Meeting notice: The 03.March.18 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. Suggested topic: the Grand Challenges of 21st Century Engineering & NT. What will be the most impressive achievements of engineering in this century? For which is NT an essential precondition or merely a convenience? To make this list a project should be large and demanding, open doors for the society, and be conceptually focussed. A Mars expedition, for all the man- hours it would soak up, would probably not count, since the model (whether that model be using people for exploration or dumping them, once in orbit, back down onto the bottom of gravity wells) has no future. An AIDS vaccine, as inspiring an achievement as that will be, would not qualify since it closes a chapter, or at least so it seems from here. Neither AI or the end of aging seem focussed enough to count -- at this point they both look like problems that have a thousand heads, though it might not work out that way. Given these admittedly restrictive criteria, likely candidates would surely include: 1. The space elevator. No introduction needed in this company. 2. The world subway. A global network of maglev trains running in evacuated tunnels at very high speeds (~10K mph). The WS would give us a world in which all the major cities were an hour or two from each other or less. . 3. The Life Finder. A telescope orbiting North of Jupiter big enough to do spectroscopy on the atmospheres of earth-sized planets out to several thousand light years. (On the other hand, it could be argued against the lifefinder's candidacy that finding oxygen in the atmosphere of an extrasolar would have no social or culture significance beyond stimulating interest in an Artificial Structures Finder. The latter almost certainly require NT.) 4. Virtual organisms. Computer models of real creatures accurate down to the smallest detail of biochemical significance. Past a certain point in scale virtual organisms raise questions essential to the general acceptance of uploading. And of course: 5. The assembler. Any others? <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon. -- Jules Verne, 1865 <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> 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.