I've recently finished reading physicist James Kakalios's popular book, The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics. I bought Barnes & Noble's ebook version and read it on my Nook, a gadget I now use every day.
Kakalios describes in a simplified way how modern technologies which have developed rapidly in our lifetimes, and which would have sounded science-fictional 50 years ago, for example lasers, microprocessors, solar electric panels, LED's, computer memory and magnetic resonance imaging in health care, have all exploited quantum mechanics deliberately. By getting the underlying physical principles right in emerging technologies, the physicists, inventors and engineers who work in these areas have shown that they can produce the goods in a timely fashion. "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed," a principle I've heard attributed to Sir Francis Bacon. (I suppose in my preferred E-prime I'd write that as, "To command nature, you must obey nature.")
So why hasn't that happened in Eric Drexler's clankety-clank vision of "nanotechnology"? Because Drexler's proposal engages in something like quantum mechanics denialism?
And I repeat: I have no emotional investment in Drexler's reputation. I do, however, have an emotional investment in staying alive, and if Drexler's ideas suck, we need to discard them and move on to potentially better ideas. But apparently other cryonicists have gotten stuck in sunk-costs reasoning, emotional attachments to pet ideas and other cognitive biases, and they don't want to consider my suggestion.
I mean, seriously, we've wasted a whole generation chasing this phantasm. People in their 20's today were born around the time Drexler began to construct the propaganda machine for his ideas in the 1980's, and many of them have started their own families by now (and therefore added to the supply of human minds traumatized by the knowledge of their mortality), with no "nanoassemblers" in sight. Meanwhile, the technologies which exploit quantum mechanics have shown progress.
I also wonder why transhumanist conferences even bother now to feature speakers about "nanotechnology." They might as well offer their podiums to someone who claims that Tony Starks's fictional "arc reactor" will come along any time now and solve our energy problems. Those "nanotechnologists" look like middle-school boys with their science fair projects compared to a real empirical scientist of the caliber of Michael R. Rose, who now also regularly appears at these kinds of conferences:
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