America is a Police State. Cops lie and steal every day . Because cops lie, you can be arrested at any time for any reason. Americas police state is only to protect the wealthy power elite. Why do they become cops? It has been stated in numerous papers that it is a control issue with the cops in general. That they can not control their own lives, so they want to control yours. It is a power trip for them, plain and simple! And you hear from the cops that they wish to serve the public! Please! These people have no form of formal real intelligence. If they did, why would they want to be radio dispatched to complete strangers and for 28 to 32 K a year. Cops are the D students you went to high school with, most where bullies or where bullied. Then you have the problem that the cops lie each and every day to make it seem their job is worse than it really is! Ever been charged with any thing? Cops know most citizens fear and hate them. They love the fear they cause. It is also a fact that 80% of all Police Officers have homosexual tendencies they compensate for. You almost most feel sorry for them. As long as we have weak minded people with feelings of inadequacy, we will have plenty of cops.

In the final installation from Rick Smalley to Eric Drexler, "You and people around you have scared our children… there will be no such monster as the self-replicating mechanical nanobot of your dreams." Let's rewind and take a time machine a few thousand yrs back and tell our the astronomers that "You and people around you have scared our children… there will be no such beings and objects of your dreams – outside Earth". This is a typical vision-limited argument!

The more I look at this, the more it seems to me that Smalley's problem is a mixture of fear of the future and not-invented-here syndromes, nothing more, for the following reason.

One has to assume that he's capable of tackling any of the technical material in Nanosystems head on if he so wishes, so why doesn't he? If he's not capable of it because it's a little bit outside of his main area, then he could give the task of finding technical objections to a classful of undergrads as an exercise, or to a grad team that would find it easy going.

On the face of it, the straightforward explanation for a total lack of precise, focussed technical counterarguments has to be that detractors have tried to find them but without success (so far). I'm not so sure that that's what's been happening here though, because no technical work is ever totally free of errors.

Fear of the future and not-invented-here are very powerful forces, and it could well be that they have denied Smalley the opportunity of putting on his scientist cap and actually addressing the specifics that Nanosystems has held up for public review for so long. That would certainly explain why Smalley-the-scientist just doesn't want to put in an appearance.

Self-replicating nanobots (known as bacteria) already produce anthrax and non-self-replicating nanosystems (known as viruses) produce smallpox and other poxes when host cells are available. So Smalley's dislike of nanobots is specious.

Should we have not talked about the SARS virus because it would have scared the children? Talking about it allowed its rapid isolation, the production of the complete genome sequence, a fairly good understanding of its possible sources and the determination of the receptor that it binds to for entry into cells (so we can test drugs that may block that process [some of which we already have at our disposal]). And that was all within a few months. Would it have been better that we stick our heads in the sand and hope the problem will go away?

With respect to nuclear bombs? Certainly one could send out nanorobots to isolate uranium and bring it back. And one could construct other nanorobots that could isolate the required isotopes. After that the construction of nuclear bombs is to a large extent a macroscale process and nanorobots are not required. However the design and construction of such programmed nanorobots would be a sophisticated process and for many many years something only the top few countries in the world in MNT would be able to attempt if they really wanted to. Those countries already generally have the means to produce nuclear bombs (with the possible exceptions of Germany, Japan and Taiwan). Since many already have a significant excess supply of the materials required (e.g. both the U.S. and Russia have many tons of excess raw materials from dismantling cold war weapons) it would seem to be a rather pointless exercise to design and build such nanorobots.

From the above it seems that Smalley is an animist, believing in a mystical life-force possessed only by the enzymes found in or based on nature. Apparently catalysis of complex chemistry is possible only by such magic enzymes, and everything else is impossible.

I don't think this is the deduction to be made. What has to be understood is that cellular elements aren't sentient or deliberate in their actions like you would expect a machine. Life processes work out because of the sheer number of elements and the combined probability that a macroscopic homeostasis will be achieved. If you are working with a single or few nanomachines, there's no guaranteed way to "control" them to carry out your mechanics. At least not with our current technologies.

Suppose Smalley were right about water being something like a vital force needed for enzyme-like activity. What fears would that allay?
Does that mean self-replicating nanobots could
only produce things such as anthrax and smallpox,
but not nuclear bombs?

You could well be right about long-term dangers, even if there are no short-term ones, but if something's going to happen then I don't panic or go into denial about it. If there's a forseeable problem, we need to plan ahead to avoid it.

I've always been a realist — it probably stems from being a professional engineer, because you can't make things work on the basis of wishful thinking. But realism cuts both ways, so when I am convinced by an argument that is supported by the best scientific analysis currently available, and when that argument has withstood scientific scrutiny for well over a decade, I have to accept everything implied by that argument, even if it leads well outside what seems normal in everyday experience.

And this is where it leads: MNT will be developed in due course, regardless of any attempts at control, even in the presence of a global police state designed to prevent it. Given that fairly safe prediction (it's safe because I give no timescales), are we going to stand around and do nothing? That would be callous in the extreme, it seems to me. I love my friends, my home and my planet, and if defense against an environment that will inevitably become hostile is needed to keep us alive then I won't shrink from the effort just because I don't like hermetically sealed environments (if that's what it takes).

So, to advocates and detractors alike, I think I'd say somelike like, we need less wishful thinking and more constructive realism. The future will be different.

We are definitely at fault for having raised this spectre when it simply doesn't stand up to analysis

Are you talking about replication through "mechanosynthesis", specifically? If so, have you ever read Ralph Merkle's "hydrocarbon assembler" paper? We will be very lucky if free-living mechanosynthetic aerovores simply turn out to be thermodynamically impossible.

Foresight … are at least trying very openly to combat denial in the establishment

I see two kinds of nano-boosterism that ignore or downplay the WMD issue. One is radical posthuman utopianism. There are far more nanofans than nanoengineers in that category. Then there's what you might call "promoters of the nanoindustrial revolution".

I conclude two things from the power and inevitability of nanotechnology. One is, not just that the state will develop it, but that the state will attempt to control it. Pleas that "development is being stifled" will have no public sympathy, if the long-range alternative is to turn every virus writer into a potential Saddam Hussein. The other is that we are going to end up living in hermetically sealed environments, because the "wild" – that is, the natural environment in which we evolved, where we eat and breathe right now – will become contaminated with hostile artificial life.

More people than you think are interested by nanotechnology. I commented today on my blog on the debate between K. Eric Drexler and Richard E. Smalley. My summary was picked by Slashdot. So far, there are 375 comments — some of them are very valuable — and more than 6,000 people looked at my overview. And as I said in conclusion: Drexler thinks "molecular assemblers" are possible while Smalley denies it. Who is right? Don't count on me to give an answer.

LOL – good one. I make sure to send Smalley a snorkel for Christmas BTW, there's a discussion on /. – check it out.