In princiople, because they are organic, molecular transistors could reporduce themselves like life. They could be part of machines that grow as livng cells grow. If this could happen, then the world of the nanobot would be a step closer.
New technologies are often met with fear and skepticism, but whether you’re terrified or excited by the notion of these, know that these techhnologies are coming at us fast and have the potential if not the promise to change not just our bodies and minds, but our entire world.
Can we program matter itself? Will we ever manufacture reality at atomic level? Technological progress has often been characterized by thinking big but if we want to defeat aging and death, maybe we should start thinking small. REALLY small. Through cutting edge scanning tunneling microscopes, Nanoengineer Ralph C. Merkel of Georgia Tech has recently demonstrated our ability to grab a single atom from one location and move it to another. One nanoscopic step for atom, one giant leap for mankind. Because if we were to assembling things atom by atom, then theoretically, what’s to stop us from making anything we want? It’s a question that’s more important than you might think, because if it were possible, what exactly would differentiate us humans from the machines that we build? If we were able reverse engineer ourselves to the atomic level and build ourselves back up again, would we finally unlock the path to immortality? This is the idea of Nanotechnology, assembling molecules, machines, drugs, and materials atom by atom. Simply put, the word “Nano” means 10 to the power of -10, and a nanometer is a BILLIONTH of a meter. Imagine that the burj Khalifa in dubai was the size of a human hair, by comparison you would be the about the size of a protein and a nanometer would be half the size of a golf ball. The origins of Nanotechnology date back to 1959 with Physicist Richard Feynman’s paper “Molecular Engineering”, where he describes how making machines smaller would allow for more complexity and more accuracy for technology. In his talk “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom“.[2] Feynman described how scientists could potentially move and manipulate individual atoms[3] however, it was Doctor Eric Drexler’s book “Engines of creation” that popularized the idea of assembling them into self-replicating machines. Today, Nanotechnology is being researched in a variety of different fields, like materials, electronics, IT, sustainable energy, and medicine.[4] It might also be the only possible way of resuscitating people cryonically preserved at ALCOR. To accomplish this Drexler gives us the idea of Molecular Manufacturing , the construction of macroscopic products with nanoscopic precision. The ultimate end goal of molecular manufacturing is the construction of a nanofactory we call an “Autoassembler”. Essentially 3D printing on steroids, constructing virtually any device or molecular structure from basic chemical building blocks one atom at a time. It’s the idea of a machine no larger than your kitchen that could be programmed to turn even the most basic raw materials into complex microchips, therapeutic proteins, custom DNA, and even food.A contemporary of Feynman, Hungarian physicist John Von Neumann, called this idea “the universal constructor”. Universal constructors programmers write the software for video games. A world of magic where all that we can imagine comes true. Programmers would become sorcerers and strings of ones or zeros would become spells, translating the spoken word into reality. However, the most important command one could give this device, would be for it to make a copy of itself. If it were to do so, the universal construtor would become a theoretical device we call a “Nanoreplicator”, a self-replicating machine that would not only produce whatever we tell it to, but also reproduce itself to an exact degree, kind of like a virus. This way everybody can have an Universal Constructor with no labor cost at all, given that such technology doesn’t create a disaster event like the grey goo scenario, where even one malfunctioning replicator could copy itself exponentially to the point that it consumes the entire planet.
