Science, Technology, and Exaltation," Keynote Speech

Ralph Merkle

Well, thank you very much for that very flattering introduction. And with that, I think we can start on the The talk I decided I hope I’m not being too presumptuous by talking about science technology. An exaltation, and I must confess I was quite taken with the quote, as man now is, God once was, as God now is, man may be.

Ralph Merkle

One of the things that happens when I talk about nanotechnology is I have to be very careful about what I say. I have to say, well, when we develop molecular nanorobot robotics and we have nanomedicine, why we will have good health. Extended good health. So I can’t say anything like we’ll have good health for, you know. A very long period of time.

Ralph Merkle

How many people here want to be alive and healthy 200 years from now? 10,000 years from now? Heat death of the universe? Yeah, I I I wouldn’t be able to say those kind of things in in front of most audiences. That wouldn’t be received very well most of the time. Most people You know, that that that’s, you know, not sort of considered to be okay. Good health is as far as I usually go. But I think with this audience we can go a little bit farther than that.

Ralph Merkle

So I think what we’ll do is I will just go blazing through a bunch of technology blindingly fast. And then we’ll stop. And then hopefully, at that point, we’ll have gotten a bunch of stuff in that will get people interested. And hopefully excited, and then we’ll have time for questions and discussions and things like that. So then you can all pop in and say, hey, what about this or that or the other?

Ralph Merkle

So we’ll start out by talking about exponential trends in manufacturing. And we’ve seen three of them, three big ones, over the past many decades in complexity, precision and cost. The complexity of things that we can manufacture has been getting, well, more complex, and the precision has been getting more precise, and the cost has been shrinking. And those trends have been going along exponentially. And we’re also seeing those trends let’s just pull this one off. Here, shall we?

Ralph Merkle

We’ve been also seeing those trends in 3D printing. So 3D printing has been showing trends. Oh, yeah, that’d be great. We’ve also been seeing those trends in 3D printing. We’ve been watching 3D printers just take off. So everyone wants to get into the 3D printing business because, oh, there’s lots of money to be made. It’s the computer revolution all over.

Ralph Merkle

You remember the home hobbyists? And computers, Atari 800s, Radio Shack, any of you ever had the Trash 80? Ah, too young. Okay. Anyway, there used to be oh, a couple of you do remember those things. Yep. They used to have those. We’re doing the same thing with the 3D printers.

Ralph Merkle

So 3D printers can make all kinds of stuff, and people are making them all over the place. They’re customized, wonderful gizmos and knickknacks and things. This is how a 3D printer works. you’re seeing the printhead of a 3D printer. What it is, is it’s extruding hot plastic through a very small hole, about a 500 micron exit hole, and it’s doing it with 50 micron accuracy. So it’s very accurate. 50 microns. Very accurate. Yeah, right. And it’s making little parts. So you can see there it is, it’s finishing off the parts and it made some parts. So you can make all kinds of stuff that way. And people are and they’re having a great deal of fun.

Ralph Merkle

So now we see a scanning tunneling microscope. And a scanning tunneling microscope is essentially a really, really sharp pointed stick. And there you see we’re zooming in. And you see a scale bar here. The scale bar is one micron. So that sharp pointed stick is really sharp and the end. This is a very dull scanning tunneling microscope. The end is huge. It’s 100 nanometers across. A proper scanning tunneling microscope, I just got this off the web. Nice, easy to illustrate scanning tunneling microscope. A proper scanning tunneling microscope would have a sharp tip that came down to one atom. So that’s that scanning tunneling microscope.

Ralph Merkle

So and you can build things using the same technique. You can use the scanning tunneling microscope to put little things on on surfaces. This was design this was the first one was built in 1981, so they’re fairly recent historically. We’ve only had them since, well Since 1981, and people have been having a lot of fun. The two guys who did it got the Nobel Prize in Physics. So these are very snazzy devices that are very amazing.

Ralph Merkle

And here’s a picture of how one works. It has a very sharp pointed tip. It moves the sharp-pointed tip over the surface. You can scan the surface, you can look at it, you can get pictures of the surface. And as I said, the atom at the tip. Of the sharp-pointed stick can be used to build up a picture because it’s a little bit of a tunneling current that flows from the tip to the surface.

