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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Morgenstern" data-source="post: 3131096" data-attributes="member: 5485">No, you wouldn't need anti-matter (whole other topic which I'll leave to Pbartender <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />) but usually when nono-tech gets presented in fiction you dump it on a pile of wood, and and up pops a chair after a (very) short while. As if the nanite were solar powered... or perhaps (very) convienently wood-powered. Nanites are damn small - that's the point, so they really can't be solar powered  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> - no surface area. Most likely they'll have to be chemically powered, so are a lot like bacteria.A lot like bacteria.The idea of in-body nanotech being able to leech of chemical energy by stealing sugars from the body isn't a bad one. Other stuff parasitizes us in that fashion, so there are already chemical blue-prints for it out there to steal for our proposed nano-tech. But as that stuff is wandering around my body, I want it to show restraint on a body-wide scale. That means the nanites have to be superbly networked so they don't snatch sugars in areas that are highly sensitive - i.e. "no feeding in my brain please. Get lunch in my muscle tissue before commuting up there to work. Ok?" That mean more energy loss (in communication and navigation) and more size/complexity of the nanite (having a working understanding of location a typical body or coding guidelines/tables for decision trees based on sugar availability). That extra work makes me wonder if it really will be all that vastly more efficient than other tools available to us. There are a lot of separate disciplines at work here that have to go a long towards making something like this happen. Especially in a tumultuous chemical envronment like a working body. A person goes jogging long enough to draw down blood oxygen levels to shift their musculature into semi-anabolic mode... Does all their nanotech flip out when it can't scavenge the oxygen it needs to metabolize its stolen sugars? Non-destructive shutdown mode... and more code. Like the body itself, you'll probably see working nanotech at that level able to produce specialized sub-units working towards a single overall goal. You plant a seed - the only part of the nanotech capable of self-replication and it releases sub-types as needed. It uses many types of working nanites to do the job, but its also putting out diagnostic nanites that tell it what is going on, and it puts out feeder nanites that go colonize the stomach and steal food there are the central source and package it for use by the other nanites in a way parallel to but undisturbed by the host metbolism. This seed doesn't actually have to suffer all the limitations of nano-tech in terms of size/suficient volume to store the MASSIVE istruction set needed - it could be the size of a kernel of corn inserted under the skin and simply manage a bunch of non-replicating servant nanites for the host's benefit.Part of the problem is scale. The chair example is perfect for that - you are expecting machinery capable of moving atoms around to produce an object in the human scale - devices with an individual range of perception in the nanometer range are going to have to produce a object with smooth lines in the meter range - 1 atom at a time. In other words, getting it right 50 Quadrillion times along the axis (conservatively).  It's like humans building a 10,000 mile long road in a perfectly straight line - by eyeballing it. If you want to give them survey equipment its going to take extra size to store that coding and every ditch digger doesn't need the full package. You just need a site manager every few miles, who reports to a bigger boss in however many levels of heirarchy it takes to do the job, but not every bit of it needs to be a von Neumann device, and really, you don't want the bactieria self-replicating because they are going to mutatate. Things at the nanoscale break when stray particles hit them. So you'd need redundancy, which means more code/size, which means more value in restricting the replication abilities to larger, hardier nanites, or things that aren't nano-sized at all.Nano-tech IS real, and in its infancy. Electricity is alos real, and we tried to attribute ressurection to its many promises early on. We did the same thing with radiation, and we did it again with genetics. Nano-tech is the new magic du jour of fiction, and its real world incarnation will get better and better as it matures, but a lot of early thinking on it is just hooey, same as every other revolutionary advance. Its not going to work as fast as people now think, be as clean as people think, be as cheap as people think, and it's going to be a lot harder to use inside bodies than most people think. And by people I mean many of the sci-fi writers who are giving us our perceptions of where this technological concept will be when it does mature. That's mostly where I am going with this <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />.(small plug - I'm working on the RPG Farthest Star. It includes some of what I think of as plausible mature nano-tech in a firm-Sci-fi environment. So it has been on my mind a few years. Nano in FS does neat stuff, but it has its limits too.)</blockquote>

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