But the bright side of this tech would be UTILITY FOG: A collective of nanotechnological devices (“Foglets”) that link together into a complex network in the air, able to work together to exert force in any direction or transmit information between each other. This would give users almost complete control over their environment. See Utility Fog by J. Storrs Hall [J. Storrs Hall 1994]. Robots that can reshape and reform themselves so they can do any particular task perfectly, what if we take that same idea and think small. really small, I’m talking about programmable matter. Actual 3 dimensional tactile material that can take on any predetermined shape and then change shapes on demand. Imagin that we have a programmable material workstation. That might include a little troth with some beige puttuy in it, and this putty looks totally normal, until you send it some information, like a virtual model of a 3d object, and then it springs into action. Forming that object right in front of your eyes. It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, and that crazy tech has to be decades away right? Maybe, but maybe not. Ine approach to programmable matter is Claytronics, an idea that came out of carnagie mellon university and intel. The base unit of claytronics is the catom, the computerized atom. Now these catoms can work together to form 3d objects on demand, and building that kind of machine is pretty tricky. They have to be able to recieve energy. They have to be able to communicate with one another and they have to be able to move around, preferably without haveing an moving parts of their own. So serveral years ago Carnagie Mellon University researchers built catom cylindrical prototypes that were 44mm in diameter, now these things were able to move around on a 2d plane pushing and pulling against each other using electromagnets. In the future we want to see even smaller catoms, maybe just a millimeter in size, or the size of a grain of sand, or maybe even smaller than that. In a future where this is a reality, where we have programmable material, why should we be excited about it? Think about it, email has pretty much rendered the fax obsolete, but what if you could fax 3d objects. Let’s say that I have a troth full of claytronic catoms in front of me and I take an object and dip it into that troth. the catoms flow over it, creating a virtual model of the object I put into it. And then I send that to you, and you have your own troth of claytronic catoms that assemble themselves into that same 3d object and boom. I just sent you a copy of a real physical thing. Or in the far future it could be part of telepresence. Forget phone calls and videocalls, I’d be able to create a full 3d claytronic version of myself that could appear in front of you and give you a handshake or even a hug. The entertainment applications for this alone would be astounding. Imagine playing a video game and the characters literally leap off the screen and become literal 3d creatures in your home. And if this stuff becomes plentiful and cheap enough, we could have objects disaassembling and reassembling themselves everywhere. Lets say I have a bunch of friends coming over for dinner and I want to make sure I got enough seats for them. I could use claytronics to build the furtniture right then and there, and then while my guests sleep, I could have it disaassemble back into those individual catoms and go into a vat for storage. This might not happen anytime soon, but I’m still really excited by the prospect of people working on tis technology and we don’t even know were it could go. When people first started making computers, they had no idea the future would turn out as amazing as our present is.
But make no mistake, the industrial manufacturing of anything larger than a few micrometers or the synthesis of the simplest bacterium is DECADES away, and Nanotechnology is only a multi billion dollar industry but mostly because of things fabric coatings, drug delivery, and transistor assembly. However, in the confines of their laboratories, scientists with scanning probe tips are chipping away at the foundational hurdles of nanoassembly, now having developed the ability to not just move not one, but even hundreds of atoms within a short time frame. A few years ago (2007) the US military announced a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) soliciting proposals on Tip-Based Nanofabrication to make nanowires, nanotubes, or quantum dots and under contract with DARPA, nanotechnology corporation Zyvex has been working on researching 3 proposed nanoassembly methods, Epitaxy, Mechanosynthesis, and Bioassembly. Meaning its not a question of IF we can build things atom by atom, but a question of how.
Firstly, we have Epitaxy, nanomanufacturing through layering deposited material into an ordered orientation. It’s important to note that Nanotechnology does not violate the laws of physics, rather, it’s based on a different kind of physics altogether. Quantum Mechanics. While regular machines, such as the internal combustion engines in most cars, operate according to the rules of physics laid out by Isaac Newton, things at the nanoscale follow the more complex laws of chemistry. A group of physicists from the University of Mainz in Germany recently built the smallest engine ever created from just a single atom, trapping it in a cone of electromagnetic energy and using lasers to move it up and down, like an engine piston. Epitaxy is a matter of creating a factory that harnesses these forces of quantum mechanics to assemble molecules. Patterned Atomic Layer Epitaxy or PALE consists of using a Scanning Tunneling Microscope on a Hydrogen-terminated Silicon surface to remove individual Hydrogen atoms, followed by microinjections of gases into an assembly chamber where they deposit atoms on the depassivated surface. A compound called Silylene or (SiH2) is then used to drop a new layer to the crystal on the depassivated site. Rinse and repeat. To shape this into a 3D model, we grow the silicon scaffolds on a bed of germanium and etch it away once we’re done. Through a process called “Autodoping”, Epitaxial films may also be grown from gaseous or liquid precursors as a seed crystal, a substrate onto which Epitaxial layers can be tagged onto through adding impurities like arsine, phosphine, or diborane, . While Epitaxy makes it sound like this technology is only useful for creating tiny things like pharmaceuticals or transistors, that’s DEFINITELY not the case. It’s just a matter of the right variety of molecules in the right order and then dropping them into a series of pressure chambers so they will assemble themselves into larger things. This is an idea that Nanoengineer Ralph Merkel calls “Convergent Assembly”, where we make the right amount of molecules and expose themselves to each other in the right order so that chemistry does all the work for us. From there, we deposite those into increasingly larger molecular feedstocks to 3d print things like Houses, Cars, Space Stations, or even Dyson Spheres. You simply fill a nanomachine with things like ammonia, co2, and sand, come back an hour later, and it’ll have a brand new smartphone waiting for you. Put one in your stomach and you could essentially live on grass and dirt. Merkel proposes a kind of top-down solution to developing these replicators, starting with bulky 3d macroprinters printers, then to microprinters, then getting smaller and smaller to nanoprinters.
