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A Radical Future for Nanotechnology
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2014-03-22 01:03:00, 조회 : 1,875 |
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A Radical Future for Nanotechnology
Subject(s): Sci/Tech
SANDIA NATIONAL LABS
A nanodesigned biomimetic membrane developed at Sandia Labs could greatly increase the availability of fresh water in the developing world.
By
K. Eric Drexler
Book Review: The Atomically Precise Revolution
By José Cordeiro
Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization by K. Eric Drexler. Public Affairs. 2013. 368 pages.
Eric Drexler is popularly known as “the founding father of nanotechnology.” He introduced the concept in his seminal 1981 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, establishing the fundamental principles of molecular engineering and outlining development paths to advanced nanotechnologies. Then he popularized the idea of nanotechnology in his 1986 book, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, where he introduced a broad audience to a fundamental technology objective: using machines that work at the molecular scale to structure matter from the bottom up. He continued with his PhD thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the guidance of AI-pioneer Marvin Minsky, and published it in a modified form as a book in 1992, Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation.
In Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization, Drexler tells the story of nanotechnology from its small beginnings to its quick move toward a big future. He explains what ”nanotechnology” is and what it is not, and what we can do with it for the benefit of humanity. In Engines of Creation, Drexler defined nanotechnology as a potential technology with these features: “manufacturing using machinery based on nanoscale devices, and products built with atomic precision.” In Radical Abundance, he expands on his prior thinking, corrects much of the misconceptions about nanotechnology, and dismisses fears of dystopian futures replete with malevolent nanobots and gray goo. He clearly identifies nanotechnology with atomically precise manufacturing (APM) in order to avoid other incomplete or simplistic ideas.
Drexler encourages us to think big—radically big. In 1986, he already talked about nanotechnology as the engine of abundance, but now he talks about radical abundance:
Imagine what the world might be like if we were really good at making things—better things—cleanly, inexpensively, and on a global scale.… The global prospect would be, not scarcity, but unprecedented abundance—radical, transformative, and sustainable abundance. We would be able to produce radically more of what people want and at a radically lower cost—in every sense of the word, both economic and environmental.
What if industrial production as we know it can be changed beyond recognition? The consequences would change almost everything else, and this new industrial revolution is visible on the horizon. Imagine a world where the gadgets and goods that run our society are produced not in a far-flung supply chain of industrial facilities, but in compact, even desktop-scale machines. Imagine replacing an enormous automobile factory and all of its multi-million dollar equipment with a garage-sized facility that can assemble cars from inexpensive, microscopic parts, with production times measured in minutes. Then imagine that the technologies that can make these visions real are emerging—under many names, behind the scenes, with a long road still ahead, yet moving surprisingly fast.
APM rests on well-understood scientific and engineering principles that will support large-scale, low-cost production of advanced products, enable solutions to seemingly intractable global problems, and facilitate rapid draw-down of atmospheric CO2 levels. Drexler describes how APM will radically reduce materials and energy costs since most future devices will be manufactured using very abundant and common elements like carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and silicon, and at a very low cost of less than one dollar per kilogram. Photovoltaic systems using nanotechnology will power human civilization using only 0.2% of the Earth’s land surface, without using any more fossil fuels, and thus helping to improve the environment.
Drexler tells us to consider that a “one-gram platform built with advanced technologies could provide teraflops of computational power (and much more, in bursts), together with a million-terabyte data storage capacity and better-than-human sensors, all with a power demand comparable to that of cell phone on standby.” In fact, he argues that new devices produced with APM will use radically fewer resources and less energy, and will be radically more efficient and stronger. Instead of using milliwatts, future devices will use nanowatts of power. We will produce much more for much less, while preserving the environment and improving it.
Drexler makes many comparisons between the Information Revolution and what he now calls the APM Revolution. What the former did with bits, the latter will do with atoms: “Image files today will be joined by product files tomorrow,” Drexler writes. “Today one can produce an image of the Mona Lisa without being able to draw a good circle; tomorrow one will be able to produce a display screen without knowing how to manufacture a wire.”
We are moving to a world of radical abundance, where nanotechnology will help to produce radically more, while consuming radically less, says Drexler. If he’s right, APM will change humanity and help solve the global grand challenges, from water to energy, from food to global health.
About the Reviewer
José Cordeiro is the director of the Venezuela Node of the The Millennium Project and Energy Advisor/Faculty at the Singularity University. His Web site is Cordeiro.org.
