Spider as a template for Contruction Nanobots of the Future?

alxian · 08-03-2005

we've all heard that nanobots munching buckminsterfullerene (to create diamond hard materials) would be the way to mass produce the structures of the future (replacing metals).

the bots would be fed by a nutrient rich liquid, they'd build very complex biodegradable materials much stronger than steel concrete etc.

we could create nano sized spiders (actual biological fluid born spider like creatures) who by the millions/billions weave-build super structures using something like artificial carbon nanotube empregnated spider silk (the tube being sourced cheaply from any of a numerous potential cheap sources), or even normal protein based spider silk? since spider silk by itself is more than strong enough to serve our purposes, at least until those carbon nano structures (tubes and spheres) are cheap enough to put into the feed fluid.

in the case of building materials you'd have vast bacterial flats of arananobots (lol) building slabs of biosteel wall and florring materials, as well as joining pieces, created on site making the erection of large buildings fast, should the plans change onsite pieces could be recycled on site, even on the floor right there.

its known that spidder silk, made from only two protiens is one of the strongest and cheapest to produce building materials known. spiders though are too big and too disagreeable to serve our purposes (even GM spiders wouldn't make for good builders as they are too big versus the silk they must weave). nanobots as they exist in fiction now are too small and possibly too hard to manage (like the spiders) basically if we invented nanobots tomorrow (to bring sci-fi to life, we'd have to allow nanobots to manage themselves in a hierarchy very similar to human construction hierarchies (unable to equipe each bot with transceivers and track and correct each of them in a very hectic building schedule), some would be builders, some would be foremen, some would manage the foremen etc. more likely we'd build near self sufficient bots acting with swarm ai where each bot has its part of the plan preprogrammed but could communicte with nearby bots to coordinate the build.

a comprimise would be large fluid born bacteria sized micromachines based on spiders (which basically sci-fi has been preaching forever to the designed template) that actually create "biosteel" (again either natural protein based spider silk as we know it, or an an alloy (if thats the right word), of protein and carbon nanostructures) each with a chunk of that "genetically encoded" building plan. the issue would be getting billions of bots to work together rather than leaving one bot to build a whole building on its own (fill up a wading pool months (if not years) later you get the shell of bungalow/family sedan/"bullet proof" suit).. meaning nanobots would require many internal structures, building tools, like molecular assembler/dissassemblers, transportation and information processing faculties (cpu, memory, nervous system, and chemical or wi-fi like communication structures etc). viruses travel around by reproducing and drifting (reproducing themsleves in such large numbers that they get where they need to go much like a fluid). the spider nanobot would have to have a digestive track and "tissues" and "organs" to create silk and a brain big enough to store data (chunks of data shared between millions/billions of units), enough to reorganise dynamically to keep the projetc going.

that brain being the source of fear... what happens when the brain is too powerful? allowing the swarm to become independantly intelligent.... easy enough if the bot is part organic to begin with. personally if the brain is no more powerful than a termite its not likely that the swarm would have enough banwidth to act like a brain. (each bot in the swarm being a neuron in the swarm). piffle.

orbsycli · 04-11-2006

This thread is crazy, I'm surprised no one ever replied...Bump

Jay-qu · 04-11-2006

yeah lol, nice read but im to drunk to understand it fully

GAHD · 04-11-2006

I'd say Biofullerine would be a better name, considering Steel is an Iron/carbon/nickle alloy.

that being said, it might be even easyer to just work more with self assembly nanostructures. Once you do that a "brain" becomes useless and any problems with AI are negated.