Second, there’s Mechanosynthesis, another form of nanoassembly which is instead centered on applying mechanical forces and constraints. Think of a robotic arm, perhaps composed of 7 million atoms, moving a single atom to build another robotic arm, now imagine that this scales up exponentially until you have 8 quadrillion robotic arms. It starts with a computer using atomic force microscopes to move atoms from a cartridge or feedstock into a workspace. In this workspace, a nanomanipulator equipped with customizable crystalline tooltips for grabbing different kinds of atoms arranges the structure in ways mother nature could only dream of doing. The first big goal of mechanosynthesis will simply be to create what’s called a diamondoid nanofactory, which uses a hydrocarbon feedstock based on natural gas, propane, or acetylene to create machines made of pure diamond. It can also use ceramics like silicon carbide, silicon nitride, boron nitride, and sapphire (monocrystalline aluminum oxide) that can be covalently bonded into to pure diamond nanostructures. Diamond is the crystalline allotrope of carbon and is the strongest substance known to mankind, and while pure crystals of diamond are brittle and easily fractured, the intricate molecular structure of a diamondoid nanofactory more resembles a complex composite material, potentially making the most durable machines possible. One example of mechanosynthesis would be the DCB6 carbon dimer placement tool developed by dr. Robert Freitas as a method for fabricating diamandoid based nanostructures, winning him the Feymen prize in 2010. Another example is the molecular 3D printer developed by Martin D. Burke’s team at the university of illinois, additively self-assembling carbon based molecules. We can now manipulate the dense three-dimensional network of diamandoid carbon bonds to make things like graphene, carbon nanotubes (illustrated at right) or fullerenes. Dr. Ralph Merkel has founded the Nanofactory Collaboration organization with the intent of creating such a machine that could mass manufacture these nanostructures, potentially allowing us to build the materials needed for crazy moonshot ideas like space elevators. The first tangible products of mechanosynthesis will probably be things like graphene superconductor based nanocomputers, medical nanobots, and houses made of pure diamond. They would be stronger and sturdier than any machine we have today. The second milestone will be an organic nanofactory where we figure out how to tag other kinds of atoms onto these carbon structures to make pharmaceuticals, biomolecules, or even life. Most materials used for this nanomachinery would be constructed from the atoms of 12 elements in the Periodic Table: carbon (C), silicon (Si) or germanium (Ge) in Group IV, nitrogen (N) or phosphorus (P) in Group V, oxygen (O) or sulfur (S) in Group VI, fluorine (F) or chlorine (Cl) in Group VII, boron (B) or aluminum (Al) in Group III, and, of course, hydrogen (H). The gears of nanomachines would be made from things like Catenanes, molecular chains of ring molecules created by bonding c-shaped molecules with copper ions that move turn when heat is introduced into the system. Chemists like James Tour from Rice University have even been able to create primitive nanomachines like the nanocar using 4 rotating molecules as wheels. There are other designs, like Dr. Ben Feringa’s UV driven Nanomotor, Methyl group tipped nanopropellors, and James Fraser Stoddart’s “Rotaxane” elevator, but these machines work under laws of physics that are very unintuitive to us.Researchers have developed some models based on molecular dynamics simulations and scaling law analysis. There’s the molecular differential gear for a motor designed by Drexler and Merkle while they worked at Xerox PARC (File:A8 diffgear animation2.gif animation above was produced from a NanoDynamics-1 ), fullerene gears, operating with carbon nanotubes shafts and Benzyne molecules as single atom wide gear teeth ((((Template:Molmac Al Globus’ web page. gallery of the original NASA carbon nanotube gears is located here. (J. Han, A. Globus, R. Jaffe and Glenn Deardorff, “Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Carbon Nanotube Based Gears“, Nanotechnology, Vol. 8, pp. 95-102 (1997). D. Srivastava,”A Phenomenological Model of the Rotation Dynamics of Carbon Nanotube Gears with Laser Electric Fields“, Nanotechnology, Vol. 8, pp. 186-192 (1997).))). The last milestone would be a biological nanofactory where we create living organisms, which brings us to Bioassembly.
