NatNet 3D Molecular Printing - Is This Legit?

[Compro01]

Storing one specific fully grown pear would take a ridiculous amount of memory
1 liter = 10^24 nm^3 = around 10^26 atoms = at least 100,000,000,000 Petabit

Yeah, but there's a huge amount of repetition, so it would compress magnificently.

[Vanguard]

Everything about this smells like 3 day old fish.

[replicatore]

I'm from Milan. Got to admit it was a clever advertising move (we're pretty good at marketing nothingness around here) but also I don't dislike the idea. It takes from RepRap in that it's a community built around an idea for the future. We all think the destiny of 3D Printing is molecular 3D Printing and we know how far a goal that is (a bit like warp speed space travel i'd say). Actually it's theoretically more feasible than warp speed but like many have thankfully explained it is way beyond out technical and scientific capabilities. And it will be for a long time. Still, 3D Printing is the beginning of that road

[Larry]

Theoretically, it's very possible. In fact I would go as far as saying that in my lifetime (I'm 32) this will likely be possible. Having said this, I don't think the technology exists today to do even close to such a thing. They gotta show, not tell.

[DerekPeterson]

Their big unveiling is only a day or two away at the Frontiers of Interaction Conference in Milan Italy on October 24 and 25th.

So what was shown in the big unveiling on October 24-25? Is it legit or not?

[Vanguard]

It is legitimately a potential, someday, possibly, maybe.

[RedSox2013]

So what was shown in the big unveiling on October 24-25? Is it legit or not?

I guess that's a secret as well. I would think that if it was anything groundbreaking, there would have been at least one or two people blogging about it.

[mechadense]

Compro01

Originally Posted by mechadense
Storing one specific fully grown pear would take a ridiculous amount of memory
1 liter = 10^24 nm^3 = around 10^26 atoms = at least 100,000,000,000 Petabit

Yeah, but there's a huge amount of repetition, so it would compress magnificently.

If you use DNA as quasi compression you only can reproduce topology not form and shape of every cell.
The kind of compression present in DNA is obviously not exactly suitable for a printing process.

If you compress more computer like you must ditch some information to get your repetition/symmetry.
Candidates to ditch are:
1) The orientations of the water molecules
2) The deformation states of proteins
3) ... some other stuff
One might say that those protein deformations get erased through thermal vibrations very quickly and it therefore is sufficient to store only the rigid body coordinates of the proteins. But where to draw the line what to store and what not? Think about Proteins with multiple metastable configurations.
Soft watery heavily diffusing bio-systems are therefore hard to compress and even harder to build.
Whilst building they move away under your tool-tip which is fatal when building blindly so they are not really amenable to mechanosynthetic production.
Proposed technical systems can circumvent all that trouble by choosing rigid non-diffusing structures (with those one can build almost anything but food).


For people who are really interested in serious attempts to reach atomically precise manufacturing I can recommend following two books:
A technical investigation:
Nanosystems: molecular machinery, manufacturing and computation
A non technical introduction:
Radical Abundance: how a revolution in nanotechnology will change civilization

[Larry]

So It's been about 3 months since this story originally broke, and we don't know anything else since that first post. They have been extremely quiet, and there Facebook page has not had a post on it in 10 weeks. Has anyone heard anything at all about these guys lately?

[Solidabble]

It had to have been a publicity stunt of some sort. Not sure what the purpose was for doing all that though....