The Trajectory of Technology

I’ve been exploring some recent developments in chemical synthesis and self-assembly that suggest attractive possibilities for engineering robust self-assembling molecular systems. Boronate esters are involved in two ways.

Two days ago, I sat down to write about this, but then I read further into the literature, and learned substantially more. Yesterday, another cycle of the same. There’s entirely too much relevant information and progress. Maybe tomorrow.

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The greatest problem with fusion power is rarely mentioned and not on the research agenda. When I discussed it earlier, in “Fusion Power: A New Way to Boil Water”, I hadn’t seen this (quietly damning) report, which I think is worth quoting:

From the introduction:

The goal of this activity is to provide guidance to the fusion energy sciences community based on industry requirements…

Buried among the discussions of plasma physics, neutron fluxes, and a host of practical engineering concerns, there is a page that briefly notes the “Achilles’ Heel” that makes the rest look like an academic exercise. There is no mention of the problem in the introduction or the conclusions:

From page 22:

Fusion fuel is cheap, but the capital costs are high. This may be the Achilles Heel of economic fusion power. The capital costs must be lowered by significant amounts — an order of magnitude of cost reduction would be highly desirable but probably not attainable. Traditional cost cutting efforts offer marginal improvements and will not be sufficiently effective. Innovative approaches that promise orders of magnitude cost reductions on major items must be aggressively pursued… [This will require] new fabrication and production technologies….

Emphasis added.

Translation: There is no known way to build a remotely economical fusion power plant, even if the fuel is free and the plasma physics works perfectly.

The report speaks of potential, unspecified, orders-of-magnitude reductions in fabrication cost, but what would other technologies look like if evaluated by the same rules?

Advances that would drop the cost of future fusion power machines into a range competitive with current photovoltaic devices are on a scale that would drop the cost of future photovoltaic devices to almost nothing.

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As I showed before, here’s the planned ITER reactor, including the high-vacuum chamber and its surrounding high-field superconducting magnets, together with the requisite particle accelerators, power systems, etc.,. Ordinary nuclear reactors are mostly plumbing; this is a fancy physics apparatus, more nearly comparable to the Large Hadron Collider.

For scale, note the person in the blue coat standing at the bottom:

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The plasma physics problems are a fascinating distraction from the physics of advanced fabrication. (This would, admittedly, solve the cost problem.)

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See also:

• The Physical Basis of High-Throughput Atomically Precise Manufacturing
• Fusion Power: A New Way to Boil Water

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The Edge Annual Question — 2010 asks “How is the Internet changing the way you think?”, with answers by (to borrow from the Edge description) “an array of world-class scientists, artists, and creative thinkers” that includes technology analyst Nicholas Carr, social software guru Clay Shirky, science historian George Dyson, and Web 2.0 pioneer Tim O’Reilly, among many others (Richard Dawkins, Nicholas Taleb, Marin Rees, Sean Carroll…). The landscape of social cognition is changing, and the authors offer many views and maps.

In my answer I discuss how the Internet boosts the growth of human knowledge in a way that is powerful and yet — by nature — almost invisible: It helps us see what’s missing:
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The cover of Science features atomically precise inorganic nanostructures, polyoxometalates (POMs), that form by means of atomically precise templates. The outer rings of these structures contain 150 molybdenum atoms.

POMs are a diverse class of nanoscale metal-oxide structures with characteristics that make them remarkably attractive as potential components for self-assembled composite nanosystems.

These characteristics include:

• Atomically precise structures
• Diverse sizes, shapes, properties, and functions
• Good mechanical stiffness
• Facile aqueous synthesis (see below)
• Biomolecular compatibility

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The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday, “Feynman and the Futurists”, about Feynman’s ideas, mine, how the nanotechnology bandwagon got rolling, and how the band got thrown off the wagon — and then, out of the shadows, the NRC report and why the U.S. government should implement the NRC’s recommendations.

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Part 6 of a series prompted by the recent 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”. This is arguably the most important post of the series, or of this blog to date.

Topics:
— The most credible study of molecular manufacturing to date
— The study’s recommendations for Federal research support
— The current state of progress toward implementation
— The critical problem: not science, but institutions and focus

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A formal, Federal-level study has examined the physical principles of high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing (aka molecular manufacturing), assessing its feasibility and closing with a call for experimental research.

Surprisingly, this recommendation smacks of heresy in some circles, and the very idea of examining the subject met strong opposition.

The process in outline: Congress voted to direct the U.S. National Research Council, the working arm of the U.S. National Academies, to conduct, as part of the lengthy Triennial Review of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, what in the House version had been described as a “Study on molecular manufacturing…to determine the technical feasibility of the manufacture of materials and devices at the molecular scale”, and in response, the NRC convened a study committee that organized a workshop, examined the literature, deliberated, and reported their conclusions, recommending appropriate research directions for moving the field forward, including experimental research directed toward development of molecular manufacturing.

NRC studies are not haphazard processes, and the National Academies website describes its procedures in substantial detail. Because the NRC often advises the Federal government on politically charged questions, “Checks and balances are applied at every step in the study process to protect the integrity of the reports and to maintain public confidence in them.” These include independent scientific review of reports that are themselves the product of independent experts assembled with attention to potential conflicts of interest.

It’s worth taking a moment to compare the NRC to the three previous leading sources of information on molecular manufacturing: committed advocates, committed critics, and self-propagating mythologies. None of these is remotely comparable. Unless one has studied the topic closely and in technical detail, it seems reasonable to adopt the committee’s conclusions as a rough-draft version of reality, and to proceed from there.

Here are some excerpts that I think deserve special emphasis, followed by the concluding paragraph of the report:
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Comments on “Molecular Manufacturing: The NRC study and its recommendations” are invited below.

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