While Zyvex hasn’t created a nanofactory just yet, it doesn’t mean that such things don’t already exist in some form. The existence of life is proof nanotech works, as all life is already built by tiny molecular assemblers, real life nanofactories called ribosomes. In fact, we all have a little nanofactory inside each of our cells called the Ribosome. It’s a simple biomolecular constructor that can assemble 20 different amino acids into an infinite combination of proteins, making up the vast complexity of your cellular machinery. As science educator Michio Kaku puts it, “the ribosome is a miracle machine that can literally take the protein from hamburgers and turn them into a baby within 9 months, meaning nanobots would not just be able to produce material goods, but also new life”. Additionally, Nanobots also exist in the present day, we call them viruses. Just like a nanobot, a virus is a molecular machine made of DNA and protein that’s able to program the ribosomes of a cell to make whatever they want, including copies of themselves, which they then use to infect other cells and repeat the process. If Ribosomes can fabricate complex biological machines out of proteins then there’s no reason mechanosynthesis can’t manufacture machines out of bulk covalently bonded carbon. The main difference is that ribosomes have already been built for us by mother nature and all we have to do is modify them to create different kinds of proteins or even, new biomolecules altogether, an idea called Xenobiology. Advancements in genetic modification, synthetic biology, and protein engineering are now starting to be used to self assemble custom DNA and even artifical viruses. Examples include nanobots called Foldamers, which are being used to treat human cancer patients as we speak. However, a true bioassembler would be something like pouring sewage into an entrypoint, pressing a button and see quadrillions of tiny protein-based robotic nanoarms and scanning probes disassemble the atoms from the sewage then reassemble them into a copy of yourself. Make no mistake human genome is 3 billion base oppirs long but it has finite particles and each of those particles have a finite location in space and time.as well as a finite size. All you’d need is enough of these tiny robot arms, create a molecular map for them, and program them to unfold matter into copies of your brain. It’s not magic, it’s just complicated. So how do we build a bioassembler? Richard Feynman first suggested that to build such a thing all you would need to do is build a smaller amount of these robotic arms but then teach them to construct copies of themselves until you have a quadrillion arms that could construct things like people. The mystical properties of exponential growth could give you a quadrillion arms in mere days after you’ve built the first few. Forget ending aging, immortality is just a few nanobot arms away from being able to have essentially indefinte repairs for the body as well as infinite copies of that body. It’s the same principle behind a blue whale starts out as just a single fertilized egg and growing into a bus sized creature in a few months. Natural selection has created amazing nanobots, but directed evolution will be able to create better nanobots, unlike our self replicating cells, these self replicating machines will replicate faster because they could be maximized for maximum efficiency through mechanosynthesis.This is a transformation that will have hundreds of times the impact that the industrial revolution did if not more. We’ll be able to build any product we see in the world around us with molecular precision. Like the assembly from star trek. If you were wondering why Star trek had the ability to make socialism work where we on earth have failed, perhaps it’s their technology that allowed it to work, just like the industrial revolution allowed capitsalism to work and eventually replace feudalism. Lower cost, greater strength, less pollution, a revolution in mediicine and manufacturing. Today the means of production sits with businesses and factories, but nanotech would allow us to decentralizes the means of production to the point where we could all have one in our own home, they would only have to cover the cost of the raw materials. A nanofactory consists of thousands of microscopic robots that assemble out of tiny individual atoms. In the future we might all be unemployed but living in luxury, each of us with a tiny nanofactory in our kitchen.
Throughout history differnet societies have tried to create utopia. The USSR, the Quakers, Anarcho Communist Catalonia, the Anarcho Capitalist Utopia of Liberland. Yet they all fail. So many different kinds of movements looking to create utopia. Why? One reason why is because of scarcity, because back then societies had scarcioty, which creates conflict, and unless you have a flawless way to resolve social, political, and economic conflict, the society will fall apart. How do you allocate resources, who gets access to food when there’s a famine, who gets shelter when there’s a snowstorm and you’ve eaten all your seed corn. However, now we have nanotechnology, and with nanotech, perhaps whonknows maybe iby the end of the century we’ll have something called the universal molecular assembler, or the replicator, as it’s called in star trek, the molecular assembler. It taes ordinary raw materials, breaks them up at the atomic level into industrial chemicals, and then joins the joints and molcular bonds in different ways to create new substances. If you have a molecular assembler, you can turn a glass into wood, or vice versa. You’d have the power of a magician or a god. The ability to literally transform one substance into another. The power of transmutation sought after by the alchemists of the past. It’s also the most subversive devicen of all. If utopias fail from scarcity, then what happens if you have infinite abundance. What if you simplky ask and it comes to you, if you want something, you ask, and you simply get it. This is a society without money. That’s subversive, revolutionary, because if all utopian societies vanished because of carcity and conflict. This means ideologies like communism could actually work instead of breaking down into famine ridden stone age societies. The notion of work would change comopletely. There would no longer be a need for incentive because all work will just be things you want to do anyway. This has enourmous pjhilosophical implications. Why bother to go to work? You’d just work on your passions and hobbies for the rest of your life. When there is infinite plenty, 99% forms of all scarcity will be eliminated, with only the demand for human services remaining. You may have heard replicators are sci-fi and violate the laws of physics. Well, not really. there actually is a nanobot that can replicate, actually take apart molecules and rearrange them into fantastic shapes. Mother nature’s already created it. It’s called the ribosome. The ribosome can take the protein from hamburgers and milkshakes and turn them into a baby in 9 months. That is a miracle. It breaks apart the molecules of food and reassembles them into the DNA of new organisms. This means nanobots would not just produce material goods, but also new life. Mastery over Nanotechnology will make Biotechnology obsolete. Nature has created the ribosome replicator, it replicates humans. But what happens when humans create a replicator that replicates everything else. This is the idea behind Nanocornucopianism. Fundamentally, Nanocornucopians believe that that continued progress and provision of material items for mankind can be met by similarly continued advances in technology. Fundamentally they believe that there is enough matter and energy on the Earth to provide for the population of the world.