The father of the concept of “nanotechnology” shows how the goals of atomically precise manufacturing got sidetracked and where its future really is. With technologies enabling us to make things with lower costs and less resource consumption, we could all live in a radically abundant world.
In 1986, with the publication of my book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (Anchor), I introduced the world to a concept I had first described a few years before. This concept of nanotechnology has two key features: (1) manufacturing using machinery based on nanoscale devices and (2) products built with atomic precision. These features are closely linked, because atomically precise manufacturing relies on nanoscale devices and will also provide a way to build them.
Nanoscale parts and atomic precision together enable atomically precise manufacturing (APM), and this technology will open the door to extraordinary improvements in the cost, range, and performance of products. The range extends beyond the whole of modern physical technology, spanning ultra-light structures for aircraft, billion-core laptops, etc.
At the time, I had no idea that nanotechnology would become an object of such fascination and speculation. At the outset, “nanotechnology” was simply a name I had chosen to label the concept of an APM-based technology, a name that occurred to me between the first and second drafts of Engines of Creation.
Without the promise of APM-level technologies, nanotechnology in the broader sense would have progressed less quickly and very likely under a range of more traditional names. There would have been no abrupt takeoff of press coverage, no public fascination with a nanoscale robot mythology, and no reason for nanotechnology to infiltrate popular culture through books, movies, and computer games. Nanoscale particles and the like would never have been mistaken for a technology that could upend the world.
Soon after the publication of Engines of Creation, feature articles and coverage in the popular press reached millions of readers within a few months. Science-fiction novels took up the theme in the years that followed, further exciting the public’s imagination. During this time, “nanotechnology” in the public mind grew into a vision of a futuristic technology based on tiny machines, loosely derived from my initial conception of high-throughput, atomically precise manufacturing.
More than a decade ago, in support of a vision of atomically precise fabrication, President Clinton announced a plan for the world’s first national nanotechnology program. But soon after the program was funded, its leaders in Washington redefined “nanotechnology” solely in terms of scale, eliminating all mention of atomic precision. To qualify as a nanotechnology, it was merely necessary that structures have features with “dimensions of roughly one to one hundred nanometers.” AP nanotechnologies often satisfy this size criterion, but so do transistors on silicon chips and particles of ultrafine powder. This revised concept of nanotechnology had little in common with atomically precise manufacturing using machinery based on nanoscale devices.
The 1990s saw increasingly widespread confusion between near-term and long-term technologies, and this confusion suggested a close relationship, a narrow gap, or a short path from present technologies to prospects that had rightly been regarded as decades in the future. Nanotechnology, it seemed, had already arrived. The confusion, however, served to channel money to researchers who then had little incentive to explain the difference between nanoparticles and nanomachines. The incongruity led to tensions.
Imagine the position of researchers specializing in making, studying, and applying the properties of very small particles. In the years before 1986, their studies had little cachet, yet in the early 1990s the world increasingly found their research exciting—provided they called it nanotechnology.
Indeed, researchers from not just one but a host of fields were rewarded with interest when they referred to their work as nanotechnology—and why not use this label? The word in itself fit well enough, because their work was “nano” and also technology. As researchers followed one another in adopting this label, it began to serve a real purpose, bringing researchers together across academic boundaries to create new communities. Their differences sometimes strained any plausible sense of relationship, yet the banner of nanotechnology still brought them together, bringing the pleasure and rewards of long-overdue recognition. Something called “nanotechnology” seemed to explode.
In those early days, the appearance of growth stemmed primarily from relabeling research, which became a well-known tactic for winning funding. People joked about this at conferences and asked a question that has never gone away—“What is nanotechnology, anyway?” I know of no other field pasted together from pieces that had so little in common, and certainly none defined by a criterion as generic as size.
These questions often came with a third question: “When will nanotechnology give us swarms of tiny robots that can build almost anything, atom by atom?”
This was when the very idea of building with atomic precision began to raise ire. The concept had become closely linked with promises and dangers that seemed (and often actually were) absurd, and atomically precise fabrication machines— which were all seen as the same—had morphed into imaginary swarms of tiny, threatening, atom-juggling robots.
The easy, uninformed response to this strange bundle of ideas was to deny that they made any sense. The promise of an AP technology revolution was still advertised, while the technologies themselves were first misunderstood, then rejected.
Applications for a Revolutionary Nanotechnology
What are the natural, practical applications of the physical capabilities of APM-level technologies, the applications that will matter to people and the Earth? What can be seen is enough to call for a radical reassessment of prospects for the twenty-first century. In practice, a radical reassessment must begin incrementally, first encouraging inquiry into key questions (regarding potential technologies, timelines, implications, and policy options), and then hedging bets (intellectual, technological, financial, political, and so on) in response to what the answers suggest.
