josh@aramis.rutgers.edu (08/18/89)
Utility Fog -- the Machine of the Future The origin of this idea was that I have a half-hour commute, and thus plenty of time to think idly about random things like nanotechnological applications, but over a background of cars, traffic, etc. So it occurred to me to wonder what a nanotech seatbelt would be like. Suppose you have your car filled with molecular-sized robots, floating around in the air. *Lots* of them. Now when an accident occurs, they need only reach out and grab the assembler/robot next to them, forming a 3-dimensional interlocking structure. And incidentally transforming the air in the car from a gas to a solid. Assuming the network extended down into your lungs and other airspaces in your body, you could drive into a brick wall at 100 mph without serious injury. So what else is like a car wreck? Your house being struck by the shock wave from a nuclear (or conventional) bomb. Surround and fill your house with a gas of such assemblers, and when the bombs fall, the area around your house becomes a low, sloping, *solid*, dome, easily reflecting the shock wave. Indeed, it wouldn't be too hard to reflect visible and IR radiation, since the assemblers are just about the right size to pull off some serious optical polymorphism: mirror, transparent, or any color of the rainbow, just a matter of how far you bend that arm and whether these conducting patches touch or not... Indeed, why build a house in the first place? Just have the gadgets hold hands in the places the walls are supposed to be. Like green grass on the floor, and perching purple pteradons for decor? Easy. Any object can be simulated at a level too fine for human senses to detect the deception. Instantly, since the individual assemblers are already there, they just need to grab hold in the right pattern. This includes machines, of course, at least gross physical machines. Nanotech-level machinery would either have to be permanent or part of the assemblers themselves. Your "personal computer", for example, might consist of some space-time-slice of the dynamic network running on all the robots' control computers. (You might even, if you were a follower of Hans Moravec, want to download into the Utility Fog. Talk about having your head in the clouds...) Whether you do that, or use a somewhat more conventional neural connection (the Fog would have no trouble obtaining a constant, detailed electroencephalogram for example) you wind up with a more-or-less direct control over your physical environment. Want a chair, a tiger, a person? Poof, they're there. *You* want to be somewhere else? Assemblers there link up in the image of you, and those around you link up in the image of the place. Telepresence. The Utility Fog seems to combine the properties of the Robot Bush and the Krell "monsters from the Id" machine in Forbidden Planet. Instead of simply controlling the matter around you, it'd *be* the matter around you, and you'd control it directly. The only exception would be items whose actual molecular structure mattered, such as food. These could be synthesized on the fly from atoms handed in bucket-brigade fashion from hidden reservoirs. It would also probably be a good defense against Grey Goo. --JoSH
Daniel.Mocsny@uc.edu (daniel mocsny) (08/22/89)
In article <Aug.17.20.53.42.1989.24513@athos.rutgers.edu>, josh@aramis.rutgers.edu writes: > Suppose you have your car filled with molecular-sized robots, floating > around in the air. *Lots* of them. Now when an accident occurs, they > need only reach out and grab the assembler/robot next to them, forming > a 3-dimensional interlocking structure. And incidentally transforming > the air in the car from a gas to a solid. Assuming the network extended > down into your lungs and other airspaces in your body, you could drive > into a brick wall at 100 mph without serious injury. Wrong. You would still die from brain injury. Your brain floats in cerebral-spinal fluid, but it is slightly denser than the surrounding fluid, so in a severe skull impact it "sinks" towards the impact point. The inside of the skull is rough where the interlocking skull bones join, so rough that the brain can be damaged by bumping it even though the dura (tough surrounding membrane) lies between the brain and skull. A typical injury is a subdural haematoma, where the stress on the brain tissue ruptures blood vessels. The subsequent bleeding causes gradual loss of brain function over a period of minutes to hours, possibly leading to death unless a brain surgeon is handy. The ability of the brain to withstand accelerations is well-known. I believe 600 g's is usually fatal; 300 g's leaves you a pretty good mess; 100 g's gives you a severe headache and perhaps a concussion. Helmets for motorcyclists and bicyclists contain crushable material to reduce the accelerations in typical impacts to a survivable level, I think the number was 50 g's. For the utility fog to work, it would have to have some give, like an air bag does. Ideally, it would continuously tailor its properties to keep accelerations on vulnerable bodyparts to survivable levels. In challenging impacts (e.g., airplane crashes) where some injury is unavoidable, it could dynamically optimize its properties to minimize the injury. BTW, standard automobile air bags can already protect in seemingly hopeless impacts. I read about a man driving a light car who hit a tractor-trailer head on. Both vehicles were going over 60 mph, so with change of direction the air-bag equipped car had an impact equivalent to hitting a stationary, unyielding object at 120 mph. The driver had a few broken bones, but he walked away (after the wrecking crew cut him out of the car). I don't have a reference. While we are on the subject of surrounding