Foresight Update 23.19: A Moore's Law for energy? - May 7, 2009
Discuss these news stories at http://foresight.org/nanodot.
Top News of the Week
Earlier this week I was at the premiere of Transcendent Man, a biographical overview of Ray Kurzweil's views on the coming Singularity. Kurzweil's main argument is that the power of the exponential in technology is major, systemic, and underappreciated. The specific item of interest in this post is Kurzweil's claim, repeated in the movie, that solar energy is on a Moore's Law-like curve with a power/$ doubling time of two years…
In this issue:
Foresight Events – Lectures
Foreseeing Future Technologies - Join Foresight
Contact Foresight
In Arthur C. Clarke's classic SF novel Against the Fall of Night, there is a description of the "moving ways", the powered sidewalks on which people rode around the city, as being made of a material that would have baffled an engineer of our own times because it was solid in one direction and liquid in another…
This article over at Ars Technica has a nice overview of some recent work showing that when water is forced through a nanotube of appropriate size, the polar nature of the water molecule lines them up so as to create a voltage along the tube.…
Over at Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov continues the discussion about nanofactories. He says a number of reasonable things, but then mischaracterizes, or at least greatly oversimplifies, Foresight's position on nanofactories and self-replicating machines in general.…
Over at Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov has a post about self-replication in which he seems to find it remarkable that Foresight, among others, can view a world containing mechanical replicators with aplomb.…
Two days ago I posted on the development of DNA scaffolding with programmable modules for use in the modular molecular composite nanosystems (MMCNs) route to atomically precise productive nanosystems. Two months ago I posted a story about the incorporation of DNA devices in a DNA scaffolding for the purpose of manipulating molecular building blocks. Two recent publications in Nature Nanotechnology provide more evidence of the growing capability of DNA scaffolds to support complex and interactive functions.…
—Nanodot posts by J. Storrs Hall and James Lewis
Foresight Events – Lectures
Foresight Lectures
May 28-29, 2009
1st Annual Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence Symposium
Palo Alto, California
Christine Peterson will speak on beneficial medical nanotechnologies.
Click here for conference details
June 17-18, 2009
Size Matters 2009: the future fields of application, opportunities and ethical challenges of nanoscience
Saarbrücken, Germany
Christine Peterson will speak on Nanotechnology & Open Source Sensing.
Click here for conference details
August 20-22, 2009
Gnomedex: a technology conference of inspiration and influence
Seattle, Washington
Christine Peterson will speak on life extension.
Click here for conference details
Advancements in technologies such as nanotech, robotics, and biotech are promising to make major differences in our lives in the not-too-distant future, as the Industrial Revolution did to the agrarian world — to do for the physical world what the computer and Internet have done to the world of information.
Since 1986, the Foresight Institute has been in the forefront of a worldwide community of visionaries who work to help shape these possibilities into a positive, beneficial reality. If you would like to help us understand the potential of these technologies, and influence their direction, please consider becoming a member of the Foresight community. With your support, Foresight will continue to educate the general public on these technologies and what they will mean to our society.
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