[tt] advanced nanotechnology - Where is mechanosynthesis? In progress but underfunded.

[Eugen Leitl]

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----- Forwarded message from "Perry E. Metzger" <perry at piermont.com> -----

From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry at piermont.com>
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 15:26:49 -0400
To: Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>
Cc: tt at postbiota.org, perry at piermont.com
Subject: Re: [tt] advanced nanotechnology - Where is mechanosynthesis? In progress but underfunded.
User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.1 (berkeley-unix)


> [7]IEEE Spectrum asks where is my mechanosynthesis?

I decided several years ago that I was interested in helping make
mechanosynthesis happen. I was bored with my career, lucrative and
successful though it was, and thought this would be a much bigger
challenge.

I started taking university classes in chemistry and physics (and I've
done very well in them), and I started looking around for PhD programs
that I could apply to so that I could become an expert in the field
and work to push it forward.

I started looking around almost two years ago for a PhD program in
which to work on the problem, and in the interim I've failed to find
one.

>From what I can tell, we more or less have Robert Freitas doing
theoretical work, no one doing any lab work, and no places for
aspiring PhD students to join up with the effort at all.

I've asked certain well known people in the field (indeed, some of the
best known people in the field) for advice or even encouragement, and
generally speaking they don't bother replying to one's email, or if
they do they send a line or two saying "sorry, no advice to give, good
luck."  It feels almost as though they don't want anyone to help make
the dream happen.

So long as we're in an environment where essentially no one is working
on the problem in academia, no one is working on it in industry, and
the few that understand the problem and are in a position to mentor
people are uninterested in doing so, no one new is going to start
working on the field, no progress will be made, and we'll be more or
less where we are now for many years to come.

The vision described in Engines of Creation is an ambitious
one. Achieving it will require the labor of thousands of people in
research labs over the course of decades to achieve. This is not an
insurmountable obstacle -- it took decades and thousands of people to
get where we are today biotechnology, on the verge of the creation of
fully synthetic organisms.

However, anyone who has the ability and desire to can go off and get a
PhD in molecular biology and devote their labor to the biotechnology
effort, while no one who has ability and desire has any way at all to
join up with the non-existent mechanosynthesis research effort. Small
wonder, then, that no one is doing the research.

Thus, the vision will remain just as far away from reality for many
years to come as it is today.


Perry

----- End forwarded message -----
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