Haven’t heard from my old friend (in both senses of the word these days), but Ray Kurzweil has an interview.
Haven’t listened to the whole thing, but so far, he doesn’t seem to have mentioned that he got interested in the subject of nanotech via his interest in space.
Actually, I knew him before you did and always suspected that one of his motivations for diving into nanotech was to have the machinery needed to revive himself after going “on ice” in Antarctica for a century – given the “glacial” pace of space progress. 🙂
I’m sure that appealed to him at some point, but I think it started from trying to develop a thin enough material for a light sail.
I read The Engines Of Creation and Nanosystems in three days at the state reference library around 1995. Probably the fastest I’ve ever consumed non-fiction.
I would have liked more discussion on unexpected barriers. Both AI and nanotechnology have turned out to be fields where it really is a whole lot harder than you expected to get thingsidone. I hear that they are getting a lot of things done anyhow, but an overall perspective on what is turning out to be _really hard_ and why would be neat.
As far as I can see it’s because academia is a terrible place to do research and productive nanosystems are the kind of blue sky research that you can’t do commercially. The typical way around this is for researchers to do it in their spare time while working full time on something else – this is how, for example, MEMS was done. The problem here is that the tools required to do nanosystems are mostly unavailable to tinkerers.