ourselves with material that changes, I for one would have immediate use for smart clothes that could tailor their thermal properties. I ride a bicycle in winter, and I find that no available clothing works well. When I am climbing a hill, I can be generating body heat at over 10 times my resting rate. My airspeed, and thus my cooling rate, is relatively low at the time. The thermal delay created by winter clothing insures that I get quite sweaty. When I roll down the other side at 40--50 mph my work rate drops to little more than my resting rate while the wind chill gets ridiculous. A few cycles of that spells a curious form of misery where I seem to be freezing and sweating concurrently. Eventually the accumulated sweat wins, and I have to get back indoors. What I need is smart nanotech clothing that gets itself largely out of the way when I am accumulating heat, then comes back when I need it. Dan Mocsny dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu [Decelerating from 100 mph at 100 G you will travel 3.3 feet. A deceleration path of at least that length should be left in any Utility Fog seatbelt designs, should anyone reading this be designing one... --JoSH]
rod@venera.isi.edu (Rodney Doyle Van Meter III) (08/22/89)
A quibble and a question: Re: hitting a brick wall at 100mph Let's use "immovable object" so people don't start getting pedantic about breaking through. In a standard size car, you don't want to hit it head on at anything above 35mph. There's basically no way to prevent brain damage at anything above that speed. Even if you decellerate uniformly from the moment your car touches and finish when your head reaches the wall, your brain will slosh against your brain case, almost certainly causing brain damage and reaching real jelly stage by 70 mph (4 times the kinetic energy). This from friends of mine who make airbag sensors for cars, so they're familiar with this stuff. Of course, even most head on collisions don't really have the dynamics of hitting immovable objects, usually the cars end up spinning and skidding around for a while. I think even nanomachines will have a tough time changing this fact of life, though you never know. Questions: Where does the energy come from to power this Utility Fog, where does its waste heat go, and what is the maximum density of this stuff? Also, if it's to be a fog, where do raw materials come from, or does the fog itself not grow (all premade)? When do we get nanomachines that can help with our pollution (particularly air pollution) problems? Seems to me we should be on the verge of producing microbes that are airborne and quite happy on a diet of nitrogen and sulphur compounds, simply by virtue of the strain we're already putting on the system. -=-Rod [This is a good quibble, see dmocsny's letter. However, I would like to note that a certain amount of the "brain sloshing" damage in collisions comes from the braincase's *rotation* as the head whips around. This mode of damage at least would be reduced. Purely guessing now, I would suggest that a good structural material for Fog assemblers might be silicon nitride, primarily since these are two extremely abundant elements. Energy is a subject of considerable interest, which has been discussed here before (and will again, I'm sure). My favorite scheme involves replacing grass with a nanoengineered replacement that stores and transmits solar energy (but still looks like grass). Power could be transmitted to anywhere it's needed by dynamically created pathways trough the Fog. --JoSH]
cphoenix@csli.Stanford.EDU (Chris Phoenix) (08/24/89)
In article <Aug.21.18.07.18.1989.21876@athos.rutgers.edu> JoSH writes: > ... My favorite scheme involves replacing grass with a nanoengineered > replacement that stores and transmits solar energy (but still looks > like grass). Power could be transmitted to anywhere it's needed by > dynamically created pathways trough the Fog. Wouldn't it be easier, and cause a lot less screaming among the Luddites, to just design something that could grow *inside* the grass? Replacing the grass entirely would cause several problems: It would be inedible, it wouldn't have the root system (unless you designed that too) so the ground under it would erode or leach, ... Nanotech is great, but we might want to think about working with the systems already in place rather than replacing them. I'm not sure if the argument holds in this case, but if nanotech viruses and gragu won't be too much worse than evolution could come up with, then probably nanotech grass won't be too much better. Why not save ourselves the hassle? -- 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. [The root system constitute the power grid to collect the energy generated by the leaves. It could be designed not only to prevent but reverse erosion. You might want your lawn to be inedible, and plant something different in the cow pasture. Nanograss could thrive in areas where biograss does not, i.e. deserts. But primarily, I'm assuming that low level infestations of gray goo will do serious harm to most of the earth's biological inventory in the next century, and it will simply be necessary to replace it. --JoSH]
mmm@cup.portal.com (08/24/89)
