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| Solar nanoantennas |
| RepRap the self-replicating 3D printer |
| 2007 Year in Review |
| Stanford nanowire battery produces 10x more electricity |
| Toshiba Builds 100x Smaller Micro Nuclear Reactor |
A 2-part piece by Bill Softky
(from bafuture)
Part 1: Software engineers - the ultimate brain scientists?
Part 2: Design patterns for a Black Box Brain?
It is most of all the power of destructive self-replication in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) that should give us pause. Self-replication is the modus operandi of genetic engineering, which uses the machinery of the cell to replicate its designs, and the prime danger underlying gray goo in nanotechnology. Stories of run-amok robots like the Borg, replicating or mutating to escape from the ethical constraints imposed on them by their creators, are well established in our science fiction books and movies. It is even possible that self-replication may be more fundamental than we thought, and hence harder - or even impossible - to control. A recent article by Stuart Kauffman inNature titled “Self-Replication: Even Peptides Do It” discusses the discovery that a 32-amino-acid peptide can “autocatalyse its own synthesis.” We don’t know how widespread this ability is, but Kauffman notes that it may hint at “a route to self-reproducing molecular systems on a basis far wider than Watson-Crick base-pairing.
- From Bill Joy’s Why the future doesn’t need us
a sample of their planned menu of nanotechnological wonders:
With their multiple personalities, quantum states could form the heart of a massively parallel computer (New Scientist)
Whereas the nanobots of sci-fi nightmares are implausible little devices that mine atoms from the environment and use them to build more nano-brothers and sisters, von Kiedrowski ’s versions are based on the tried-and-tested molecular replicator DNA. Hisprototype replicators rely on the same principles that enable DNA to copy itself to pass on their own assembly instructions to a new generation. Why go to all the bother of designing replication systems from scratch, von Kiedrowski asks, when nature already has a good way of doing it?
That ’s not the only reason for nanotech scientists to seize on DNA ’s double helix. Over the past decade or so they have learnt that DNA is also the ideal construction material for nanoscale engineering. Usually building nanomachines is a fiddly and laborious task. But not if you can make the building blocks spontaneously join together in the desired arrangement, or self-assemble. And to do that, they need to be programmed with the right assembly instructions.
- From New Scientist
Humanity is remarkable in its resourcefulness. In the last hundred years or so we have made great leaps in the fields of technological advancement. Could our next evolutionary step arise from the merging of biology…and technology?
- From STELARC : Cybernetic Visionary
…are clearly outside the scope of human experience, others are not. Under the right conditions, for example, we can perceive single quantum events, and neuronal synapses rely on electron “tunneling,” a quantum effect that allows electrons to jump across forbidden energy zones (Hameroff, 1998; Wolf, 1999). We are not ordinarily aware of quantum or relativistic effects, but we are nevertheless composed of the same fabric of the universe as rocks, stars and blackholes. Thus, it is conceivable that exotic time -loops, reversals, symmetries and acausal correlations may lurk deep within us. If this were so, how might such experiences manifest? Consciously, they may emerge as precognitions of future events. And unconsciously, perhaps they would be experienced as intuitive hunches, gut feelings, and synchronicities.
Excerpt from Dean Radin’s Time-reversed human experience
Are we the last generations of homo sapiens? Has the transition already started, subconsciously and overtly? Will our retired years will be spent interacting with modified transhumans, cyborgs, posthuman entities, massive intelligent networks, immersive virtual environments, ubiquitous and invisible interfaces, and other technological creations with radically different physical configurations? Whether this will cure your boredom or induce complex psychological neuroses remains to be seen.
it’s happening faster than you realize
time and space are slipping away
folding inward past the nanozone
disrupting the very laws of nature
bear witness to the shifting [r]evolution
and prepare for the change
why are You on this stretch of the curve?
TECHNOLOGY HAS ALWAYS been a double-edged sword, empowering both our creative and our destructive natures. It has brought us longer and healthier lives, freedom from physical and mental drudgery, and many new creative possibilities. Yet it has also introduced new and salient dangers.
Learning to Control a Brain-Machine Interface for Reaching and Grasping by Primates, PLoS Biology.
