“Would aliens also have X?” for almost any X tickles the brain a lot.
The X that primed it for me just now (again) is stainless steel, but almost any generalization of it works.
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Does feel like the right way to rate the progress of a species is material technology!
Alien species prob relied on stainless steel during a brief phase of their existence? Humans have only had it for a small fraction and will likely move beyond it in time?
Great material tho!
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I’d say humans are <100 years from atomic level designer materials. Specificy the properties you want, a quantum computer figures out the optimal atomic composition and then a “printer” drags atoms intro the right place. I’d guess any sufficiently advanced civ has these 🧐🤞🙏
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Fascinating. Is there a defined path to getting there yet? Like is that <100 years a set of known challenges to solve or is the path still unknown?
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I’d point to a few things already:
link.springer.com/content/pdf/10
Chapter 5 of: pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3797/83683491c
openphilanthropy.org/sites/default/
energy.gov/eere/amo/downl
energy.gov/sites/prod/fil
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1st two have an explicit albeit preliminary claim about what to take from mechanical tips versus bio/chem blocks . The last three are about molecularly self-assembled molecular printers. Amazing to me nobody talks about this stuff anymore. Was all the rage in 2000.
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While for more recent incremental work at least exploring some new mechanisms for nano-construction, see
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Replying to @michael_nielsen
Another awesome recent example of run-in-reverse. Take (Nobel-winning) super-resolution localization microscopy and run it in closed loop with a global "ratchet" for patterning:
nature.com/articles/s4155
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About 20 years ago, people stopped talking about, or attempting to explicitly roadmap, the ambitious version Shaun mentioned, and this happened for sociological reasons. Doesn’t mean it is easy to solve the technical challenges! But could likely be <100yr if we actually tried.
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Incidentally, meanwhile, 3D carbon nanotube computers work now
poplab.stanford.edu/pdfs/Aly-N3XT1
skywatertechnology.com/industry-news/
But only DARPA is currently investing in them, not the big chip companies, because of a “valley of death” type issue commercially vis a vis discovery of markets/apps.
All I want for Christmas is... reasonable societal infrastructure for developing advanced nanofabrication platform technologies.
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So ... by "elves" you mean "grad students"
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