Molecular manufacturing means 3D printers that construct things atom by atom, with quintillions of tiny molecular assemblers. There are three main reasons this is a big deal. The first is that atomic precision would allow the mass production of ultra-strong and ultra-light materials such as fullerenes. Think mansions made out of pure diamond. It would also allow the production of motors and batteries with extremely high energy densities. For this, imagine a tank with motors as powerful as an aircraft carrier.
Programmable matter is the idea that matter can change it’s shape and physical properties just by reconfiguring it’s atoms. What about creating a 3d prototype of anything? Programmable matter would be like magic putty in your hands, it would truly make man feel like he is a god. This is the idea of so called “Utility Fog” or “Smart Dust” where the very dirt we walk on and the air we breath will contain nanobots. We would be able to morph objects out of thin air to suit our needs, like the genie from Aladin. This would even change communication. we would be able to create atomically identitcal copies of ourselves that could appear anywhere and any time, connecting us in a way we never could have thought possible. Imagine playing a game where the characters leap of the screen and become characters in your home, making life itself a video game (add nanotech will make anime real). Leading to programmable universe where you will no longer be able to tell virtual reality from actual reality. At this point it will no longer matter if the universe is say a programmed simulation, because it’ll now be possible to rewrite the program either way.
If nanobots can keep exponentially replicating themselves, tehy could become cheap enough and plentiful enough, we could have objects disassembling and reassembling themselves everywherer in daily life. A reality where all matter is fluid. The very dust of the earth would become alive.
Manufactured products are made from atoms, and the properties of those products depend on how those atoms were arranged (Georgia Tech professor Ralph C Merkel), today’s manufacturing tech arrange atoms veruy crudely and statistically, but in the future with nanotechnology, we’ll be able to arrange the fundamental building blocks of matter in preciserly the patterns we want very flexibly and very inexpensively. Nanotech will open vast opportunities for all other technologies, in particular for computeing. wehen computer connections and entire transistors can be made by single atoms, computing power will increase exponentially. Computers so powerful that we could put into a single sugar cube a computer that is more powerful than all the computers in the world today combined. Nanotech will also apply to biotech. Scientists used to believe nanotech will remain science fiction, but reality is stranger than fiction. We’ve already started seeing the first nanotechnology appearing on the market. We make materials with purified water to generate electricity, chemical energy, and a long term project where we build a system that processes information kind of like an artififcal neuron. The ultimate goal is to create robots as small as viruses called “Nanobots”. Combined with the technology we mentioned earlier, these individual robots might even be more intelligent than an intire person. One possible set of applications is longevity. Nanobots can be injected into the bloodstream as a kind of cleansing team to kill cancer ells or to carry out other kinds of maintenance work on the body, or even to modify the DNA cosde from the ground up. It mioght seem like this is a very expensive technology but in fact the opposite is true, we will be able to program nanobots to reproduce themselves just as akl natural creatures do, they will then be able to grab material from their environment and use iot to make copies of themselves. The basic goal is to build what’s called an assembler, a small device that can make copies of itself, and it’s a programmable device so it could be programmed to build a wide rtange of useful things. Auto-assemblers can be seen as a new formn of artificial life comparable to yeast cells, they can reproduce themselves and at the same time transform matter just as yeast cells change sugar into alcohol.The ponly difference is the se new creatures can be programmmed to carry out any task we wantthem to. Change carbon into diamonds perhaps, or create food. Molecular nanotechnology is to physical reality what compuiter programming is to virtual reality, it’s a bit of an exxageration but gioves the idea whereas compiueter programmers can program software to do what they want, molecular nanotech will allow us to change matter at the most fundamental level, to build any kind of structure to our exact specification by moving individual atoms. This sounds like a world of magic where all that we imagine because real, programmable reality where you are the designer. The role of the genie or the good fairy is taken over by robots so miniscule we cannot asee them, instead of saying a magic word, we type computer code so they’ll grant our wishes,