With an advanced technology like utility fog, why would you be in a car? What reason would you have for going any place outside your house? Everything small can be brought to you or manufactured at your house, and virtual reality can take you to the big things like the Grand Canyon. It's like saying, "Once we have nanotechnology, what will be the highest recording density on a floppy disk?" The answer is that the question isn't relevant. There won't be floppy disks, roll film, punch cards, etc. I think the only time you would risk travel would be when you move away from your parents, and when you get married. When people have indefinite lifespan, I think they will be much more careful about avoiding potential causes of death. Now, utility fog might make sense in the home. Here in California, we get a 7.0 earthquake every couple of hundred years. The East Coast also gets large earthquakes, but less frequently. (However the largest earthquake ever to hit the U.S. was the New Madrid earthquake, which rang church bells in Boston.) If you are planning to live for 1000 years in California, you must be prepared to survive several severe earthquakes. (Assuming a way to predict or prevent earthquakes doesn't render the problem moot; of course, there will still be the threat of being hit by a meteor.) [In the long run, you just transmit your downloaded "self" to the Fog wherever you want to appear. In the short run, who knows what kind of beloved toys (ie cars) you might want to keep around? --JoSH]
"Keith_J._Emanuel.HENR801c"@xerox.com (09/01/89)
Josh et al, Chris Phoenix make a valid point that you seemed to gloss over or treated a little too lightly for me ! The use of Nanotechnology is the most powerful proposition to come down the pipe in all of recorded history. It provides the power to recreate the world within the scope of our imagination. What a seductive possibility. BUT, as Chris points out, all of the repercussions of of our actions must be thought out. The nanograss idea is interesting, but the role of actual grass is pervasive. Modifing existing grass seems vastly safer and wiser than attempting to make a leap to all NEW nanograss. Our track record for anticipating the results of such moves have historically been poor. Keith J. Emanuel Xerox Corp. [I would go so far as to say that "we" have virtually never correctly anticipated the effects of a major technological innovation, indeed our hindsight as to the effects of accomplished innovations isn't even very good. My feeling is, we have a pretty good record in understanding and controlling physical developments, as far as their effect on the physical environment is concerned. I have no great qualms about continuing to develop along those lines at a relatively unrestrained pace. The technology we do not understand, and that is modifying our world far faster and more drastically, is ideas/information/social. We do not know whether a society is stable in the long run with television, for example... We have a hell of a lot slimmer chance of "anticipating the results of such moves" as a hypertext publishing medium than of playing with the grass. Now the question is, does this mean we shouldn't build such a medium? Isn't it more important to give up TV than CFC's? The printing press arguably caused 200 years of bitter religious war. Can we afford 200 years of total warfare starting with today's level of technology, much less nanotech? (ps, these are questions, not answers. My attempts at answers might surprize you.) --JoSH]
brucec@demiurge.wv.tek.com (Bruce Cohen;685-2439;61-028) (09/08/89)
In article <Aug.31.17.31.37.1989.11982@athos.rutgers.edu> JoSH writes: > >[I would go so far as to say that "we" have virtually never correctly > anticipated the effects of a major technological innovation, indeed > our hindsight as to the effects of accomplished innovations isn't > even very good. My feeling is, we have a pretty good record in > understanding and controlling physical developments, as far as their > effect on the physical environment is concerned. I have no great qualms > about continuing to develop along those lines at a relatively unrestrained > pace. > The technology we do not understand, and that is modifying our world > far faster and more drastically, is ideas/information/social. We do > not know whether a society is stable in the long run with television, > for example... We have a hell of a lot slimmer chance of "anticipating > the results of such moves" as a hypertext publishing medium than of > playing with the grass. I don't agree: I think the problems are equally complex, and equally hard to solve. We can anticipate physical developments when the cause/effect relationships are straightforward; we're terrible at it when the systems have complex feedback loops. Consider: the argument over the Gaia hypothesis is currently centered around the question of whether some hypoothesized feedback loops even exist; forget about the question of their quantitative attributes. How can you predict a system whose composition you don't know? Biological evolution has produced a complex web of interrelationships whose nature we are only just discovering; we certainly don't have any consistent, detailed models of the kind which allow prediction. And just as in the prediction of social systems, it's often the completely unexpected tertiary effects which cause the most perturbation. In the social system, a classic example is the effect of the automobile on courtship customs and the (possibly) consequent decline of the extended family (I don't have a reference for this theory, but I've heard it often enough that I suspect a lot of people believe it. Does anyone know if it is still in vogue in sociology circles?). In the biological/ecological system, a good example is the, at first parasitic, then symbiotic relationship between certain microbes and the primitive ancestors of the eukaryotes, which resulted in giant cells capable of evolving into multi-cellular organisms and colonizing large parts of Earth which were hostile to the individual partners of the symbiosis. > --JoSH] "Small men in padded bras don't look the same falling from high places." - R.A. MacAvoy, "The Third Eagle" Bruce Cohen brucec@orca.wv.tek.com Interactive Technologies Division, Tektronix, Inc. M/S 61-028, P.O. Box 1000, Wilsonville, OR 97070