>> Jay A. Lewis wrote:
>>>If you want nanites to build your house, I'm sure there must be some
>>>theoretical limit to how fast this could be done...
>>Heat will be the major problem.
>I've gotta admit, it's not obvious to me that this is a problem. I'm
>assuming that the NT house construction will take a few days.
There you go. The original point was that time is a limited resource. What if you want your new house built from scratch in 5 seconds? You can't do it. Now, compared to manufacturing today, completely building a new house (including all sorts of wonderful nanotechnology toys) in a couple of days is pretty good, and asking for it to be done in 5 seconds, or even 5 minutes, is an outrageous request. With nanotechnology, however, many things that seem like outrageous requests today will be possible. Not all will be possible, however, and some things that will be almost impossible (like doing a large enough number of easy things) will be very hard. Scarcity is the measure of how much hard stuff one can accomplish. People will be more capable with these tools, but not infinitely capable, so there will still be limits, and thus costs.
Tom McKendree
tmckendree@msmail3.hac.com