"Benford-Biotech" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

All too often, though, in the hands of some science fiction writers, nanotech's
promised abilities -- building atom by atom for strength and purity, dramatic
new shapes and kinds of substances -- lead to excess. We see stories about
quantum, biomolecular brains for space robots, all set to conquer the stars.
About miraculous, overnight reshaping of our entire physical world -- the final
victory of Information over Mass. Or about accelerated education of our young by
nanorobots which coast through their brains, bringing encyclopedias of knowledge
disguised in a single mouthful of Koolaid.

Partly this is natural speculative outgassing. One can make at least one safe
prediction: such wild dreams will dog nanotech. The real difficulty in thinking
about possibilities is that so little seems ruled out. Agog at the horizons, we
neglect the limitations -- both physical and social.

Nanotech holds forth so much murky promise that writers can appear to be doing
hard sf, while in fact just daydreaming. Not only is the metaphorical net not up
on this game of dream tennis, it isn't even visible.

People can tell disciplined speculation from flights of fancy when they deal
with something familiar and at hand. Nanotech is neither. Worse, it touches on
the edge of quantum mechanical effects, and nothing in modem physics has been
belabored more than the inherent uncertainties of the wave-particle duality, and
the like. People often take uncertainty as a free ticket to any implausibility,
flights of fancy leaving on the hour.

Developing a discipline demands discipline. Dreaming is not enough.

One point we do know must operate in nanotech's development: nothing happens in
a vacuum. The explosion of biotech, just one or two orders of magnitude above
the nanotech scale, will deeply shape what comes of nanotech.

The transition is gradual. The finer one looks on the scale of biology, the more
it looks mechanical in style. The flagella that let bacterium swim work by an
arrangement which looks much like a motor, each proton extruded by the motor
turns the assembly a small bit of a full rotation. Above that scale, the
"biologic" of events is protean and flexible, compared with mechanical devices.
Below it, functions are increasingly more machine-like. The ultimate limit to
this would be the nanotech dream of arranging atoms precisely, as when a team at
IBM spelled out the company initials on a low temperature substrate. But
widespread application of such methods lies probably decades away, perhaps
several. The future will be vastly changed by directed biology, before nanotech
comes fully on stage.

Consider a field of maize -- corn, to Americans. At its edge a black swarm
marches in orderly, incessant columns.

Ants, their long lines carrying a kernel of corn each. Others carry bits of
husk; there an entire team coagulates around a chunk of a cob. The streams
split, kernel-carriers trooping off to a ceramic tower, climbing a ramp and
letting their burdens rattle down into a sunken vault. Each returns dutifully to