cphoenix@csli.Stanford.EDU (Chris Phoenix) (08/24/89)
Why use an external fog for crash protection? Why not have it built in to your body all the time? You could remove, say, one cell in 5 or 6 in your bones and blood vessels. In the extra space, put nanotech structures which are normally very flexible-- but if they detect breakage, or acceleration over 10 G's, they link and stiffen. This gives not only crash protection, but also cut and bruise and broken bone protection. And it removes the problem of brain sloshing, since the brain would be held immobile by its interior blood vessels, with maybe some cross-bracing to the skull. You might have to provide some extra bracing around fluid-filled cavities such as the heart and digestive system, but it shouldn't be too hard to design. Questions: How much injury could you prevent without making the system trigger too often? If such a thing were invented, it would almost certainly be modified for remote-control, say of prisoners. This raises issues I'm not going to get into. If the crash were intense enough to trigger the system around the heart, you would basically stop it beating on the order of a second. How easy would it be to make absolutely sure it would start again? Having such a system would encourage people to take more risks, such as diving off bridges just for kicks. Eventually, someone would make it fail. What then? You could, I suppose, build in a broadcast system, so that whenever something major triggered it, it would call an ambulance. If you were found without a car wreck nearby, you'd be in trouble. How strong could you make it, anyway? Would you have to displace too much tissue to get a workable system? I stuck to blood vessel walls because they go almost everywhere and aren't used for too much, but would you have to go outside them to have a workable system? How much acceleration could someone protected this way handle? In a sci-fi book I read, there was the suggestion of a transportation system based on many tiny fibers that went through your body structure and then were pulled very fast to where you wanted to go. Could this be used as part of a similar system? Just put you in an acceleration frame, then shoot you wherever at 100 G's. -- Chris Phoenix | I'm a paranoid schizophrenic! I'm after me! cphoenix@csli.Stanford.EDU | "More input! More input!" For every idiot-proof system, a new improved idiot will arise to overcome it. Disclaimer: I want a kinder, gentler net with a thousand pints of lite. [Well, suppose we replaced all the collagen in our bodies with diamond fiber. We might be significantly tougher. This gets into the area of remaking ourselves, which I personally think is a more difficult subject than designing things from scratch, but sure is interesting. Rather than simple accident protection, the first thing I expect to see is (a) increasing strength and stamina (b) ability to survive in extreme environments (space, Antarctica, undersea) and/or (c) real time polymorphism under conscious control. --JoSH]
hkhenson@cup.portal.com (09/01/89)
I can't resist adding my two cents to nanotech improved damage resistant methods for people. One of my favorates is to have some open space in the tissues. When your enhansed body locally senses a bullet on the way, it just pulls the tissue back from the projected path, and the bullet passes through causing no damage. After being in a fight (and before the holes closed up) a person might look like swiss cheese. (Or showing my age, Al Capp's Fearless Fossdick) Keith Henson
gordon@idca.tds.philips.nl (Gordon Booman) (09/08/89)
I don't think we would bother with Utility Fog for Crash Protection. At least, not external Fog. If the problem is the brain sloshing up against the skull, why not solidify the brain and its surrounding fluid whenever great acceleration is detected? Inject nano-machines into the brain that just roll around until accelerated, at which point the reach out and grab someone. Seems a lot simpler than Utility Fog. (Hah! as if any of these schemes were easy!) I said "At least, not external Fog." The point being that internal Fog (general purpose nanomachines saturating the body) would be quite useful for medical and other reasons... -- Gordon Booman SSP/V3 Philips TDS Apeldoorn, The Netherlands +31 55 432785 domain: gordon@idca.tds.philips.nl uucp: ...!mcvax!philapd!gordon [Internal nanomachines are "older" as a concept than the Fog since they are discussed in EoC. I figured that the Fog would be easier to do, since there's more unused room in the air than most people's heads, and the body is sensitive to things like being flooded with strange synthetic molecules. --JoSH]
landman@sun.com (Howard A. Landman x61391) (09/13/89)
In article <Sep.7.22.23.36.1989.18912@athos.rutgers.edu> gordon@idca.tds.philips.nl (Gordon Booman) writes: >If the problem is the brain sloshing up against the skull, why not >solidify the brain and its surrounding fluid whenever great acceleration >is detected? Inject nano-machines into the brain that just roll around >until accelerated, at which point the reach out and grab someone. >Seems a lot simpler than Utility Fog. (Hah! as if any of these schemes >were easy!) In that case, we hardly need nanotechnology. We already know how to make solutions that become more viscous under stress - cornstarch and water demonstrates the principle admirably well. We just need to design something non-toxic and compatible with cerebro-spinal fluid. Of course, we could always make genes to build it in. A related question: is it clear that we *could* build acceleration triggers on a nano scale? Wouldn't Brownian motion constantly be setting them off? The kinetic environment at that scale is *very* noisy! Howard A. Landman landman@sun.com [The Utility Fog schemes, as I originally envisioned them, require an overall control. There is not enough information avalible to the individual Foglet to make the right decisions, even if it had the processing power. --JoSH]