sturdier version, with error correction, and *lots* of little rods.) There's also a Netnews group "sci.nanotech" on the subject. Let's be nice folks and keep the STAR TREK-specific stuff out of there, please? (Violators will be forced to read alt.flame for a month.-) That means making sure that follow-ups to this message stay in rec.arts.startrek, as I've tried to ensure with the appropriate header line magic. (You guys in the nanotech group: the STAR TREK story referred to nanomachines as "nannites". Is that from Drexler's vocabulary, or have Rodenberry and Company coined a new word? Send e-mail, I'll summarize.) Yes, "nannites" (or "nanites", but that doesn't look like it's spelled right) could be be programmed to evolve. No, if Wesley did what he said he did, they wouldn't become intelligent. (Heinlein's THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS handled this brilliantly, but he was wrong, and too many SF writers have accepted that novel and TRUE NAMES as their major computer science textbooks.-) Yes, they could be intelligent in some sense, individually or collectively. Yes, they could easily fix the computer's memory that fast. No, I don't think they could have taken over another machine so quickly (and it was a dumb way to give them a voice, IMHO). The major problem with nanotechnology and science fiction, as my friend Dale Skran has pointed out, is that the characters are no longer human. They could fix broken bones with a pill, fly to the moon without a spaceship (or even a spacesuit), and in general act in ways literally beyond our imagination. Read Drexler's book, and we'll talk. Paul S. R. Chisholm, AT&T Bell Laboratories att!pegasus!psrc, psrc@pegasus.att.com, AT&T Mail !psrchisholm I'm not speaking for the company, I'm just speaking my mind. [I for one have never heard or read "nannites". Leafing through EOC, one sees the term "assembler" used fairly consistently. I didn't the episode referred to. Would anyone care to summarize? --JoSH]
peb@tma1.eng.sun.com (Paul Baclaski) (10/11/89)
> [I for one have never heard or read "nannites". Leafing through > EOC, one sees the term "assembler" used fairly consistently. > I didn't the episode referred to. Would anyone care to summarize? > --JoSH] This episode of STTNG indeed incorporated the idea of nanotechnology in the form of tiny robots. Wesley was doing a science project in which he took these off the shelf nanites, as he called them, and modified them to talk to each other to share knowledge. They escaped and apparently could reproduce since they ended up invading the ship computer in hordes. This caused the computer to malfunction in certain ways and simultaneously not recognize that it was malfunctioning. This jepordized the ship to some degree and also caused a problem in that it could make the launch of a probe into a neutron star miss its launch window (which occured once every 196 years). They had some graphics that were supposed to represent the nanites-- it looked like a color paint program with some pixel globs moving around leaving trails behind them. It got a little hokey when Wesley used tweasers to pick up the nanites! It also looked like he was using a small optical microscope to look at them. I supposed we could assume that the nanites were much bigger than the ones Drexler envisions. Overall, for such an interesting topic, the show was not that exciting: perhaps that is good, since they did not do a gray goo show, which might alarm some people. (It might be a good thing that they did not use exact terms from EoC for the same reason.) Paul E. Baclaski Sun Microsystems peb@sun.com
landman@sun.com (Howard A. Landman x61391) (10/11/89)
In article <Oct.5.20.10.23.1989.23719@athos.rutgers.edu> psrc@pegasus.ATT.COM (Paul S. R. Chisholm) writes: >The nanotechnology described in "Evolution" (the third season premier >of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION is, um, real speculative science. >[I for one have never heard or read "nannites". Leafing through > EOC, one sees the term "assembler" used fairly consistently. > I didn't the episode referred to. Would anyone care to summarize? > --JoSH] Approximately: Ensign Wesley Crusher falls asleep while pulling an all-nighter working on his lab assignment for nanotechnology class. The project involves getting the nanites to communicate and cooperate (genetic algorithms?). Two of them escape (hasn't the federation thought of containment facilities yet?). They begin eating the Enterprise main computer memory for raw materials. Various utterly unbelievable computer malfunctions ensue (I guess the Fed *still* haven't figured out fault-tolerant computing). The nanites use the raw materials to reproduce. Their colony develops an intelligence. A physicist kills part of the colony and the rest of the nanites go for revenge. Picard is about to order radiation sterilization of the memory cores whan Data is able to make contact with the nanites. Eventually they agree to fix the memory if they get a planet to themselves. All in all, not too awful. The general level of scientific content in the ST:TNG scripts has been far higher than in the original ST. This episode is one example; another episode they discussed modifying the transporter biofilter to try to cure Dr. Pulaski of a nasty virus-like condition. Another episode featured the Borg, who are cyborgs, and whose ships can heal themselves (although they look like one of those cubes that comes out of an automobile compacter). Of course, it's not Nova or The Day The Universe Changed; but it's not Space:1999 either ... Howard A. Landman landman@eng.sun.com
al@questar.questar.mn.org (Al Viall) (11/07/89)
In article <Oct.10.20.40.23.1989.6500@athos.rutgers.edu>, peb@tma1.eng.sun.com (Paul Baclaski) writes: > [ Text Deleted ] > it looked like a color paint program with some pixel globs moving > around leaving trails behind them. It got a little hokey when Wesley > used tweasers to pick up the nanites! It also looked like he was > using a small optical microscope to look at them. I supposed we could > assume that the nanites were much bigger than the ones Drexler envisions. > Wesley did NOT pick up the nannites using the tweasers. What he picked up was a sample of computer chips from one container and dropped it into the container containing the nannites which he had captured. The small container was actually a sort of mousetrap for nannites, which the process of how it works escapes me, but I would guess a little bait and some sort of field to prevent escape once inside. The reason for the computer chip was to show the reaction between the nannites with the chip which was, as they put it, "candy to them". - Al - -- | INTERNET: al@questar.QUESTAR.MN.ORG | "What we need, is someone like | | UUCP: ..!amdahl!tcnet!questar!al | Gorby in charge of our National | | FIDONET: 1/242:1,2 (Al Viall) | Space Policy. At least THEY can | | "WHAT! You want ME to eat THAT? No Way!" | do it. And with bread lines, yet"|