Eric Drexler at Metamodern points out a two page roadmap to low cost DNA production by one of the top people in the field of DNA synthesis, George Church. George lays out a roadmap synthesize DNA material for dollars per kilogram of DNA. This price is about a billion times cheaper than current costs for synthesizing DNA.
George Church notes two key requirements for implementation:
1. Engineering of [more efficient] nucleotide synthesis: We are collaborating with Philippe Marliere on optimizing metabolic pathways to the synthesis of the four dNTPs in vivo.
2. DNA secretion: This is a natural process in some bacteria, could be enhanced to prevent (potentially toxic) levels of DNA in vivo.
IBM trying to use DNA to place carbon nanotube grids.
DNA has been used to assemble and glue a 3d structure with millions of 15 nm gold particles.
It is interesting to see how advanced and cheap DNA nanotechnology capabilities could be leveraged to help bring down the cost of the ten million tons of Hall weather machine spheres for earth weather or to help achieve nanofactories.
$10/kg for each kilogram of the 10 million tons of J Storrs Hall weather machine spheres would be $100 billion.
The roughly 40,000 trillion tons of material to capture all of the sun’s energy (4 X 10**16 tons) is a less than one of the larger asteroids.
Ceres is about 10**18 tons of material.
Hygiea is carbonaceous (a lot of carbon) and weighs 8 X 10**16 tons.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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