The key physical capabilities include low-cost production of higher-performance materials, leading to higher-performance components and products of essentially every kind: stronger, lighter structures, more-efficient engines, greater safety, lower emissions, and vastly greater computational power. The advantages of atomic precision spill over into medicine, too, where molecular interactions are crucial.
Cost is a crucial concern for technologies. Unless costs are affordable, even the highest-performance technologies will languish as laboratory curiosities. In the case of APM-level production technologies, however, high performance is virtually synonymous with low-cost production. Technologies that offer higher than high-end performance coupled to lower than low-end costs have been a rare and disruptive market phenomenon, yet this is what APM promises to deliver, and not just in one area of application.
APM-level technologies will expand the range of accessible products that can be driven, worn, or used in sports or in daily life at home—conveniences, entertainment systems, and a broad range of consumer products. The impacts of new production technologies in the consumer sphere are easy to see; these start with deep cost reductions, but also embrace a range of both higher-performance and entirely novel consumer technologies.
Transforming the Means of Production
From where we stand today, the coming transformation can best be understood through contrasts with current industrial technologies. As we’ve seen, the primary contrasts emerge from just two basic characteristics of APM-level technologies: the nanoscale size of components and the atomic precision of processes and products. As we’ve seen, there are several key implications of these from an applications perspective.
First, nanoscale size enables extreme productivity as a consequence of mechanical scaling laws. In addition, small-scale, versatile, highly productive machinery can collapse globe-spanning industrial supply chains to just a few links, from raw materials to refined feedstock materials, from feedstocks to standardized microblocks, and then from microblocks to products that play roles as different as solar cells, spacecraft, car engines, concrete, computers, and medical instruments. Short supply chains and flexible production can enable radical decentralization.
Second, atomic precision starts with small-molecule feedstocks, atomically precise by nature and often available at a low cost per kilogram. A sequence of atomically precise processing steps then enables precise control of the structure of materials and components, yielding products with performance improved by factors that can range from 10 to more than 1 million. And because precise processing embraces both products and byproducts, APM-based systems need not produce hazardous wastes.
Both industry and APM produce physical products, yet their contrasts point to radical differences. The Information Revolution provides an alternative model.
Producing patterns of atoms using APM-based technologies resembles producing patterns of bits using information technologies. Rapid production based on multipurpose, scalable platforms; independence from long, specialized supply chains; the potential for radical decentralization; the pivotal role of software and online data; new products without costly new physical capital; low marginal costs of production and distribution; the potential for rapid, global deployment of new products—all these characteristics are shared by both APM and information technologies, yet all contrast sharply with the characteristics of modern industry.
Transforming Information Technologies
APM-based production will boost the Information Revolution itself. At the physical level of information technologies, where rapid change is already routine, APM-based production can boost ongoing trends, carrying them further (and perhaps faster) than expected.
Since 1970, transistors have shrunk from dimensions of 10,000 to just 10 atomic diameters, yet from the beginning they’ve been built by methods that inherently lack atomic precision. APM-level technology can go much further, but the size of the step will depend on the performance of other technologies at the time, and those technologies will be a moving target. Indeed, specialized AP fabrication processes will likely enable hybrid-technology chips, smoothing the transition.
Estimating potential advances measured against today’s technologies is more straightforward. One can expect reductions in energy consumption (comparing low-power processors with comparable capacity) from milliwatts to nanowatts, and reductions in processor scale from millimeters to micrometers—in volume, a factor of roughly 1 billion. Increases in single-core processor speeds will depend on the speed of digital devices, and fundamental physical constraints suggest that the remaining potential increase in speed will be less than the factor we’ve already seen in the evolution of transistor-based machines.
Telecommunications costs have fallen even faster than the cost of computation. Current technologies enable transmission of many terabits per second through an optical fiber just tens of microns in diameter. While fiber data capacities continue to climb, free-space transmission is burgeoning; Wi-Fi delivers tens of megabits per second, and industry plans to multiply this by a factor of 100; the physical limits have yet to be reached.
Here, too, APM-level technologies can both increase capacity and lower costs. On a per-unit-mass basis, the critical electronic guts of current telecommunication systems cost more than $1,000 per kilogram, leaving room for thousandfold cost reductions. Potential performance improvements are harder to estimate, but will likely be large.
