Molecular assembler (disambiguation)
Note: The concept of advanced assemblers for diamondoid materials is outdated!
Molecular assemblers are member of the class of mobile naoscale robotic devices ("nanobots").
The idea is to create a machine with side-lengths of a few hundred nanometers which packages all the functionality to produce useful products and also make copies of itself (directly with diamondoid mechanosynthesis). This way you get an exponential rate of replication and can produce macroscopic goods in reasonable amounts of time.
It turned out that packaging all the functionality into such a small package is a rather unbalanced and inefficient approach for technology level III. This can be seen in the nanofactory cross section image where it is visible that the bottommost assembly levels (here layers) take the largest portion of the stack. In the small package of an assembler the bottommost layers would be underrepresented making it rather slow.
Quite a bit of thought was put into the assembler model [Todo: link KSRM]. Either they where supposed to swim about in a solution or there was some form of movement mechanism in a machine phase scaffold crystal envisioned like:
- sliding cubes [TODO add references]
- legged blocks [TODO add references]
The combination of their appearance (legs or other mechanisms to move about) with their very tightly packed capability of self replication in their vacuum "belly" that seem akin to a "whomb" led to the situation that the public started to perceive this technology as swarms of tiny life like nano-bugs that could potentially start uncontrollable and unstoppable self replication. Why this is a rather miss-informed opinion can be read up here and here.
Many considerations about assemblers are still relevant:
- methods for movement e.g. for the transport of microcomponents and self repair by microcomponent replacement in the higher assembly levels of nanofactories. The legged block mobility design is also known from the concept of (speculative) utility fog but has other design priorities in a manufacturing context like more rigidity and less "intelligence".
- methods for gas tight sealing and locking parts out
- and many more ...
- the design of robotic mechanosyntesis cores
The current concetpt for advanced APM of Technology level III are atomically precise small scale factories.
The ribosome and similar artificial biomimetic nano"machines"
These are also often called molecular assembler although they are:
- non self replicvation
- critically dependant on brownian movement
- and can only assembles floppy linear chain molecules which again need brownian motion to fold into something useful
Block placing assembler linkage
Unlike diamondoid assemblers this idea is not outdated. Atomically precise building blocks from structural DNA nanotechnology that are pre-produced by self assembly could be assembled to passive block manipulator linkages by those same passive block manipulator linkages after a first one was put together manually. Actuation could be from a chips surface (see technology level I) and self replication could work in the form of exponential assembly.
