Hello,

First of all many thanks for the new forum :)
I've quickly read through all the posts and have seen that there is interest in making youtube videos.

Actually I'am planning to do so for quite a while now.
It started with a talk about APM that I gave last year.
(  https://cfp.linuxwochen.at/de/LWW14/public/events/115  )

Since I had only about sixteen listeners I thought about making the slides into a youtube presentation,
so that all the work wouldn't go to waste.

I started out with about 40 slides and improved on them.
Beside collecting relevant images I made many svg info-graphics by myself.
A view of them, can be seen here:
https://www.pinterest.com/lukassuess/atomically-precise-nanotechnology/

The number of slides grew and grew and I've now ended up with a about 200 of them (all german atm) - still growing.
Sadly I realized just very recently that static slides are a catastrophe for youtube - way to boring.
See this test-video catastrophe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y60-80X7q4
the same **** in german: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoFHHtl7S38
(I’m well aware that there is much more wrong with these videos than just the single static image)

As a consequence I plan to switch my focus to making screen-cast videos where I draw stuff and drag and scale images (probably accelerated video with pre-recorded audio) - this way there is more movement on the screen and the viewer always knows where to put her/his attention. (Making animations would be waay too much effort.)

With the slides I ended up with five big main parts which are:
* the basics of working in the small
* a bottom up tour through a nano-factory (as a sensible far term goal - not as easy an easy to reach goal)
* the products of a nano-factory (with focus on solving the great civilisation problems)
* the path to the nano-factory (current relevant developments)
* some possible ecological and economical consequences and miscellaneous

I recently formulated some brand new text for the overall introduction video.
As a side-note: I want the introduction to be so easy that anyone’s grandparents can understand most of it.

Here it is:
(excuse spelling errors I quick & dirty translated it right now)
(I'd be pleased to hear your thoughts about this)

##################

Welcome,

[arouse interest]
Here I want to introduce you to a technology that has greater potential to enrich our world than all achievements of mankind to up until the present day.

[minimal definition]
Specifically this is about a device that can produce all things that you need in your daily live. And that extremely cheap or even completely free. This device is so small that it comfortably fits on a table and so quiet and odour-less that you can run it in your living-room.

[product materials]
All the often gaily coloured or super stylish items that come out of this nano-factory consist of very special materials. Although they consist out of tiniest gemstone pieces they can behave for example like rubber. This is however only one concrete example. In the big whole there are gazillions of new material properties possible which  from today’s view appear either utterly uncommon or alien. There are limits though. Biological products like real beef cannot be produced. For this a very different technology is necessary.

[Building material]
Your personal nano-factory of course needs building material. This it can even filter from completely normal air.
To use air as building material your nano-factory needs a lot of energy though. Here this energy comes from a solar-cell-foil. Whereas this foil again also is made from your nano-factory. With that the circle closes. Instead of air you can also run your nano-factory with other easily attainable substances. In this case there is often more energy contained in the building material than you need to run the nano-factory. The nano-factory than works like a generator and it can feed back the excessive energy into the grid or pump it into very special energy storages. I believe you can now correctly guess how you get those very special energy storages.

[demarcation(?)]
Attention: This is not about what today is called "nanotechnology" in the media and also not about swarms of self reproducing nano-robots of the kind of which you can read in some science fiction literature. Instead this is about factual existing up-to-date knowledge about those nano-factories.

Even if we can't yet build such a nano-factory this doesn't rule out that we can understand major properties of it.
To find trustworthy statements about a future nano-factory though without having the possibility to make direct tests or measurements on it we must obey strict discipline. First we are only allowed to use well tested theoretical models and second in all the estimations(?) we do with these models we need to be very careful. In other words: We always need to leave ourselves big safety margins. If we - under strict abidance of these rules - analyse a rough model of a nano-factory we see something astonishing. In spite of the consequent pessimistic estimations we get enormously promising values both for the performance of a nano-factory and the performance of its products.

[topic & target audience]
In this series I want to present for the first time the already existing knowledge of nano-factories in a well illustrated way that is not only accessible for scientists but for the average technologically interested person.

