What is the quickest route to diamondoid nanotechnology at this point?

    Hello, Jim and everyone, it is good to be onboard here with you all.


    I have read and absorbed huge amounts of nanotechnology data over the years, and I have examined many of the potential routes to the "grand grail" of general purpose or even basic diamondoid mechanosynthesis. At this point, and I welcome all of your views on this, what appears to be the most efficient and fastest route to regular atomic precision diamondoid nanotechnology ala Nanosystems?


    The DNA front seems to have advanced in recent years but I still think we need some form of proto assembler in the form of a proximal probe/scanning probe microscopes able to have molecular gripper tips that allow the assembly of three dimensional structures like assembler parts to bootstrap primitive assemblers to then build ever-increasingly advanced assemblers.


    What do you all think? Protein folding? DNA nanomachines? SPMs with molecular grippers like Drexler and Merkle and others mentioned years ago? Engineered bacteria and viruses? Laser, Electron Beam and other energetic beam systems?

    Welcome Diamondoid!


    It is difficult to say what approach will yield the quickest route, since only modest progress has been made in any of the approaches.


    When my time permits, I've been looking at using SPMs in the bootstrap phase. I suspect that DNA engineered bacteria are another approach that may be relatively fast. I'm not aware of anyone making any progress using any of the other techniques you mention to the extent that those two approaches have already demonstrated in the lab.

    Quote from Diamondoid

    What do you all think? Protein folding? DNA nanomachines? SPMs with molecular grippers like Drexler and Merkle and others mentioned years ago? Engineered bacteria and viruses? Laser, Electron Beam and other energetic beam systems?

    I guess a bit of all of them - viruses and bacteria only as means for producing artificially designed de-novo proteins.


    We had some related discussion about possible approaches here:
    What are the remaining lurkers up to?


    The next major milestones I'm looking for are:
    #) Putting
    hierarchically self assembled (already experimentally demonstrated in isolation)
    hinged and rigid (already experimentally demonstrated in isolation)
    DNA/Protein/Peptoid/Foldamer structures onto photographically etched chips (already experimentally demonstrated in isolation)
    such that they get aligned to the etched structures.
    #) Introducing high rate bistable electrostatic actuation via this chips surface.


    Then It gets more murky:
    #) Introducing mechanical demultiplexing in the self assembled sufficiently stiff foldamer structures.
    #) Making kind of like a protein block based 3D printer (on chip surface) and thereby get rid of unreliable high error rate self assembly.
    #) Switching to bio-minearlisation materials (I perceive a big knowledge gap here) - As elaborated in "Radical Abundance" Appendix
    #) Building micro vacuum chambers and finally switching to advanced materials like diamond and silicon. - Also as elaborated in "Radical Abundance" Appendix


    In one of his more recent presentation Eric Drexler presented an approach for in liquid free floating foldamer activation mechanosynthesis devices.
    He proposed to design
    #) a three axis site activator via hierarchical self assembly and
    #) use trichromatic light for directed motion actuation (already experimentally demonstrated in isolation).

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