Dismantling gas giants with nanotech

The future is a different country; they do things more grandly there. Last week, a small but impassioned band of forward thinkers gathered in Tucson, Arizona for the first conference of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. The Internet pioneers spent 20 years rejecting the idea of government regulation. But CRN's two …

[Anonymous Coward]

self proclaimed "nanotechnologists"

Both Chris Phoenix and Mike Treder are self proclaimed "nanotechnologists", neither of which has any formal training in areas of nanotechnology nor has actually ever worked in the field. That is why no one takes them seriously.

[Ash]

Culture

Once again, Life immitates Art.

Ian M. Banks knows all about the future of substrate-based intellect.

[Alex]

Bollocks

Can I submit this as the worst web 2.0 bullshit ever? kthxbai

[Clive Rowland]

Yeouch!

Was it just me, or did that whole article sound like it was written by amanfrommars?!?!?

[Morely Dotes]

For anyone with a smattering of tehcnological education...

...not only does it all make sense, it's perfectly coherent.

Think of this article as a mirror; if you see it as disjointed and incomprehensible, perhaps the problem is in the viewer rather than the author.

Nanomanufacturing is coming. I predict that China will be the first to deploy it on a large scale - and that political turmoil will follow worldwide as a result.

[the Jim bloke]

Dismantling gas gaints

is it time to kiss Uranus goodbye ??

<uses pocket assembler to create a coat out of 3 pens and a cold cup of coffee>

[the Jim bloke]

No matter how wonderful the technology

the failure point is still present, located "between keyboard and chair"

[Remy Redert]

PEBKAC

Imagine the potential size of a PEBKAC involving nanomanufacturing... Before you know it you could have several tons of self-replicating nanomachines running havoc in the area...

[the Jim bloke]

Call to helpdesk..

Embarassed User:" errrr, I think I've just dissolved London.."

Nanotechnology Helpdesk:"OK, had you made a backup ?"

[Pascal Monett]

The Precautionary Principle

I don't know who this Marchant is, but I must say that I agree with him on that point. If we were doing biological weapons research like we do GM crop "research", then we'd all be dead.

I fail to understand how, in the name of Heaven, anyone was able to get a license to do open-field GM crops before all lab-environment tests were concluded. Well, actually I understand very well how this happened : Monsanto poured a few billion dollars into the right ears and all went the way they wanted.

Thanks to that disastrous decision, we now have GM crops cross-pollinated with non-GM crops, and God only knows what is going to happen tomorrow.

This GM stuff should have been grown under vast, environmentally-sealed white domes, just like in the X-Files film. Any precaution-taking at this point is closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.