Ralph Merkle

Here are some things that people have built using scanning, tunneling microscopes. Not only can you scan the surface, but you can push atoms around on the surface. Isn’t that cute? So they’ve been pushing atoms around on surfaces. And in the upper left-hand corner, you see the letters IBM. Spelled out in xenon atoms on a nickel surface. Ooh, spiffy.

Ralph Merkle

And other people, that was the first one, all the physicists were going, what? You can move atoms around? You can touch atoms and move atoms. I mean, you know, come on, what are they, marbles or something? Jeez, what is this? And the moment they did that, of course, other people had to get into the act and they spelled out logos of various research laboratories. made little structures and ponds and Star Trek logos and a hand going, you know, live long and prosper. That was fun.

Ralph Merkle

And then, of course, moving away from that again, getting back to the 3D printing, 3D printers. Can, well, I mean, conceptually, 3D printers, what are they going to be doing in the future? Right now, 3D printers are big. But in the future, instead of having one big 3D printer, we’ll have large numbers of very small 3D printers, and then they’ll be moving around atoms. So you’ll have lots and lots and lots of parallel small 3D printers moving around lots and lots and lots of atoms, and that will let you build things. Where every atom is in the right place. Isn’t that interesting?

Ralph Merkle

So, as Richard Feynman put it back in 1959 in a very famous talk called There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, by the way. How many people have read there’s plenty of room at the bottom? How many people read oh, a couple of hands have gone up, yes. Okay, for the rest of you, it’s vintage Feynman. You’ll love it.

Ralph Merkle

But essentially what he said is, hey, you know, nothing in the laws of physics prevents you from arranging atoms one by one the way you want. Geez. It’s basic physics. Anyone would know that. Any Nobel Prize winner in physics in 1959 would understand that. And now, a few decades later, the rest of us understand it as well. So we’re beginning to understand that, and we’re beginning to understand that we will be able to arrange atoms any way we want. That’s a new manufacturing technology. It’s 3D printers on steroids. Another 20 years, something like that, 25 years, we’ll have this. Okay, we’ll be able to arrange atoms. That’s nice. What does that mean?

Ralph Merkle

Well, we’ll be able to build nanocomputers. really powerful computers. That’s one thing we’ll be you know the the computer revolution, Moore’s Law and all that? It’s gonna keep going. For a couple more decades. You know how the computer revolution has been? You know, think about 20, 30 years ago, the computer revolution. Now take that. and plotted out another 20, 30 years. Got that picture in your mind? Okay, good. Now

Ralph Merkle

take all of the other technologies and imagine them following Moore’s law for twenty, thirty years. We’re going to have medical nanorobots, we’re going to have comprehensive environmental remediation, will be able to clean up all the messes, inexpensive clean power, personal spacecraft. How many of you want to go out into the solar system and putter around? You, personally. Yep. We’ll make a passive limitation, yeah? Okay, I gather a lot of you would enjoy doing that.

Ralph Merkle

Ultra high yield agriculture. Zero pollution manufacturing. Today’s manufacturing pollutes. It’s not that manufacturers want to pollute, it’s that they don’t have a technology that will let them make things without polluting. If you’ve got the ability to arrange atoms the way you want, you don’t pollute. You turn the sulfur into bricks of sulfur and sell a sulfur on the sulfur market, if nothing else.

Ralph Merkle

Okay, so computers will be cheap. What do I mean by cheap? A one liter molecular computer with 10 to the 18th logic elements, 10 to the 18th. That’s a billion, billion transistors in it. It might cost a few dollars. That would be nice. That’s 10 to the 27th logic operations per second at 1 gigahertz.

Ralph Merkle

Now if you use standard conventional Irreversible logic operations that would be three million watts out of a cubic liter. To give you a feel for that, a hairdryer is about a thousand watts. So 3 million watts would be about 3,000 hair dryers from a cubic liter. It might get a little bit hot. The magic melting supercomputer.

Ralph Merkle

But don’t worry. We’re going to have something called thermodynamically reversible computing. I’m not going to explain that because it would take another hour’s talk. It’ll work, don’t worry. And that’ll get the energy down to couple of watts, something like that. So we’ll have a lot of computing power.

Ralph Merkle

And now I’m going to date the slide. That’s about 10 million BlueGene supercomputers at 100 million a pop, all running in parallel. So that’s a lot of computing power, which is, and it’s also roughly the computational power of 10 to the 11th humans. We have about 10 to the 10th humans on the planet. I mean, 10 billion. I mean, for the accuracy of this calculation, the human population is 10 billion, okay? So that’s 10 times the human population of the planet. Cubic liter, 10 times the computing power of the planet. Exaltation, huh? Yeah. Hmm. Interesting.