Smart dust emerged as an ideo of general purpose computing, sensrors, wireless netowrks, all bundled up into millimeter micrometer, and nanometer scale sentinels, invisible to the naked eye., Drifitng in the air currents, going in and our of body. Computer dust settling on the skin, ingested, monitoring you and replacing you inside and out. Every square inch of every city will be alive with intelligence because every street and every building will have a network of mirocomputers built right into them. A smart dust particle is a wireless sensor with sensing computation communication and power in one tiny package. These all in one microcomputers will be very small, the size of a grain of rice. We’ve shown we can make the circuitry small enougn and light enough that eventually it will be possible to make things on a sub millimeter size scale. THIS could help us defeat the enivitable decay of aging. Tiny specks of computer smart dust will form a vast network that can help manage the infrastructure of even the largest city. Smart cities in the future will take thios low power inexpensive small technology and basically distribute it everywhere. These tiny compouters record information about their surroundings,infot hey can send to other compouters or to you, smart dust on the tracks will monitor your commuter train so you’ll know if it’s riunning late. Potholes will be able toi repair themselves or warn your fcar. Monitoring the traffic, giving you allertts about where to go. Bridges will get a coating of smart dust praticles that can warn us whern they get potential fractures and prevent collapses. It will allow vbuildings and streets to recognize you and respond accordingly. The environment will increasingly to who we are and adapt in consequence. The coity will know whwre you are if you want it to. Your workpace will know you. Smart dust at the entrance will boot up your computer, embedded in the elevetrodoors will ring your floor. No matter how we live in the future city, it will be radically different.
, where molecule sized machines manipulat eht ereactants of chemical processes at the level of individual atoms, building objects from the molecule up. But can it be done? We’ll we’ve tuned computers that were once the size of buildings into the size of cellphones, so could we ever shrink ta computer the size of a cell phone to the size of a grain of dust? But make no mistake, Nanotechnology would deal wirth a very different world of physics that macrotachnology does. Obejctrs behave more differently the smaller they get. This can come at a dissadvantage, because a nanobot swimming through your blood would have to wade through molecules like a person trying to swim in a pool made of bowling balls, mnotion would become more difficult. Random motion of pmolecules in the air would easily disrupt our nanomachines, a concept called “Thermal noise”, so they’d break a lot easier.But there are also advanges, a comnnection made at the macroscale could be torn apart easily, but at the nanoscale, the electrostatic effects van der wals forces would attract nuts and bolts together a lot tighter than they’d be in our world. This is the kind of force that lets geckos stick to ceilings. But if we wanted to build anything here, we’d need these molecules to form MECHANICAL bonds, not chemical bonds. We’ll need to find a way to link them by their shape rather than the electrons that want to bond. The individual parts of each molecule are strongly attracted to one anotherm but they can’t seperate entirely unless they break the chemical bonds of the atoms holding them together.
The term “Utility Fog”, coined in 1993 by becker john stors hall. The idea initially came to him as a way to prevent trauma in car crashes by stiffening the air inside your car, however, if we extend this idea to the atompsphere of our planet, we could conjure things out of thin air like a magician, you simply speak the magic word and the objects materialize out of nowhere, then once you’re done with it, the nnobots recycle it and use it to buiuld other things. This could engender a kind of godhood, where actual reality becomes almost as programmable as digital reality. But what if we ouirselves could become the nanofog? If we are able to upload our minds to computers, we could hypothetically use the utility for as a kind of global supercomputer. We would no longer need bodies, we could take whatever shape we wanted to take, like the greek gods of old. Who knows, these kinds of beings could be out there among the stars right now.
We can’t even create a nanobot that is large that will do most of these things on the microscopic scale, forget going down to the atomic scale. It’s not going to happen for many decades at least. Perhaps not even for a century or even longer if we drag our feet. But it does seem like the next logical step after the biotech revolution ends.
