Meeting notice: The 01.01.16 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. More details below. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> On 01.16 -- this is confirmed -- David Carnahan of Nanolab in Watertown will attend to facilitate a discussion on nanotubes. One of the first companies to begin "converting research ideas into marketable nanotechnologies," NanoLab has been turning out products based on nanotubes since early 2000. More information on the company and its products, including some neat pictures and a nicely edited set of nanotube links, can be found at NanoLab's web site at www.nano-lab.com. Minutes: During the 01.02 meeting Tony Reno made an interesting suggestion connecting nanotechnology -- perhaps better, femto- or even atto- technology -- with Fermi's Paradox. The latter is of course the question Fermi asked about extraterrestrials: where are they? We don't see ruins on the moon, we haven't had any invitations, we can't hear a thing, no infrared spikes (which would indicate the presence of a Dyson sphere) have been found, and so on. Why can we still get a tan? Shouldn't someone have expropriated the sun's output by now? If the universe is viewed as essentially inhospitable to the development of technological civilizations, then there is no problem. If on the other hand it is at least moderately hospitable, Fermi's Paradox begins to look interesting. The usual measure of FP-interest is given by cranking through Drake's equation, which can be reviewed at www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/SETI/index.html. Most but by no means everyone who has noodled around with these numbers has come up with an estimate of at least a few thousand potential communicants. This estimate actually underestimates the number of possibilities, because the Drake equation contains no term for the number of systems that might have been colonized by this moment in time. A society whose members were willing to undertake periodic interstellar voyages of a few thousand years (perhaps in search of newer, cheaper, less exploited sources of solar energy) would radiate throughout even a fairly large galaxy in far less than 100 million years, which in turn is less than 1% of the age of most galaxies. Spreading to other galaxies would take longer, but all in all, it seems as though there has been plenty of time for every energy outlet in the universe to have found its plug. Fermi's Paradox therefore seems worth pondering. What solutions come to mind? One might be that we are an isolation experiment, rather like that conducted by Charles II who brought up a baby in a barrel to see whether it would start speaking Latin or Greek. Or we might be a Sim City type computer game in which isolation is an important structural element, perhaps because it poses recreational possibilities that a normally populated universe would not. (An isolated civilization might be more likely to go insane in stimulating or amusing ways.) At the last meeting Tony Reno pointed out that the model of colonization presented above universally assumes an "up and out" mode. However, if you believe in uploading -- simulating human sentience on computers -- then there is probably a "down and in" direction to colonization as well. If it takes, say, X processing to simulate human-level sentience, then over time, as we learn more about probability engineering and quantum coding, the amount of physical space required to support X should contract considerably, perhaps continuously, and perhaps even at a rate that keeps pace with or exceeds population growth. In short, the Fermi paradox might end up having the same kind of resolution as Ober's paradox -- the problem of the patchiness of the night sky. In both cases scale changes in the nature of space overwhelm the saturation effects that common sense seems to call for. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little else. 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 must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti- spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com.