Ralph Merkle

Oh, and then the medical nanorobotics. Yeah, those things. So we’ll have nifty gizmos. That’s a respiracy, and that’s a microbivore, and that’s a typical human cell. There’s no such thing as a typical human cell, by the way. But I drew one anyway, just so you’d have a feeling for the size. And let’s see if this works. Oh, it’s working. So we inject a dose of microbivores. Can we see this? Sort of flashing around a little bit. Oh, there it is. There’s a microbivore. Excuse me. A respiracy. Sorry. Respiracy. What is a ricypyrosite, I hear you cry?

Ralph Merkle

Well, if you can arrange atoms, you can build diamond and you can make uh about a one micron sphere. Which would be made out of diamond and would be able to hold compressed iron. Oxygen at about a thousand atmospheres. And you could inject a dose of these things, billions and billions, if I can. Use that phrase. I don’t think there’s a copyright on it.

Ralph Merkle

And then they would float around in your body and they would release oxygen in your tissues. When your tissue Needed it, and they would absorb carbon dioxide in the tissues and release it in the lungs, so you would exhale the carbon dioxide. They’d be artificial red blood cells. Only they’d have over a hundred times the capacity of your ordinary red blood cells, which means that you could hold your breath for about an hour. Okay, I can’t hold my breath very long, but with these gadgets you could. So you could sit at the bottom of a pool for an hour, which sounds very exciting.

Ralph Merkle

Or if you were prone to heart attacks and you’d been injected with a bunch of these Devices and you had a heart attack, instead of keeling over, which is normally what you do if you have a heart attack, you would go, oh, my heart. Has stopped. Hello, Doc. My heart has stopped. Get down to the emergency room now. Okay. And you would get down to the emergency room now. Because you’d only have an hour. And having an hour is makes a big difference because having an hour is a lot better than thump. And then you go to the emergency room and you explain that you had a heart attack and your heart has stopped. You know, after persuading them that, yes, it that really is true, call your doctor and he’d explain it. They would get busy and start treating you. So these devices would have a, I think, a big impact on improving.

Ralph Merkle

How many of you want to have this device available before you have the heart attack? Ah, yeah. How many people expect to be alive and healthy and well just conventionally for like 30 years? Ah, okay. So yes yeah, long long-term planning is one of the things that would be useful with these Devices.

Ralph Merkle

This is microbivores. These are artificial white blood cells. And essentially, they’re, you know, similar. nanomedical devices. And what they do is they have little robotic arms with little um antibodies on their tips that bind to antigens on nasty bacteria and sweep them into their maw. And there it is being swept, and then it closes upon them, and then they get diced, sliced up. and digestive enzymes are dropped in on them. And then once they’ve been reduced to harmless amino acids and water and things like that, they’re extruded. You can eliminate an infection something like a hundred times more rapidly than regular white blood cells with these these little gadgets. So they can just sweep the circulatory system clear very rapidly and very effectively. So again, medical capabilities that are a lot better than what we’ve got now.

Ralph Merkle

And to sort of summarize the difference. Some medical treatments are not atomically precise. Other medical treatments are atomically precise. And some medical treatments provide little control, and some medical treatments provide sophisticated control. So if you have little control and it’s not atomically precise, oh, well that’s not very good. That’s the wrecking ball. You know, who cares? Cares.

Ralph Merkle

But if you have little control and it’s atomically precise, that’s pharmaceuticals. Those do pretty good things. And if you have sophisticated control but it’s not atomically precise, that’s a surgeon’s scalpel. which, from the point of view of a cell, is better for ripping and tearing than it is for healing and curing. And if you have sophisticated control with molecular computers, and it’s atomically precise. you have medical nanorobots, which usher in a revolution in medicine.

Ralph Merkle

Oh, and then we have mortality rates. I think I’ll just skip this slide. This shows mortality rates. It turns out that a 10-year-old child has a mortality rate That is about one chance in 10,000 of dying per year when they’re 10 years old. So, biological systems, when they’re in peak performance and properly maintained, Can actually have a mortality rate that’s so low that if you could maintain the biological system in good working order and prevent aging. You’d have a lifespan of five, six thousand years, right there. Bang. Wouldn’t need any of this fancy nanotechnology or anything. Have properly working biological molecular machinery. But we do age, which is a shame.