=———- Creating a cornucopia of infinite material abundance. Although nanotech is not guaranteed to lead us into the singulary, the ability to manipulate the world at the molecular level is a sign of a radical new age to come. The next 10 to 20 years will be comparable to the next century or two as seen from the past and having a change of that magnitude in a single human lifetime will be a tremendous challenge to our iunstitutions and to us as individuals. What we can do as a civilization as a species depends on the materials we can make, overcomingscarcity. A technology that can build from the bottom up from molecular building blocks will have that precise control. It’s naturally a 3 dimensional technology. Different kinds of devices become possible. Everrything from generations of electronics far beyond what we are through extraordinary strong and perfect materials that can be used for making aerospace systems that will make space very inexpensive to access through devices that are small enough and work on a scale appropriate to interact with human cells and tissues and enable a new generation of medicine. Proteins that execute functions or compartments within our cells, or even pathogens such as viruses that might invade. Our bodies have built themselves at that nanometer scale range so nanomedicine, by being at the same scale, can interact and actuate on those natural elements or even pathogens and that’s what makes nanomedicine very amennable for enhancing and improving our abilities in terms of diagnosis or prevention of disease or even in the case of regeneration of tissues. With nanotech you’re dealing with atoms, the building blocks of the physical world, instead of cells. So if all the miracles of computation and information technology are living in the space of ones and zeros. They can be made into the hundred thousand songs in your pocket, all that ones and zeros. When we’re able to do that, to play the instruments just like we do in the digital space but with atoms, then all the physical world will be as manipulative as the digital world. You will have transcended not just biology, but also chemistry and matter itself. Humans would become the functional equivalent of gods in the eyes of any past civilizations. This time we’re going to explore the future of nanotech. In particular, molecular self assembly, what we could call nanotechnology 2 point 0, which, in the future may allow the local manufacture of almost anything we can imagine. Nanotechnology is the engineering of matter on the molecular or even the atomic scale. With one nanometer being just one billionth of a meter in size. Since early humans first made primitive tools, we’ve been using technology to manipulate clumps of atoms. Even so, almost all manufacturing processes still move atoms around in a fairly imprecise manner. Indeed, if we imagine these plastic bricks to be atoms or even molecules comprised of many atoms bonded together, then those current manufacturing methods are akin to making things out of lego while wearing boxing glives. We can move the atoms and molecules around but we cannot control where each individual one of them ends up. Its often said that naniotechnology lets us take our metaphorcial boxing gloves off to manipulat eindividual molecules and even individual atoms. For example, microchip manufacturers like intel use a photographic process called nanolithography to make microprocessors. This picture projects images of circuit layers that are chemically developed into nanoscale components that could be as small as a few hundred atoms accross. Another application is using it to create nanocomposites and nanocoatings. These make nanoscale additives with conventional materials in order to improve their internal properties or surface qualities. For example nanoparticles of silver are now added to some plastics to make them antibacterial while nanoparticles of titanium dioxide are routinely applied to glass so that it’s surface rejects dirt, and in effect, becomes self cleaning. Tiny lattices of carbon atoms known as carbon nanotubes in graphene are also starting to be added to some paints and plastics in order to make them more stronger or electrically conductive. In the next decade, the market for nanocomposites and nanocoatings will be worth tens of billions of dollars. But returning to our previous analogy of the legos, it’s worth noting that the technology basically involves mixing nanoscale legoblocks into another material, or chucking them onto a surface with no control existing over the precise placement of each individual nanoparticle. here is also self assembly. Nanotechnologies used to make microprocessors and nanocomposites and nanocoatings are based on so termed “top down” processes, in other words, they use traditional scale technology to build nanostructures. However, the future of nanotechnology as a manufacturing process is more likely to involve development of so termed “bottom up” methods, in other words, methods of actually building things molecule by molecule at the nanosclae. In theory we could do this by using a technique called positional assembly, where you take individual atoms and indivudlal molecules, pick them up, move them around, and stick them together. This actually works because we’;ve figured out how to use what’s called a scanning tunneling microscope to move around individual atoms, it was first done in an IBM lab in 1990. But the prolem with position assembly is that most products contain quintillions of atoms, so the idea of picking them up moving them around putting them together and taking them apart isn’t going to work. and for that reason future scale methods of nanoscale manufactureing will be based on a process called molecular self assembly. To understand molecular self assembly, imaghine how a pile opf lego bricks, representing a pile of molecular components, would be turned into a final objects. Our current manufacturing approach is to pick up the individual bricks and to piece them together by a process akin to positional assembly, however an alternative approach is where we can take all the bricks, put them in a container, put the lid on the container, give it a really good shake, and we can now take of f the top and inside we’d find a completed object. All of our bricks in this case have put themselves together. Now that might sound absolutely ridiculous the idea of taking lots of molecular scale components, put it in a container, and getting a complete object, it sounds almost like magic. But it really is what the idea of what molecular self assembly is all about. Molecular self assembly is a practical possibility for products made from complex molecules which only fit together in one orientation,which will lock into place on contact. When such components are mixed,, they will bump up against each other and when the collision is at just the right angle they will join together. The idea may sound ridiculous, but we need to remember that all living things, including ourselves, are manufactured from individual molecules that self assemble without the intervention of production tools. Engines of creation is another concept. The idea of developing nanotechnologies capable of self assembly was first introduced by Eric drexler in his 1986 book engines of creation. This imagines a future in which we’d learn to manipulat eindiviudal molecules and atoms in order to fabricate any product we desirte out of very basic raw materials. In 2001 Drexler’s work had resulted in the establishment of a national nanotechnology initiative in the united states, followed by the national center for nanoscience and technology in China in 2003. To date tens of billions of government dollars around the world have been invested in nanotechnolgoy. With that said, the focus has been almost entirely on short term development in areas such as nanocomposites and nanocoating.
