"Diamondoid bacteria" nanobots: deadly threat or dead-end? A nanotech investigation
titotal.substack.com
Confidence level: I’m a computational physicist working on nanoscale simulations, so I have some understanding of most of the things discussed here, but I am not specifically an expert on the topics covered, so I can’t promise perfect accuracy. I want to give a huge thanks to Professor Phillip Moriarty of the university of Nottingham for answering my questions about the experimental side of mechanosynthesis research.

https://titotal.substack.com/p/diamondoid-bacteria-nanobots-deadly

I wrote this article a month or two ago, thought people here might be interested. Drexler-style nanotech research appears to be effectively dead at the moment.

Oh, and Yudkowsky responded to the article with characteristic obliviousness:

I broadly endorse this reply and have mostly shifted to trying to talk about “covalently bonded” bacteria, since using the term “diamondoid” (tightly covalently bonded CHON) causes people to panic about the lack of currently known mechanosynthesis pathways for tetrahedral carbon lattices.

  • @blakestaceyMAEnglish
    15•7 months ago

    “covalently bonded” bacteria

    what an amazing theoretical possibility

    • @geriksonEnglish
      11•7 months ago

      “My previous bullshit term didn’t take off, time to try to launch a new one”.

      • @blakestaceyMAEnglish
        13•7 months ago

        “Covalently bonded bacteria” sounds like something the writers of Star Trek: Voyager would have come up with because they heard that “covalent bond” was a science term but did not know what bacteria are actually made of.