Ralph Merkle

Anyway, getting back to the medical nanobots. Today, the big problem is that cells are self-repairing. And because they’re self-repairing, once they stop metabolizing, once they stop respiring, they can’t self-repair themselves. which means the moment they stop respiring, they are then set on a downwards trajectory from which they cannot recover. That’s It. It’s over.

Ralph Merkle

Which means the medical imperative is that you have to preserve function. They have to keep functioning. The moment they stop functioning, that’s it. The self-repair mechanism is gone. You don’t have anything with which you can repair them. It’s gone.

Ralph Merkle

With medical nanorobots, externally provided medical repair capabilities, you can repair passive structures. which means you no longer have to maintain function. You can repair non-functional cells. Which makes a huge change in the medical imperative. You now are able to repair something as long as the structure has been preserved. If the structure is preserved, you can repair it. So, today, function must be preserved. With medical nanorobots, structure must be preserved. Big difference.

Ralph Merkle

This difference is so big that you should be able to heal cryopreserved tissue. If you’ve cryopreserved tissue, it’s no longer functional. But the structure is there if you’ve done a good job in the cryo preservation. And in fact, we’ve got examples

Ralph Merkle

Of simple tissues, which are cryopreserved on a fairly routine basis, and they’re just cooled and warmed. And there’s one example of a complex tissue, a complex mammalian organ. a rabbit kidney that was cooled and warmed, and began to function again. No nanotechnology involved. And we have evidence of excellent structural preservation.

Ralph Merkle

If, for example, you use vitrification, you can see the image on the right, it’s a vitrified kidney. And this is being investigated for purposes of organ banking. If you can organ bank kidneys, then suddenly you can get very good matching of the organs. Someone comes in and their kidney is failing, you can say, ah, that organ there in the organ bank is a perfect match, and you can provide them a good organ.

Ralph Merkle

So this is also something that is of interest in the field of cryonics. If you can cryopreserve someone, keep them cryopreserved, and you are able in the future to repair cryopreserved tissue. then you can revive them. And in the future, you could also use cryopreservation for field use. So, if you’re away from medical facilities and you suffer a severe injury, you could be cryopreserved as long as you have access to a good refrigerator. So.

Ralph Merkle

What is cryonics? Well, cryonics, I think most of you have heard of cryonics. How many people have heard of cryonics? Everybody’s heard of cryonics. Yeah, okay. So it involves this large stainless steel thermos bottle. Literally, it’s a stainless steel thermos bottle. And it’s over ten feet tall.

Ralph Merkle

It’s topped off weekly. Take about three months before the L and T Is exhausted, probably longer than three months, but and can preserve people essentially unchanged for millennia. And once you’re revived, you wake up in the future. There will be advanced technology. The reason I know there will be advanced technology is if there isn’t advanced technology, you won’t wake up. Very simple. There will be nanomedicine, same reason, and you will be enjoying a very long and healthy life. And we’ve previously discussed the meaning of a long and healthy life. So I won’t belabor that point.

Ralph Merkle

So that, of course, raises the question, do you want to join the control group or the experimental group? We have excellent knowledge of what happens to the control group. The experimental group has not yet been conclusively demonstrated to awaken, but I have my suspicions. Certainly given the choice. Oh, by the way, I was given the choice. Hmm, yes. So I’m signed up with the experimental group.

Ralph Merkle

In fact, I’m on the Alcor board. because I think this idea looks like it ought to work, and therefore I am pursuing that, trying to give it the best chance possible. There are a lot of non-technical issues involved. Like making sure the organization remains stable, things like that. Okay, on to environmental remediation.

Ralph Merkle

Toxic sludge is made from atoms. And obviously, we would like to filter out the toxic parts. And here we are filtering out the toxic parts. So that is a nano sorter. And the nano-sorter is something that, well, you’d have a surface, and the surface would be covered in these nanosorters, and you’d expose one side. to the toxic sludge and the other side would be a a container and they would bind to the nasty things and Filter them in, and then you would store them away. So there we are, binding to nasty things. Well, actually, in this case, we’re binding to acetyl. And this is an image from another another video which I’ve adapted for this purpose. But you get the idea. You could simply filter out the stuff that you didn’t like.