[benefit for the audience & call for action] ~~improvable~~
In this compact introduction I have barely scratched the topic "nano-factory". If you decide to accompany me to dive down deeper in the depths of this technology you can expect an orientation help for the case that I could motivate you to help with the building of the first nano-factory. And on the other side you can look forward to an extremely seldom shown image of the future which is not based on the usual suspects which would be: >>first<< far from reality science fiction >>second<< advertisement for short sighted profit oriented research and development and >>third<< Reports of all the seemingly ineluctable future catastrophes in the public media. In other words you can look forward to a picture of the future which markedly deviates from the traditionally rehashed forecasts for the future.

[orientation help]
If now a nano-factory sounds to fantastic for you I recommend you to start at the "path to the first nano-factory".
If you are impatient and want to know more about the new possibilities which open up with such nano-factories I propose you start with the "products of a nano-factory". If you're interested in the inner processes of a nano-factory then start with the "tour through a nano-factory". And if you want to take your time to hear the whole thing starting from the beginning start with the "basics". At the end I keep myself open a point for speculations about environmental and economic consequences plus further mixed topics.

[call-for-action & thanks & dismissal]
This video series is a work in progress. Please be patient. If I could spark your interest please subscribe to my you-tube channel. I’m always happy about constructive questions and comments. I should also probably point out that the majority of what I’m going to present here is not my own work. Thus I’m going to specify the used sources to the best of my knowledge and belief. If you managed to endure to this point I thank you for your attention.

######

Btw: I'm not really happy with the term "nano-factory" but that's for another topic.

>> ... a belated welcome ...
Don't sweat it, I'm actually pleasantly surprised since I was expecting to wait at least half a month.

>> I liked the idea you used to make the size of an atom comprehensible.
Thanks, the idea may be good but I think the video needs improvement.
Btw (off-topic): this works for the visualisation of the size of the earth too. Scale down a soccer field to hair-size and an equally scaled down model of the earth does comfortably fit onto a soccer field. Beyond that (solar system, galaxy and beyond) gaining an intuitive feeling for absolute size relations to everyday objects is imo impossible.

...

>> I think you may need to at least tell the viewer that later videos will explain the origin of the limitations of nano-factories.

Thanks, I was at best unconciously aware of that. I certainly can't include any explanations in the introduction since they'll have too much size even if I compactify them as best I can (see below) but I'll add a note that I'll explain this later.


>> ...  I can't begin to guess what is possible and impossible. ... "wait - why can't I make biological materials? Is making a protein molecule not possible? What would be possible?"

As I see it there is a combination of at least three reasons for why biological products (complex tissues not molecules like proteins) seem not practically producible with nanofactries:

1.) the amount of mechanosynthetic situations encountered
artificial: a vew diamondoid materials
biological: tens of thousonds of types of molecules (and embeddings in ice*)

2.) the non "diamondoidivity / gemstone likeness" of biological tissues
artificial: stiff; ... biological: non stiff (VdW bonds between ice* and biomolecules too)

3.) A very different "decompression chain" from blueprint to product
artificial: high level 3D model -> triangle mesh or similar -> toolpaths -> low level actuator commands -> final arrangement of atoms (at room temperature)
--- you get every time almost the same product from the same blueprint
biological: DNA -> ribosomal protein production -> modifications through interactions with other proteins + a lot of usage of emergent behaviour -> final arrengement of atoms (in a shock frozen* snapshot)
--- you get every time quite a bit of a different product from the same blueprint


Point 1.)  may be doable putting in lots and lots of additional effort beyond basic mechanosynthesis.
Further continuous improvement beyond basic mechanosynthetic capabilities will go in this direction.
Point 2.) should be doable too by forcefully stretching chain molecules and doing mechanosynthesis near the ends. Sufficient cooling and molecular-sorting-pump-like-vacuum-lockout right after production will probably be necessary. So after attainment of basic diamondoid mechanosysntesis it shouldn't be too hard to extend it with capabilities to produce e.g. pure sugar and some other similarly simple substances.

