Okay. I’m going to take you at your word that you understand that biology is, at it’s core, almost entirely built out of covalent bonds. In which case, I am utterly flabbergasted at the way you chose to communicate here.
I think the folded spaghetti gives the wrong impression (spaghetti is not hard to break apart). Let’s instead talk about a structure which has at it’s core a large steel wire (representing covalent bonds), where parallel sections are glued to each with extremely strong glue(that is obviously weaker than steel bonds) to build a backbone, and then finally those backbones are folded into a weird shape, and joined together at various points with a combination of steel welds, superglue, and sometimes bits of string (representing Van der waals forces). We can call this chunk a “glorpein”.
Now I come around, and I want to point out the problems with glorpein. I then proceed to say statements like:
“Glorpeins are held together by string instead of steel wires!”
“Glorpeins are held together by string, which is much weaker than steel wires! ”
“My design has figured out how to use steel, instead of Glorpein, which sticks to string! ”
“Perhaps, one day in the future, can we build steel equivalents to Glorpein”
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to point out that Glorpein is made out of fucking steel. And if you actually know the structure of Glorpein, then these statements are lies, accidental or not,designed to exaggerate the weaknesses involved.
Of course I know that diamond is stronger than bone, and why that is. My job is to simulate crystals! This point was already included in my article:
This is not to say that a fully diamondoid based nanobot, (if such a thing is even possible) wouldn’t be stronger than these examples. Protein is not entirely covalent, which introduces weaknesses. When put into extreme conditions such as high heat, they may lose their secondary and tertiary structure and unfold back to their primary covalently bonded structure, in a process called “denaturation”. Diamond can avoid this fate as all of it’s bonds are equally strong.
My point is that by reducing biology down to “static cling”, you greatly exaggerate it’s weakness, and the comparative advantage of non-biology. As just one example, you can give a protein a blast of heat that breaks all the non covalent bonds… and then often once the heat leaves, it will reform itself right back to what it was before, because it’s still held together by covalent bonds. This is one reason why you can’t just reduce things to their weakest links, and forget about the other 99% of what holds it together.
And again, while diamond is stronger than proteins, it’s also a lot stiffer, less flexible, and less versatile, which is why attempts to build diamond based nanomachines have so far failed. Enzymes can do impressive things because they are flexible and squishy, not in spite of it.
In conclusion, while I understand that science communication is hard, it’s not an excuse for saying things that are factually incorrect.
I’m sort of skeptical that you could write something that works as science communication for a general audience, though lord knows I’m not necessarily succeeding either. The key valid ideas to be communicated are:
There exists a level above biology for molecular systems, greatly superior in terms of strength and energy density. This sets a lower bound on how a very smart and uncaring entity could kill you, which looks like it attacking you with micron-diameter robots, which looks like everyone on Earth falling over dead in the same second.
The designed micron-diameter thingies can easily kill you, where bacteria can’t, because the designed thingies can more easily rip apart human cell membranes or white blood cells made of flimsier materials. They can do that because human cell membranes are held together by static cling, as are bacterial cells; whereas the ideal limits of what micron-sized engines can be put together are more like “diamond”.
This design space isn’t accessible to natural selection despite being physically possible, because evolutionary biology has an incredibly hard time designing systems like freely rotating wheels; for reasons that generalize to evolution not creating airborne cell-engines with solid covalently bonded shells and manipulator ports. My attempt to compress “Why?” down to something maybe overly pithy is “Because shallow energy gradients are more densely connected in the design space of simple mutations than deep energy gradients.”
Now, instead of talking about human cell membranes being held together by static cling, I could talk about extremely thin metallic twisty-tie wires with some magnetized sections that help them fold up together into particular configurations in a barrel of magnetized ball bearings. Your suggestion above for science communication is that this is a great thing to mention, because it helps convey the following interesting truth: if we churn the ball bearings hard enough to unfold the twisty tie, it’ll sometimes fold right back up into the same shape again once we stop churning!
This more complicated metaphor may legit add something to an explanation of organic chemistry. I don’t disagree that it’s cool, or important to organic chemistry proper.
From the perspective of explaining how you die when you confront an uncaring mind that thinks smarter and much faster than humanity, it doesn’t add anything not already contained in “cell membranes are held together by static cling”.
To be clear, my main objection is that you have made statements that are implicitly or explicitly false. I go over each one in detail in the comment here. Yes, simplification is inevitable, but at many points you crossed the line into saying things that are flat out untrue.
I am confused by the pushback and downvotes in response to pointing this out. Do you not want to be making the strongest argument you can here?
I’m sort of skeptical that you could write something that works as science communication for a general audience
I don’t think it’s particularly hard to explain why drexlerian nanotech, if it worked, would be powerful and dangerous, without making any implicitly or explicitly false claims.
“Biology is structurally limited by what can be produced by the DNA/RNA system. For example, proteins are built by stitching together a long chain of molecules which fold into themselves to form 3d structures. The backbone is made of strong covalent bonds, but the full 3d structure has weak links where the backbone is pinned together by a variety of forces, some of which are quite weak. In contrast, Drexler style nanotech could be made factory style, layer by layer, and build densely bonded crystalline structures like diamond that are strictly covalently bonded and contain no weak links, and could therefore survive in much hardier conditions and slice through regular cells.”
Too long? Okay, here’s a quick two sentence version:
“Proteins are made of long chains that fold together and are pinned in place by a variety of forces, some of which are weak. In contrast Drexlerian nanotech could be made out of densely bonded crystalline structures with strictly covalent bonds and no weak links”
If you want to use these arguments, I expect payment in social capital.