Ralph Merkle

Here’s another thing we can do with this technology. People have been concerned. How many people are concerned about global warming? Hands. Ah, I have good news for you. This technology will let us solve global warming. Very nice thing.

Ralph Merkle

There was a nice statement in the IPCC report that came out. This is from Working Group One, that’s the technical working group, which is looking at the core problems. And they said, a large fraction of anthropogenic climate change resulting from CO2 emissions is irreversible on a multi-century to millennial time scale. except in the case of a large net removal of CO two from the atmosphere over a sustained period, which I think means It’s already too late. We’ve got enough CO2 in the atmosphere that we’re going to see a lot of warming no matter what we do. Which means we need to, as they quaintly put it, have a large net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere over a sustained period.

Ralph Merkle

Guess what you can do with molecular manufacturing? Whoops, don’t have that slide. You can use those binding sites and you can remove CO2 from the atmosphere. And a few slides on, I will show you the binding sites, or I will show you a conceptual model of how to do that.

Ralph Merkle

Solar power. Solar power provides something like five thousand times the total world power usage, and with nanofactories we can make efficient, rugged, low cost solar cells and energy storage. This means we can essentially eliminate the use of coal, oil and nuclear fuels, and as a consequence, we would eliminate The production of CO2. By the way, the solar cells are already dropping in price so fast, we probably don’t need any of this fancy nanotechnology stuff for them. They’re going to be deployed, you know, regardless. The only question is how quickly are they going to be deployed and how rapidly do we phase out the coal and oil?

Ralph Merkle

And do we have the necessary batteries? Solar has this problem. The sun goes down at night, so you need some sort of energy storage mechanism so you can have power at night. Well, you can make really good energy storage devices with Nana. Space, ah yes.

Ralph Merkle

Lighter, stronger, smarter, and less expensive. Well, basically, you can get new and expensive materials with a strength to weight ratio over 50 times that of steel. That sounds good. Which will let you make really good rockets. So let me give you the punchline. Single-stage orbit vehicles. With a total of 3,000 kilograms mass, that includes fuel, and 60 kilograms of structural mass, able to carry 500 kilograms. That’ll be four passengers with air, luggage, seating, and all of that. You can run this thing on liquid oxygen and hydrogen, and it’ll cost a few thousand dollars. Got that?

Ralph Merkle

How many of you want one of these in your backyard? Same price. Just put on the booster rockets and come on home. It’s not a problem. This is actually published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. That was in 1992 that this analysis was published. So this is a nice, straightforward vanilla analysis. There was also a nice PhD thesis by a guy down south in Southern California. I think of down south as Southern California. And he basically ran through all the various launch vehicles you could use. He concluded the cost of launch to low Earth orbit would drop by a thousand. Factor of three to four orders of magnitude once you plug in the strength to weight ratio and cost of basically the kind of materials you can get from nanofactory.

Ralph Merkle

Now, once you’re in low Earth orbit, you want to putter around the solar system, right? I mean, you don’t want to be stuck in low Earth orbit. I mean, that’s dull. You get a good view of the Earth, but you want to go out to Saturn, see the rings, Jupiter, look at the moons. So you want a solar electric ion drive. That means you’re going to have aluminum reflectors. They’re going to be thin. You have arrays of small ion thrusters. and you get something like 250,000 meter per second exhaust velocity, and you’ll get an acceleration of about eight tenths meters per second squared. Earth’s gravity, by reference, is 9. 8 Meters per second squared. So you’re getting order of magnitude a tenth of a g. So it’s not a lot, but you can sustain it. And you can tour the solar system in a few months in this gadget.

Ralph Merkle

So it’s very nice. You can make it big, you can make it small. So you could have, you know, a modest size one or a large size one. And oh, by the way, you can also use. these molecular manufacturing systems to provide recycling, even in a small vessel. So you can just stay out there for as long as you want. Sealed vessel, solar powered, recycled. Enjoy yourself, completely independent. Oh, you could have a big one.

Ralph Merkle

How many people have heard of O’Neill colonies? Yeah, okay. So now you can putter out and go to the asteroid belt, mine the asteroid belt, and convert it into an eal colonies. These things are built using O’Neill was a Princeton professor, and his classes in civil engineering were a little bit dull, so he decided to liven them up. And he said, okay, use your civil engineering Techniques to design cylinders that are a couple of miles in diameter, one, two miles in diameter, ten miles long, and fill them with breathable air and put people in them. Now, solve all the engineering problems that this entails. And the classes had great fun, published books, articles, and it turns out it works like a charm. So you can have O’Neill colonies, and they’re marvelous. You can use 1960s civil engineering practices, and if you throw in nanotechnology and light, strong materials, you can make them even bigger and stronger and all of that. Feeding people.

