Originally posted by humy
It is incumbent upon you to prove that as yet uninvented technology is possible, and economic.
Simply claiming that you can't think of any reason why it wont work is not sufficient.
This is clearly false.
Suppose there is NO known reason to believe that a yet uninvented hypothetical technology T cannot ever be invented. That inclu ...[text shortened]... is a large number of other examples including the television, radar, infrared cameras and so on.
Whether or not that is true.
It does not apply in this case.
I keep pointing out problems that I
CAN see with using enzymes and you are ignoring them.
The big one being that you don't just want enzymes to sit in a chemical soup and turn it from
starter materials into product materials. You want them to actually self assemble highly complex
structures.
I mean lets look at an equivalent of carbon fibre.
Carbon Fibre Composite gets it's strength from the weave, the careful and specific arrangement, of all
the individual carbon fibres.
A material made of carbon nano-tubes composite will likewise get it's strength from the specific arrangement
of the carbon nano-tubes.
Let's say for the sake of argument that you design an enzyme that can make carbon nano-tubes.
It sits in a chemical soup and takes from that soup the precursor chemicals and fuel it needs to make
the carbon nano-tube. And it sits their randomly floating around churning out a carbon nano-tube.
Along with several trillion brethren doing the same thing.
What you get is a soup of carbon nano-tubes along with a load of waste products and spent enzymes.
This might well be useful as you can then potentially extract the nano-tubes and do stuff with them.
However it is an enormous jump to go from that to actually growing carbon nano-fibre composite.
Where the enzymes cannot just sit around they must self organise and build a very specific macro-structure
with nano-scale details and complexity.
THAT is what strikes me as being both incredibly hard if not impossible to practically do.
AND is what strikes me as being highly unlikely to be the most efficient and economical method of construction
for many products.
And I still don't see enzymes as being sufficiently robust to build many substances which require large energy
input to break and remake chemical bonds.
And the second law tells us that building highly complex structures is always going to take lots of energy.
ect ect ect.
You don't just want this technology to be possible, you want it to be the most economic.
I do not buy that and will not buy that unless you can demonstrate that it is actually simpler to program
living things to make inorganic products, when compared to more conventional or other alternative construction
techniques. And that this reduced cost will be so great that it causes us to give up on making things out of
half of the periodic table.
And you cannot possibly do that.
Because you are trying to pre-empt future economics you cannot possibly understand and you are telling me about
the capabilities and performance of technologies that have not been invented yet and you have not demonstrated
are practically possible.
And it's no good you saying you can't see how it wont work
because I can.
You are looking dreamy eyed into the far far future and making predictions about what will make sense in times you
cannot possibly have any conception of.
It would be like the ancient Egyptians trying to make predictions about the year 2020. [whatever that would have been
on their calendar] We do not know enough about the far future to make the kind of predictions about technology and
it's use. Hell we can't even do a good job predicting 50 years into the future.