Meeting notice: The 00.02.01 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Proposed topic: Nanotechnology and Religion NT promises very long life spans. In theory there is no reason why these should not be infinite, but life is too chaotic to sustain any such guarantee. Computers crash, backups get munged, hackers decide to "explore issues", cosmic rays arrive at the wrong time, people have spells of Darwin-award level incompetence, or join sects that decide to ascend to a higher level, or decide to do something extreme to attract the admiration of potential sex partners. So NT should not bring infinite life spans. What it will do is randomize the distribution of death across age. This is very different from the present distribution, which is overwhelmingly concentrated among the old, and more like that of historic times, before public health, antibiotics, and tort lawyers. Historically, random mortality distributions are associated with religious faith ("there are no atheists in foxholes"), while patterned and therefore predictable distributions are associated with agnosticism or rationalism. This is perhaps because the pattern serves the same explanatory need in us as belief in a Divine will. Instead of dying because it was God's Will people die because they are old. That line of thought will not parse in the NT era. It is therefore imaginable that NT, ironically one of the more dramatic fruits of the enlightenment, will lead to a rebirth of old-time religion as the age of death becomes less and less predictable. If it does not, presumably that will be because we have figured out some other, better, way of understanding the mystery of the origin and end of consciousness. At present nothing seems to be in sight that serves this purpose, but we do have some time to hit on the problem. <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> The two paths to the assembler are ground-up design and fabrication, and building out natural cells, reaction by reaction. One disadvantage of the first path is that it is not at all clear what the right first step ought to be, wheras it is obvious that the build-out path should start by incorporating a digital computer into a cell, since a computer is necessary for the control over timing and selectivity that would allow work to begin towards a truly general purpose programmable assembler. One lab in the area working on the problem has been Tom Knight's Cellular Engineering Lab at MIT. (See the paper on cellular logic gates at www.ai.mit.edu/people/tk/tk.html). Last week Nature magazine published an article by Boston University's Advanced Biotechnology Lab announcing the construction of a synthetic, addressable, cellular memory unit (toggle switch). The Lab's site (http://eng.bu.edu/CAB) was done when I tried but presumably this is temporary. A .pdf of the paper is in my Yahoo briefcase at http://briefcase.yahoo.com/fhapgood. Click on 'NSG'. <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Without Comment Dept. Last week Clinton proposed a $497 million "National Nanotechnology Intitiative", which Reuters described as supporting research into "high-technology breakthroughs like reducing information in the Library of Congress into a unit the size of a sugar cube". "Far too many of our citizens think science is something done by men and women who are in white lab coats behind closed doors that somehow lead to satellite TV and Dolly the sheep and it's all a mystery," Clinton told the faculty, staff and students at Cal Tech. Sandia puts the proposal into the perspective of a potential beneficiary: http://www.sandia.gov/media/NewsRel/NR2000/nanotech.htm <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg-d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and you must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti-spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com