Ralph Merkle

Right now we have some concerns about feeding people. It takes about one hectare. 10,000 square meters of farmland to feed an American, more or less give or take a bit. Now, one person actually needs about 10 megajoules a day. That’s how many calories an average person And burns. You can get 10 megajoules from less than the sunlight on one square meter of roof-mounted solar panels. 10,000 square meters of farmland and one square meter of solar panel. That’s four orders of magnitude So you’ve got forward is a magnitude difference in principle from what we use and the minimum that theoretically is required. There’s some room for improvement there.

Ralph Merkle

In fact, there was a class at Singularity University that proposed to pick up, you know, a factor of 10. More or less, and they were just going to use greenhouses, and they were just going to use 90% less water, 80% less space, 100% less pesticide, and they were just using standard known methods. They were going to. optimize the nutrients, optimize the concentration of CO two, the temperature, the humidity, eliminate pests. They were, you know, using conventional techniques. If you did all this using molecular comp molecular nanotechnology, you could drop the price, do a better job and get a better result.

Ralph Merkle

Ah, yes, and here we come to the part where we eliminate CO2 in the atmosphere. This uses diamond trees. Diamond trees have well, trees remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Diamond trees do the same thing, only they do it more effectively. They convert CO2 into well, diamond products by absorbing sunshine, and they have a large spherical photovoltaic shell on top. Perched on a flexible stalk, and you build them and plant them in the ground at regular intervals. And there’s a paper on the subject that describes what’s going on. And here we see

Ralph Merkle

Atmospheric CO2, business as usual, it goes up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up. If you assume that, you know, sometime around 2030. We develop molecular manufacturing and start deploying diamond trees. It goes up, up, up, up, up, and then it turns around and goes down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down So that’s what happens. And suddenly, we’ve solved global warming.

Ralph Merkle

So trends suggest that 15 to 20 years until we get molecular nanotechnology. But really, that’s a bit of an error because how long it takes depends on what we do. The standard winding path of random developments will take longer than if we have a directed effort focused on building molecular manufacturing. And that’s it. Now we have discussion. So question.

Speaker 1

In your mind, what are some of the best ways to do Mitigate risks in the destructive application of the majority of the majority of the majority of the majority of the majority of the majority.

Ralph Merkle

The best way to mitigate risks is to have a how shall I phrase it, low profile development project that small numbers of people know about. And which is funded by groups that are very responsible. I actually might want to read the Forsyth Guidelines on that. The Forsyth Guidelines were developed. Geez, quite a few years ago, we went off and had a retreat at a Solomar and said, hey, this technology has risk. How do we avoid them? How do we make sure everything happens safely and smoothly and there are no problems? We put out some guidelines and they’ve been updated and talked about and discussed in various ways. But there are various ways of doing it. Looks like the simplest would be to, you know Just make sure that it’s developed by people who are very responsible and make sure that it’s done in a suitably safe way. Right now, it it doesn’t look like it’s happening. So the point is moot for the moment. Other questions? Yes.

Speaker 2

You mentioned that we would have the diamond trees by the year around 2030. What about something similar that would start pulling pollution out of the air? Is there anything That would be available sooner than that?

Ralph Merkle

Well, first you got to develop the nanofactories. So if there were a large focused effort to develop, let’s put it this way: in order to go to the moon, we had a large focused effort. To go to the moon. To develop nanofactories, it would be helpful if there were a focused effort to develop nanofactories. So far, no focused effort to develop nanofactories. So, if there were a focused effort to develop nanofactories, then presumably we would be able to state more accurately how long it would take to develop them because there’d be, you know, a scale. Schedule and stuff. Right now it’s, yeah, well, you know, it should be developed somewhere along there. I mean, if you look at what’s going on in the semiconductor and computer. Industry, it’s a plausible number. And then exactly how long it takes. Yeah, you know. When a project starts, we can start getting some more accurate estimates. Yes.

Speaker 3

Would a focused effort be at odds with mitigating risk?

