[Diddley]

Thanks for the link to that letter.

Note that the proposed technology is more about guiding chemical reactions to do molecular assembly than about tiny hands manipulating atoms.

Wow! I didn't think that anyone (Smalley?) would think that it was a digital (finger) process, but rather a molecular (chemical process). Go Figure.

[forewarning]

Smalley has been putting Nobel prestige behind his straw-man impossibility argument for years. The U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative has followed his lead and pretty much ignored the sort of powerful nanotechnology you describe. This places the U.S. at increasing risk of a nasty technological surprise.

[forewarning]

Thanks for the link to that letter.

Another recent item:

"Molecular manufacturing will bring both great opportunities and great dangers. Nanocomputers will extend desktop computational power by a factor of a billion or more. Nanoscale sensors, computers, and tools will bring surgical control to the molecular level, enabling a revolution in medicine. Light, strong, and inexpensive aerospace structures will make spaceflight easy.

But the future's faster, cheaper, cleaner production of better products will also bring disruption. Advanced lethal and nonlethal weapons, deployed quickly and cheaply, could make the world a more dangerous place. The list of consequences is long, much of it sounding like science fiction."

The Future of Nanotechnology: Molecular Manufacturing

[gitmo]

When they spelled out "IBM" using 35 xenon atoms, many people could only visualize tiny waldos manipulating those atoms.