"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.

  • @saucerwizardEnglish
    6•7 months ago

    Drexler dropped diamondoid for iron pyrite like, a decade ago afaik.

    • @titotalOPEnglish
      2•7 months ago

      Do you have any links to this, out of curiosity? I looked a bunch and couldn’t find any successor projects.

      • @saucerwizardEnglish
        3•7 months ago

        Drexler’s blog - which might be gone now, which I was reading over a decade ago. I wish I could be more specific sorry. Yud hasn’t read anything since Nanosystems it seems like.