Ralph Merkle

Depends on whether the focused effort were a Big public effort, and you told everyone about it. If you had a focused effort and you said, Hey, there’s a focused effort, and by the way, it’s a nice focused effort. People are responsible, and no, we’re not going to tell everyone exactly how to do it because it’s a focused effort and we want to mitigate risks. Mitigating risks by having a focused effort, which is, you know, we’re not telling people how to do it, we’re just doing it. And we’ll make the products available, but the technology will be. He, you know, kept them to wraps.

Speaker 4

So one very common problem with human cognition is overconfidence. Given the very rosy picture that you paint, how would you gauge the optimism of this outlook versus the realism of this outlook? you know, how much of what you’ve presented depends on a fairly optimistic view versus a more realistic, less confident Like, would you put this in the 30% likelihood range or that type of thing as far as confidence is concerned?

Ralph Merkle

Well, there are a couple of answers to that question. First off, is the technology going to be developed at some point? Yes, because the basic physics is pretty obvious. Could the technology be developed on the time scale I’m talking about? Yes, because if you put in effort then the various problems have been looked at and thought about, and it looks like that kind of technological effort would be sufficient to let you develop it. Will it be developed on that time frame? Frame, that’s a harder question to answer. And the reason it’s a harder question to answer is: hey, maybe people don’t put any money into the effort. They haven’t so far. So if that continues, then it would be delayed. So telling schedules, particularly if there is not a well-funded, focused project. is difficult.

Ralph Merkle

And to give you an example of this, the National Nanotechnology Initiative originally had a dollop of funding in it that said this funding will be spent On assessing the feasibility of molecular manufacturing. And then some guy named Bill Joy. How many people have heard of Bill Joy? Okay. A guy named Bill Joy wrote a a very nice article called Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us. And in this article he postulated we would all die because Genetic engineering would kill us all because of self-replicating genetically designed bugs. And we would all die because robotics and artificial intelligence would kill us. because of self-replicating robots. And we would all die because self-replicating nano devices Assemblers would kill us all and we’d all die. And at that point, suddenly the funding to explore the feasibility of this vanished. Poof, gone. Because the people who are putting together the funding said, hey, there might be a backlash. Phew. Funding went away. And the funding hasn’t reappeared because the political sort of infrastructure that looks for funding is very shy. about anything that looks like it might put their funding at risk. So the official word went out, and the official word was, this technology is clearly impossible. And it’s impossible because it might put our funding at risk. Therefore, it’s impossible. So, you know, maybe that continues for a while. But technically, hey, should work like a charm. So the answer is, I don’t know. It involves politics, and politics is more complicated than I can analyze. It’s a very simple answer.

Speaker 5

So mine would be a related question, but specifically on the metal coal Applications. About 19 years ago, I remember hearing about this super promising treatment for cancer, where they found that cancer cells have so many tiny As many receptors for folate and for B12, and so potentially you could use a Trojan horse strategy where you bind a toxin to the vitamin And then it’s not in an amount that would kill the regular cell, but the cancer cells take in so much it destroys them. And so for a couple decades, I’ve been expecting this. To be out and saving people’s lives. And every time I go online to check on it, every few years, I see that it’s in clinical trials. They said 19 years ago that they were going to fast-track it. The FDA. So supposing that we’ve got the medical nanotechnology, how do we actually get it available to people as opposed to just having it invented?

Ralph Merkle

Well, the medical nanotechnology is going to follow the usual route. Rich people get it first. Okay, it’s just how it always happens. And the rich people will get it, and then it’ll be checked out, and it will work hopefully okay, but they’re the guinea pigs. And then as it gets better and cheaper and more reliable, the price is going to drop. You know, Moore’s Law, and eventually it’ll get to the point where it’s really cheap and really reliable and available for everyone. And that’s going to take some number of years based on sort of Moore’s Law technology progression. So don’t get cancer for a while. That’s sort of the first bit of advice.

Ralph Merkle

And if you do get cancer, call Alcor. I mean, you know, that’s what’s available now, and it’s technology that is available. So it works. We can actually cool people to the temperature of liquid nitrogen. That is guaranteed to work. Uh there’s some debate about the the part where you warm people up and have them become healthy. Uh personally, I think that part will also work. But you know, given the choices that would be available at that point, I I would suggest that being cryopreserved and preserving the information in your brain as best we can is probably A good idea. It’s sort of like, you know, you got this book, it’s been flooded and it’s got water damage. Do you stick it in the freezer and hope that you can, you know. know, figure out how to repair the damage and read it at some point in the future, or do you throw it in the fire and say p on it. Take your pick. But basically, hey, you know, the technology looks like it’s going to come and it’s going to be very impressive technology. And while I cannot make any kind of strong statement about the time frame, I’m reasonably optimistic, but you know, I really can’t. Can’t make a statement about the time frame that’s that strong. Nonetheless, it is going to be coming, and liquid nitrogen is very forgiving. You can stay in Liquid nitrogen for a long time with essentially no changes. So, other questions? Yes.

