Common misconceptions about atomically precise manufacturing

APM is a very novel area of research and development that dives into fields of knowledge that are yet pretty alien for most people including many "nanotechnology" experts. When encountering a new network of knowledge one usually tries to apply existing knowledge to judge statements and claims - what else can one do. Without deeper understanding of the relationships this can lead people into trapdoors. Some are so bad that almost everyone falls in. This page is guide around those trapdoors.

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Some concepts are not exactly wrong but simply unproportionally over-represented in current mainstream media partly because they carry the "nano" tag. See: The usual suspects

It's called "nanotechnology" - not anymore

Note that the term "nanotechnology" is as specific as the term "makrotechnology" that's seldomly used because it is so unspecific. Nanotechnology is a huge field and a big part of research is done on interesting things that are on the verge of falling apart - rather the opposite of atomically precise manufacturing (APM) where the most stable structures are of interest.

We must learn from nature thus advanced productive APM must look similar to nanobiology - nonsense

It's like saying: "We must learn from nature thus planes must look like birds." There undoubtedly are things to learn (especially on the deeper not the superficial levels) but there are lots of things to shun. So much that one ends up at systems that are very different from natural ones. Technology already has shown countless of times that it can go where evolution couldn't. Probably the most obvious difference is that in fairly advanced artificial system it is better to shun brownian motion for the most part rather than to use it like nature does.

Makro scale style machinery is not suitable for nano scale devices at all - wrong

Simply wrong. - See: [1]

Living evolving insatiable swarms of super dangerous "nanobots" that metabolize just about anything - a very flawed image

APM is like swarms of "nanobots" - wrong

The main body of AP systems and products will be bulk materials produced by nanofactories. Loose (unconnectored & floating in air or water or "crawling" on surfaces) autonomous units (e.g. in form of sprays) are unpractical except in special cases like medicine and may pose environmental problems (spill of nondissolving nonrotting material). They will thus be used only limited by non rouge actors.

Pretty advanced APM systems make swarms undeniable possible but they are over- and most often misrepresented in current media. SciFi is regularely painting unrealistic pictures of the classic dystopia.

Those "nanobots" can "eat" just about anything - wrong

Main article: atomically precise disassembly

It is often thought that the capability of taking things apart atom by atom would become available just when one starts to be able to put things together atom by atom. This is far from true. Taking things apart atom by atom is a much harder problem in many cases. Beside other factors the inability to consume just about anything harshly limits the aforementioned grey goo scenario.

No disassembly.

Related

• evolution

Almost everything will be buildable - often misunderstood

It is often thought that APM is supposed to be able to produce almost anything (often formulated: all allowed structures permissible by physical law) including e.g. food, wood, plastics and metal parts but this is surely not the case.

Take a look at the "mechanosynthesis"-page and you will find that the range of materials and strucuctures targeted lies in a very narrow range. The magic lies in the diamondoid metamaterials that emulate properties above the atomic level.

This is not to say it will be impossible for all times to assemble materials (or rather compounds) lying outside the narrow set of now targeted materials. When the technology will have been around for quite a while very advanced extensions may be able to do this but this is way beyond the scope of any current day APM attainment project.

No food

Advanced APM is not in any way intended to be a means for food production. Structures out of solvated weakly linked non stiff proteins and lipid layers are a good example of "anti-diamondoid" materials.

Attempting to create genetic twin tissue (avoiding the need for a complete scan) has the problem that information extraction from DNA to a spacial (not only typological) atom and molecule configuration is not straightforward to say the least. There's not only the forward protein folding problem but also the yet unsolved riddle how body shape at all scales is encoded.

Why an perfect 1:1 copy of a steak is and will stay impossible

Attempting to create exact copies down to atomic resolution of an original tissue at this point seems ridiculously complex. Some kind of very advanced scan (atomically precise disassembly) of the original would be needed to be performed in advance. Trying to compress quasi-random atom configurations data hierarchically like in diamondoid APM systems would probably lead to strange unnatural compression artifacts. The need to produce everything in a frozen state (ice crystals) might be a hard problem but one of the most minute ones.

Tasty "meta-food" may be creatable (given sufficient design effort in chain molecule mechanosynthesis capabilities)

Creating something edible by mixing pure synthesizes molecules together (quite a lot of sloppy molecules need to be synthesizable thus not something to expect early on) together would produce something like an advanced nourishment dough. One may be able to fake familiar food for the human senses or make something else heterogeneous and tasty but it's questionable whether we really desire to fool ourselves. At some ends deficiencies through lopsided nutrition may arise while at other ends food might get a lot healthier. A mixed nutrition with natural food will probably be best.

Competing with cheap potatoes is hard

Note: Plants are already self replicating and thus cheap. Most people just don't grow all of the plants they consume because they need space, sun, soil, and often industrial post processing. Advanced (technical) APM will bring all the other stuff to the same or lower price level per mass. Including means for easier plant breeding.

To be competitive with the cheap self replicating food that we eat today tissue construction via advanced mechanosynthetic means (e.g. a pie like this hoax [2]) must be quite a bit faster than biological machinery. This may be expectable but at this point the highly diverse tool-tip chemistry at cryogenic temperatures and at the threshold of stability needed poses a prohibitively high barrier. That is barely any exploratory engineering can be applied here. Further some kind of hierarchical assembly that completely replaces the natural system would be needed.

Other sources of synthetic food

Also other technology branches (bio-nanotechnology ...) unrelated to APM may be able to produce edible tissues before of after we attain advanced APM capabilities.

Flawed critics about the fundamentals

Thermodynamics prevents one from having every atom at the place we want it - wrong for practical scales

If one just looks at the atom displacements from thermal movement at room temperature alone big macroscopic slabs of stiff diamondoid materials stay atomically precise for long periods of time from a human perspective. More serious are effects from hard ionizing radiation that can't be shielded effective against with. Reliability and redundancy make things work practically nevertheless. Self repair can extend lifespans to uncalculatable ranges.

Advanced APM systems are a "castle in the sky" with no way to built them - not quite

It has often be perceived that diamondoid molecular elements can only be synthesized by stiff tools made that themselves are made from diamondoid molecular elements. The incremental path avoids circular dependencies by continuously changing the method of assembly from self assembly to stereotactic control. (Radical Abundance - page 190)

The direct path tries to use bigger already stiff but not quite atomically precise slabs of material to build stiff atomically precise structures (e.g. in MEMS-AFMs). This is not fundamentally impossible but a much steeper slope judging from the progress rates.

Atoms can't be placed individually because of "fat and sticky fingers" - sticky is actually good fat is just untrue for the tips

Disproved by basic experimental and detailed theoretical work. See: Mechanosynthesis.

One can't make soft materials from diamond - wrong

See: "emulated elasticity" for why this is not true.