Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!apple!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: peb@tma1.eng.sun.com (Paul Baclaski) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Nanotechnology reference Keywords: nanotechnology "Evolution" STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION Message-ID: Date: 11 Oct 89 00:40:25 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 35 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu > [I for one have never heard or read "nannites". Leafing through > EOC, one sees the term "assembler" used fairly consistently. > I didn't the episode referred to. Would anyone care to summarize? > --JoSH] This episode of STTNG indeed incorporated the idea of nanotechnology in the form of tiny robots. Wesley was doing a science project in which he took these off the shelf nanites, as he called them, and modified them to talk to each other to share knowledge. They escaped and apparently could reproduce since they ended up invading the ship computer in hordes. This caused the computer to malfunction in certain ways and simultaneously not recognize that it was malfunctioning. This jepordized the ship to some degree and also caused a problem in that it could make the launch of a probe into a neutron star miss its launch window (which occured once every 196 years). They had some graphics that were supposed to represent the nanites-- it looked like a color paint program with some pixel globs moving around leaving trails behind them. It got a little hokey when Wesley used tweasers to pick up the nanites! It also looked like he was using a small optical microscope to look at them. I supposed we could assume that the nanites were much bigger than the ones Drexler envisions. Overall, for such an interesting topic, the show was not that exciting: perhaps that is good, since they did not do a gray goo show, which might alarm some people. (It might be a good thing that they did not use exact terms from EoC for the same reason.) Paul E. Baclaski Sun Microsystems peb@sun.com