Speaker 6

So, I think you may have made the comparison of of developing nanotechnology to the space race. At the height of the space race, the budget for NASA was $20 billion. I don’t remember the numbers, but it’s not a not insignificant amount of the GDP of the country, right? And it has gone down quite a bit since then, which makes But I’m wondering where would you like to and where do you expect to see funding for this kind of a project to come from? Is that like a public thing funded by the government? Would it be a large expenditure? Was that going to come?

Ralph Merkle

Any source would be fine. I i it would be good, you know, th someone has to be able to write a check, government, private, academic, whatever. Um I would guess that a billion dollars would cover the whole project. It doesn’t have to be Written all at once. Yeah, 20 million up front. Essentially, the first thing you do is you hire a bunch of computational chemists and do a bunch of research work. On all of the reactions involved and all of the modeling of all of the key structures involved. And you can do that. I mean, you just take standard off the I mean, I was making this argument, you know. decade or so ago. I was saying, hey, give us some money. In fact, Bill Goddard, who runs the the computational center at uh Caltech, put in a proposal to model an assembler back in the 1990s, sometime. And he was turned down, of course. But the computational chemists are fearless.

Ralph Merkle

And they don’t care if you can build it. Who cares? They have computers. They have computational chemistry codes that have been checked out and can analyze structures. So you just say, hey, go. Analyze, figure it out. Boeing designs and builds airplanes on a computer before they ever build them in the real world. Same Principle, and it’s cheaper. So, burn a few tens of millions of dollars on that as the first step, and that also would consolidate the understanding, the computational chemistry. Would be able to make statements like, yeah, that design there, it would work. You build that thing, it would work. And they’d be believed because they’re, you know, standard. Mainstream computational chemists using standard computational chemist tools. So that would be the first step. And then after that, you do the rest of the development work. In accordance with the proposal that was sort of fleshed out by the work in computational chemistry. Pretty straightforward. It just requires gobs of money and focus. It’s got to have focus. If you don’t have focus, you can wind up spending lots of money. Lots of money and getting nothing.

Speaker 7

Okay, this will be the last question.

Speaker 8

What are the practical business opportunities that might drive this? Is there anything going on?

Ralph Merkle

Ungodly sums of money. That would be the you know, one of the obvious ones. And then, of course, there might be some rich person who says You mean if we don’t get this developed, I personally would wind up dropping dead? And the answer is yeah. Oh. So you know, there might be someone who decides that, A, they think being alive is worth maybe throw twenty million dollars into the modeling project and see how it comes out. Here, here’s twenty million dollars. You claimed you could design one of these things with a computational chemist. Go, do it. Come back in, you know, a couple of years with a design. And if it looks good, maybe I’ll fund that. It’s the obvious thing to do. Whoops, I think we’ve run out. There’s one last one unless it’s time for one more.

Speaker 9

So there’s quite a few billionaires in the U. S. , right? You would think. Yeah. So Elon Musk doesn’t, you know, he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to live forever?

Ralph Merkle

Hey, you know, they’re all focused on where’s the financial return in five years. Nobody wants to be told, Yeah, we’ll give you a financial return in 20 years. Look, people who have lots of money have lots of money for a reason. They spent the money they had getting more money. They’re really good at making money. That was a setup, right? Well, you know, it depends. I mean, find a billionaire and find out what they’re really interested in. and then work from there. If they want to solve global warming, sure, that’s great. But you got to find someone who is a billionaire, wants to solve global warming, and doesn’t hate technology. You know, it’s one of those things.

Speaker 7

Thanks, everyone. I think we’re just going to take a minute or two. I’m sorry, were you?

Ralph Merkle

If anyone knows someone who’s rich who wants to throw 20 Million into pot for the computational studies, you know. Pass their name along.

Speaker 10

We’re going to set up for the panel discussion, which will take place right here on this table. Thank you very much, Ralph.