Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3391-3395 (9th to 13th January 2017)
cesium133:
--- Quote from: Case on 14 Jan 2017, 07:49 ---Nanotbots exist only in SF-lit
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QC is sci-fi. I'm going with the MST3K mantra on this one...
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAwh1Wtb8QE
(it was supposed to start at 1:01, but apparently you'll have to fast-forward it yourself or watch the whole thing)
Case:
--- Quote from: cesium133 on 14 Jan 2017, 07:59 ---
--- Quote from: Case on 14 Jan 2017, 07:49 ---Nanotbots exist only in SF-lit
--- End quote ---
QC is sci-fi.
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--- Quote ---Nanotbots exist only in SF-lit and there, Grey Goo is the nanotech equivalent of cancer
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MST3K mantra: Yeah, yeah, I know -> "The first rule of Fight Club ..." is how a grad-student in high energy once put it. I'm just pissed because nanobots are bad SF. And I intensely dislike Eric Drexler ...
Found a nice paper on the locomotion at micron-scale "Life at low Reynolds-numbers" by E.M. Purcell. Written for physicists, but in that lovely American-Natsci-style that makes it accessible also to lay-audiences (and much, much easier to understand for physicists, too ... Feynman did wonders for US physics curricula)
--- Quote ---It helps to imagine under what conditions a man would be swimming at, say, the same Reynolds number as his own sperm. Well you put him in a swimming pool that is full of molasses, and the you forbid him to move any pare of his body faster than 1 cm/min. Now imagine yourself in that condition; you're under the swimming pool in molasses, and now you can only move like the hands of a clock. If under those ground rules you are able to move a few meters in a couple of weeks, you may qualify as a low Reynolds number swimmer.
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--- Quote --- I'll show you a picture of the real animals in a bit but we are going to be taking about objects which are the order of a micron in size (Fig. 4). That's a micron scale, not a suture, in the animal in Fig. 4. In water where the kinematic viscosity is 10^{-2} cm/sec these things move around with a typical speed of 30 micron/sec
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Celly:
--- Quote from: Case on 14 Jan 2017, 07:49 ---
--- Quote from: Celly on 13 Jan 2017, 17:30 ---I am calling them Legion and my theory is that they are Grey Goo.
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Nanotbots exist only in SF-lit, and there, Grey Goo is the nanotech equivalent of cancer ... Talked to a tumor lately?
(click to show/hide)Nanobots are a pet peeve of mine ... Mostly because, despite the claims of feverish- and well-sponsored research, it's so hard to meet anybody working on them even theoretically. I work as a postdoctoral research fellow in theoretical solid state physics - that'd be the physics part of what is popularly called 'nanotech'. Let's just say I cannot confirm that researching nanobots is a 'hot topic' :laugh:
If it were, it would show up in the condensed-matter section of the archive-server arXiv.org, where nearly all physicist upload the pre-print versions of their papers (mostly in order to document their claim to a specific result in a timely manner).
-> Google-search for "condmat, nanobots" gives 518 hits (and many aren't even on condmat). Google-search for "condmat, topological insulators" (one of the currently hot topics in solid state physics) gives 62.800 ...
And lastly, how would nanobots - structures whose dimensions are measured in a millionth of a millimetre: roughly a hundreth of the avg. diameter of a capillary - manage migrate from the contact point at Fayes forehead to every relevant motoneuronal pathway in a matter of seconds?
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Yes, I am using "Grey Goo" in an not totally correct sense, to informally refer to a nanobot swarm. Legion is a nanobot swarm. Though Legion may be capable of "grey gooing" his environment, perhaps after a certain point when they achieved sentience, they decided it was more interesting to observe and interact with the world than to eat it. It would certainly be easier to assemble a swarm of that size if the nanobots were capable of self-replication.
The neuron stuff, "because fiction." I am making a prediction that Legion is a nanobot swarm, not that Jeph has been 100% perfectly accurate to every branch of physics. Beyond that, a nanoscale "tendril" of nanobots could move much quicker than an individual disconnected from the swarm.
BenRG:
My guess is that the 'weapon' the white-skinned one has been using has been some manner of infrasonic or ultrasonic system that is temporarily disabling sections of the target's brain (possibly due to brainwave harmonics or something).
Case:
I'm going with good, old-fashioned transcranial magnetic stimulation :-P
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkNbYHu_STU
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