Point 3.) is serious though:
Atomically precise 3D scanning the product of a biological system [ which seems ridiculously difficult because of point 2.) in reverse where you can't choose what you find] and compressing it into a mechanistic nanofactory style blueprint would at best produce something with strange compression artefacts (like in an over-compressed JPEG image - while AI (in the sense of smart compression) is rather unrelated to basic APM capabilites here it may help a bit). For a perfect 1:1 copy representation you'd need to store the location of every atom - which in its most compact representation basically IS the product. Making copies while taking apart a shock frozen original (whatever you'd call that process - both "cloning" and "beaming" is very misleading) is imo not very sensible. I haven't thought about "divergent disassembly" for scanning as an analogue to "convergent assembly" yet - I'd guess the slicing process may slow down things severely.

In conclusion I wouldn't go as far as to say that it is completely and utterly impossible to make a perfect 1:1 copy of a steak with a diamondoid nanofactory (on steroids) but I'm pretty sure it is for all practical purposes too far off and there are way more effective and way way easier (but still harder than basic synthesis of diamond) ways to make something that
A.) on the makro-scale comes close enough to e.g. a steak that fulfils its purpose (nourishing healthy tasty and nice looking)
B.) on the sub micro scale is actually completely different. (think APT based micro-scale ink-jet printer)

Does that reasoning make sense - spot any errors?


I'm collecting my thoughts about synthesis of food here:
http://apm.bplaced.net/w/index.php?title=Synthesis_of_food

ps: If nanofactories emerge from a long and twisted way through a series of steps of "pseudo bio technology" there will be remainders of earlier technology steps of this pseudo biological stuff (DNA origami & co) that are still producible. There may be motivation though to remove bootstrapping history such that nanofactories can be used in more extreme environments.
I write down my thoughts about this here:
http://apm.bplaced.net/w/index.php?title=Consistent_design_for_external_limiting_factors

....

>> ... I found very few [videos] of any educational value. ...

What is certainly and especially missing are videos along the lines of what E.Drexler does in his new book "Radical Abundance"
# Chapter 5 "The Look and Feel of the Nanoscale World"
# Chapter 10 "The Machinery of Radical Abundance"
I plan to tackle that and more (with as much graphics as possible) in the "basics" and "tour through nanofactory" sections I mentioned. The missing videos in this area are the reason why I wrote:
>> me: "... I want to present for the first time the already existing knowledge of nano-factories in a well illustrated way that ..." and why I want to make these videos in the first place.

For the topic "products of nanofactories" there are some videos out there but not much:
I especially like J. Storrs Hall "whether machine"-video ...
part1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOPsczPlzzY
part2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd63OMosnq0
... because he focusses on the more overlooked side of applications that I'm especially interested in.
It's imo one of the more speculative applications though.
Btw: I'm collecting APM related topics that I think are unjustifiably under-represented here:
http://apm.bplaced.net/w/index.php?title=The_usual_suspects

>> ... The closest I thought that came to having useful material of use to scientists, engineers, and technologically literate audience is this one by Ralph Merkle: ...

As chance has it I re-watched this one just a few days ago since its the first link on R.Merkles homepage.
(details off-topic -> omitted)

>> ... I did review several hundred, sorted first by view count, then by viewer ratings, and lastly by most recently uploaded. ...

Wow, quite a bit of effort ...

If it comes to general introductory videos there are quite a view out there. I'm collecting the best introductory videos I occasionally find at the bottom of my wikis mainpage. See here:
http://apm.bplaced.net/w/index.php?title=Mechadense%27s_Atomically_Precise_Manufacturing_Wiki#Videos
(I've never checked the view-counts though - viewer rating may be not too important if the views are plenty?)

Are there any you have missed in there?

There are more in depth videos about APM related topics but they are mostly too technical for the general audience like:
The foresight conference videos (mostly near term topics) of which I found some rather interesting:
https://vimeo.com/foresightinst/videos
This video about mechanosynthesis is really great but also not suitable for the general audience:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=705raszSLGA


>> A couple months ago I did search Youtube for videos where the word "nanotechnology" ...

Have you read Drexlers "five types of nanotechnology" blog entry?
http://metamodern.com/2014/04/04/five-kinds-of-nanotechnology/
Basically the term "nanotechnology" is as specific as "makrotechnology" thus its no surprise that it got annexed.