Of course, my crux here would be that I don’t think Drexlerian nanotech would actually practically work, (part of the reason being the lack of flexibility), but that’s a debate for another day.
Okay. I’m going to take you at your word that you understand that biology is, at it’s core, almost entirely built out of covalent bonds. In which case, I am utterly flabbergasted at the way you chose to communicate here.
I think the folded spaghetti gives the wrong impression (spaghetti is not hard to break apart). Let’s instead talk about a structure which has at it’s core a large steel wire (representing covalent bonds), where parallel sections are glued to each with extremely strong glue(that is obviously weaker than steel bonds) to build a backbone, and then finally those backbones are folded into a weird shape, and joined together at various points with a combination of steel welds, superglue, and sometimes bits of string (representing Van der waals forces). We can call this chunk a “glorpein”.
Now I come around, and I want to point out the problems with glorpein. I then proceed to say statements like:
“Glorpeins are held together by string instead of steel wires!”
“Glorpeins are held together by string, which is much weaker than steel wires! ”
“My design has figured out how to use steel, instead of Glorpein, which sticks to string! ”
“Perhaps, one day in the future, can we build steel equivalents to Glorpein”
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to point out that Glorpein is made out of fucking steel. And if you actually know the structure of Glorpein, then these statements are lies, accidental or not, designed to exaggerate the weaknesses involved.
Of course I know that diamond is stronger than bone, and why that is. My job is to simulate crystals! This point was already included in my article:
My point is that by reducing biology down to “static cling”, you greatly exaggerate it’s weakness, and the comparative advantage of non-biology. As just one example, you can give a protein a blast of heat that breaks all the non covalent bonds… and then often once the heat leaves, it will reform itself right back to what it was before, because it’s still held together by covalent bonds. This is one reason why you can’t just reduce things to their weakest links, and forget about the other 99% of what holds it together.
And again, while diamond is stronger than proteins, it’s also a lot stiffer, less flexible, and less versatile, which is why attempts to build diamond based nanomachines have so far failed. Enzymes can do impressive things because they are flexible and squishy, not in spite of it.
In conclusion, while I understand that science communication is hard, it’s not an excuse for saying things that are factually incorrect.
I’m sort of skeptical that you could write something that works as science communication for a general audience, though lord knows I’m not necessarily succeeding either. The key valid ideas to be communicated are:
There exists a level above biology for molecular systems, greatly superior in terms of strength and energy density. This sets a lower bound on how a very smart and uncaring entity could kill you, which looks like it attacking you with micron-diameter robots, which looks like everyone on Earth falling over dead in the same second.
The designed micron-diameter thingies can easily kill you, where bacteria can’t, because the designed thingies can more easily rip apart human cell membranes or white blood cells made of flimsier materials. They can do that because human cell membranes are held together by static cling, as are bacterial cells; whereas the ideal limits of what micron-sized engines can be put together are more like “diamond”.
This design space isn’t accessible to natural selection despite being physically possible, because evolutionary biology has an incredibly hard time designing systems like freely rotating wheels; for reasons that generalize to evolution not creating airborne cell-engines with solid covalently bonded shells and manipulator ports. My attempt to compress “Why?” down to something maybe overly pithy is “Because shallow energy gradients are more densely connected in the design space of simple mutations than deep energy gradients.”
Now, instead of talking about human cell membranes being held together by static cling, I could talk about extremely thin metallic twisty-tie wires with some magnetized sections that help them fold up together into particular configurations in a barrel of magnetized ball bearings. Your suggestion above for science communication is that this is a great thing to mention, because it helps convey the following interesting truth: if we churn the ball bearings hard enough to unfold the twisty tie, it’ll sometimes fold right back up into the same shape again once we stop churning!
This more complicated metaphor may legit add something to an explanation of organic chemistry. I don’t disagree that it’s cool, or important to organic chemistry proper.
From the perspective of explaining how you die when you confront an uncaring mind that thinks smarter and much faster than humanity, it doesn’t add anything not already contained in “cell membranes are held together by static cling”.
To be clear, my main objection is that you have made statements that are implicitly or explicitly false. I go over each one in detail in the comment here. Yes, simplification is inevitable, but at many points you crossed the line into saying things that are flat out untrue.
I am confused by the pushback and downvotes in response to pointing this out. Do you not want to be making the strongest argument you can here?
I don’t think it’s particularly hard to explain why drexlerian nanotech, if it worked, would be powerful and dangerous, without making any implicitly or explicitly false claims.
“Biology is structurally limited by what can be produced by the DNA/RNA system. For example, proteins are built by stitching together a long chain of molecules which fold into themselves to form 3d structures. The backbone is made of strong covalent bonds, but the full 3d structure has weak links where the backbone is pinned together by a variety of forces, some of which are quite weak. In contrast, Drexler style nanotech could be made factory style, layer by layer, and build densely bonded crystalline structures like diamond that are strictly covalently bonded and contain no weak links, and could therefore survive in much hardier conditions and slice through regular cells.”
Too long? Okay, here’s a quick two sentence version:
“Proteins are made of long chains that fold together and are pinned in place by a variety of forces, some of which are weak. In contrast Drexlerian nanotech could be made out of densely bonded crystalline structures with strictly covalent bonds and no weak links”
If you want to use these arguments, I expect payment in social capital.
Of course, my crux here would be that I don’t think Drexlerian nanotech would actually practically work, (part of the reason being the lack of flexibility), but that’s a debate for another day.