EXISTENTIAL At times I kind of feel like a 16th century Alchemist when talking about nanotechnology. While Alchemy is technically true, meaning you could technically go to the supercollider at CERN if you want to turn lead into gold, it’s not exactly practical. At times it seems like nanotechnology can appear the same way, it’s hard to make predictions about a technology that has so many questionable uses. So, when exactly will this strange technology gain traction? In an interview with Computerworld (2009), Google engineer and futurist Ray Kurzweil said that anyone alive by 2050 will very likely achieve immortality, all thanks to the nanobots that will flow through our bloodstream, and potentially, BECOME our blood. They might even become our bodies too, as they replace us at the cellular level, neuron by neuron and upload our minds[5] Kurzweil believes nanites will provide the ultimate stairway to immortality, as medical nanobots we inject into our blood stream could locate our brain cells, replace them one by one, and copy their functioning. These nanites could take the role of our neurons and beam the data to a far off super computer, giving us limitless software copies of our consciousness from which more hardware copies can be assembled. Quite simply, YOU would become the nanobot, creating trillions of copies of yourself both body and mind, maybe merging that mind with other nanobots and dissolving into a world where anything can be reprogrammed or reassembled. Seems pretty outlandish to think about tiny invisible robots who take on the role of a genie or fairy godmother, however its always easier to see what is possible theoretically than realize it in practice, like say flight to the moon. Kurzweil might seem like a nut for believing in Nano-santa however, if you look at the history of rocketry, many people also once thought going to the moon was a ridiculous fairy tale, yet we did it. As Arthur C. Clarke once said, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (clarke’s 3 laws). A famous editorial in the 1920s from the new york times suggested it was impossible to go to the moon because there’s no air to push against in space, so rockets won’t work. Well, we can laugh today. But that was a serious concern back then, a serious misunderstanding, and we have equally serious misunderstandings about nanotechnology today. At some point there will be an effort to build molecular manufacturing systems. We don’t have a major multibillion dollar national program to develop manufacturing as nasa ddid with space travel. But now would be a good time to start. This could potentially pave the way for molecule sized transistors, skyrocketing computer power to incomprehensible possibilities. Mastery over Nanotechnology will make Biotechnology obsolete. Nature has created the ribosome replicator, it replicates humans. But what happens when humans create a replicator that replicates everything else. This is the idea behind Nanocornucopianism. Fundamentally, Nanocornucopians believe that that continued progress and provision of material items for mankind can be met by similarly continued advances in technology. Fundamentally they believe that there is enough matter and energy on the Earth to provide for the population of the world.
it can be used to clean up oil spills.
Transhumanism is not a choice. It’s inevitable. Molecular assemblers will be built, and human enhancement will flow directly from them. For any philosophy to survive in the long run, it will have to take into account this surprising truth.
Because assemblers will let us place atoms in almost any reasonable arrangement , they will let us build almost anything that the laws of nature allow to exist
Are transhumanists, as Michael Anissimov says, eugenicists without the coercion
I’m not sure that molecular manufacturing is possible, but I think it probably is, and if so, it will definitely increase our ability to manufacture what we want for lower prices. If molecular machines can be built into programmable nanorobots, molecular manufacturing will be possible. This would be especially beneficial for the world’s poorest, who lack even the most basic necessities. Whether or not molecular manufacturing is plausible is a whole other argument, again, a technical one, not a cultural one. Regardless, we can expect global per capita GDP to increase, as it has since the Industrial Revolution. By the standards of Medieval Europe, today we are wealthy “beyond dreams of avarice”. Who then would have thought that today we’d have metallic spires taller than their tallest buildings, capable of flying through the sky faster than the speed of sound?
When the technology arrives people likely won’t be called nanotech, but chemistry, nanotech being more of a stage name.
The science may be in its ver early days, but already artificial molecular self assembly is beyond science fiction. The next revolution will be nanotech, it will make biotech obsolete. The idea may be difficult to get your head around, this said, molecular self assembly is already the technolgy of life itself and could lead to a far more radical revoltution than that of the microprocessor or the internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment