Cryonicists' sunk costs reasoning about Drexler's "nanotech."

Apparently some cryonicists take exception to the blog post I've circulated by physicist Scott Locklin about what he calls Eric Drexler's "charlatanry." Drexler astounded the world a quarter century ago with his "vision" of human-designed self-replicating nanomachines which could do this and that, along the lines of bringing about the Millennium, including the resurrection of the people in frozen slumber. (Drexler figures prominently in Alcor's literature, which I suspect we'll regret from hindsight.)

Yet in our mysterious, far-future year 2010, we don't have one tangible nanomachine along Drexler's lines doing anything of the sort, and Locklin argues that Drexler's speculations haven't born fruit because they incorporate mistaken assumptions about physics. By contrast, many other technologies developed quickly because they got the physics right from the beginning. In an example that comes to my mind, the laser, weak cousin to science fiction's "death ray," went from a laboratory curiosity in 1960 to a powerful and versatile tool in science, medicine and engineering in a handful of years. How did this happen? Because the laser exploits correct principles of physics.

I wonder now if Drexlerism, if I may call it that, suffers from crank magnetism. Paraphrasing Mike Huben, Drexler's advocates may have gotten themselves into a bind, rather like Austrian economists and creationists, by rejecting criticisms from other scientists in favor of appeals to authority ("Read Nanosystems!") and pseudoscientific arguments.

I have no emotional investment in Drexler's reputation. If his ideas suck, we need to write off the bad investment into them and start to look for better ideas, especially regarding cryonics revival scenarios. Instead I detect some fallacious sunk costs reasoning in cryonicists who've come to Drexler's defense, which especially worries me at a time when cryonics has fallen under suspicion for other reasons.