Out of this reason I also consider using the term "minifactory" instead of "nanofactory" relating to the size of the whole thing and not the size of its smallest components.
Good Idea / Bad Idea?
(I ditched personal factory, personal fabricator, living room factory)

Choosing sensible nomenclature is a difficult task. I note my ideas about that topic here:
http://apm.bplaced.net/w/index.php?title=APM_related_terms
(It seems I need to reread "Radical Abundance" to find out whether Drexler refers with APM to the whole path or more to far term goal)

Btw: I came up with the term Gemstome-Gum-*** or Gem-Gum-***
*** = [Technology|Factory|Manufacturing|...]
I think it fulfils the major requirements:
1.) it is catchy (probable to be actually used)
2.) it is accurate enough to be unannexable (the term provides a concrete example for a diamondoid meta-material - out of which nanofactories ad their products are mostly made)

Your thoughts?

In general I've mostly stopped using anything with the "nano" prefix for internet searches.
When skimming for videos I often search for the names of the main persons in the realm of APM and filter for the newest material.
In general now when I'm starting a conversation about APM I usually take the route over "advanced production technologies" starting with 3D printing and avoiding nano prefix altogether - it helps - the conversation does not immediately deteriorate into the sunscreen, lotus-spray or a similar direction.

|||

I see. -- Well, I'll have enough to do in the meantime (and for the foreseeable future) :)
>> ... iPad seems to cut my IQ in half.
Agree.

New video is out since mid February 2022:


Well, It's just a sneak preview for something
– with smooth animation from pre-rendering
– proper example numbers and
– spoken explanation

No clue how long till I have something
at the current pace this goes nowhere …

Copied over from the video description:

Here's a sneak preview for a video that I'm planning.*THIS NOT A PROPOSED SYSTEM*It only serves to illustrate an important scaling law that IMO deserves more public awareness.For future cog-and-gear style diamondoid nanotechnology the high surface area of all the many bearings at the nanoscale (causing friction losses) is not a show-stopping problem, as is sometimes assumed. One main reason for that is:A very small volume of productive nanomachinery already suffices for practical levels of throughput.So why is only very little volume of nanomachinery sufficient?Every layer shown in the animation processes the exact same amount of product per time. But the layers get successively thinner.So the lowermost ultra-thin layer with nanomachinery at the very bottom processes the exact same amount of product per time as the macroscale robot in the big fat box at the very top. All layers but the nanomachinery layer at the very bottom can be made optional and stripped away. But even if they are left in they do not contribute all that much to friction. This goes into a rabbit-hole of details ... which I'll omit.But the smaller and smaller robots here operate faster and faster the reader might argue. Well, no. They don't. Note this deceptive fact: While frequencies increase when going down the layers, the absolute speeds actually stay unchanged/constant. Everything operates at the natural frequency for its scale in this illustration here (which is not a proposed system btw).So in summary the teased on *SCALING LAW* reads as follows: **Smaller machinery features higher throughput per volume (higher throughput density). A linear scaling law. Half size means double throughput density.***MATH:* http://apm.bplaced.net/w/index.php?ti...Reviews appreciated.*BONUS:* And if you "buy" lower speed of nanomachinery (absolute speeds not frequencies) by "paying" with a higher quantity (volume) of nanomachinery (keeping throughput constant) then friction losses still fall further. That is because dynamic friction losses scale down quadratically with sliding speed while friction losses scale up only linearly with the quantity (volume) of nanomachinery. Taking this into account one gets closer to an actually proposable system.Keywords:* APM atomically precise manufacturing* diamondoid nanomachineryMusic by SuperLinuxAudioGuru - License CC0https://youtu.be/lxwcNZWLDwQTHE SHOWN ARCHITECTURE IS NOT A PROPOSED SYSTEMIt only serves to illustrate an important scaling law that deserves more public awareness.— — —★ Public APM forum: https://sci-nanotech.com/★ My Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/mechadense★ My homepage: https://mechadense.github.io/00.Home-...★ My wiki: http://www.apm.bplaced.net★ Support me: https://www.patreon.com/mechadense