Digital information systems interact with the world through sensors, displays, and control signals. Regarding sensors, laboratory devices and high-end commercial systems set a lower boundary on what to expect; in cameras, for example, device sensitivity can already approach quantum-limited, photon-counting performance, while a range of chemical sensors can detect single molecules (expect fast, nearly zero-cost DNA readers).
Regarding image displays, arrays of devices for emitting light and changing reflectance already reach the resolution limits of human perception; the scope for improvement includes wearable devices and three-dimensional, window-like image quality.
And regarding control of mechanical devices, the most striking advances won’t be in the controllers, but rather in the range of devices themselves.
Putting the pieces together, potential applications of APM-enabled information technologies include the realization of extreme forms of what has already been imagined, including ubiquitous computing, networking, information services, and surveillance. How much of that potential will be realized remains to be seen—or, stating it less passively, remains to be considered, discussed, proposed, negotiated, legislated, and implemented.
Rebuilding Systems the Atomically Precise Way
A natural, cross-cutting impact of APM-based production will be reductions in the purchase and operating costs of industrial-level capital goods, including the machinery used to move things, build things, and provide utilities such as water and electricity.
• Construction Materials. In construction, APM-level technologies will improve the performance of materials, structures, and functional components while reducing the costs of their production and use. Because most structural materials used in construction already have low costs per kilogram (concrete, for example), the impact of cost reductions may be modest and will be relatively sensitive to eventual APM costs. Functional materials, by contrast, have great scope for improvements. For example, vacuum aerogels, though costly and fragile today, can equal common glass fiber insulation at only one-tenth the thickness. (Aerogels are substance like silica but lighter and more porous molecularly.) With advanced fabrication, insulating materials as good or better can be both robust and inexpensive.
Costs of assembly represent much of the cost of construction. Here one can see potential for substantial improvements through the production of low-cost, prefabricated, yet precisely customized segments of larger structures—lightweight, easy to move, and designed for easy assembly.
• Transportation. Lower-cost production, stronger, lighter materials, engines with higher power density and efficiency, zero-emission energy sources—all these can lower the cost of transportation, including its environmental impacts.
The greatest advantages will appear where costs are high and performance is critical, in aerospace systems in general, and space systems in particular. The cost of access to space today has surprisingly little to do with energy requirements and has everything to do with the cost, mass, and reliability of vehicles. Decades ago, the cost of spaceflight blocked the dream of space settlement, but that barrier will drop.
• Energy. APM-level technologies will increase energy efficiency across a wide range of applications and sometimes by large factors. Improvements in power-conversion efficiency, vehicle mass, thermal insulation, and lighting efficiency are examples. In ground and air transportation, the accessible improvements include tenfold reductions in vehicle mass and a doubling of typical engine efficiencies. Taken together, improvements like these enable deep demand reduction, while lower costs of production can enable faster replacement and upgrade of systems already in place. Other attractions (cleaner, safer, higher performance, and so on) would likewise spur replacement of existing capital stock.
On the supply side, improvements in costs and technologies can enable extensive and potentially rapid replacement and upgrade of energy infrastructure. The energy industry is highly heterogeneous, but every sector is capital intensive; reductions in the costs of physical capital will lower the cost of new installations of all kinds, facilitating replacement of capital stock at rates that could surpass any in historical experience.
In particular, improvements in costs and technologies will boost solar electric power while making coal-fired power plants (2,300 today) vulnerable to fast replacement. Indeed, when combined with efficient, inexpensive APM-enabled technologies for interconverting electrical and chemical energy, solar energy can provide both base-load electric power and liquid fuels on a global scale. Earth-abundant elements can be used to make efficient, nanostructured, thin-film photovoltaic cells, and the resulting electrical energy can be efficiently stored in conventional liquid fuels and recovered as electric power for use in vehicles or fixed energy infrastructure.
To meet current global energy demand (about 15 terawatts, including wood and dung burned for heat) would require about 0.2% of the Earth’s land area, or about 1% of the area now used for grazing and crops. With sheets of tough, abrasion-resistant composite materials used in place of fragile photovoltaic panels, rooftops and roads could provide much of the area required.
• Raw Materials. Raw materials and their uses are diverse today and will be diverse tomorrow. This complicates the question of how APM-level technologies are likely to affect raw materials demand.
APM can reduce the demand for scarce resources in two ways: (1) by enabling less-massive products to perform common functions (architectural and mechanical structures, electrical wiring, electronic systems, and so on), and (2) by enabling abundant elements (primarily hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, aluminum, and silicon) to substitute for scarcer materials (copper, nickel, cobalt, zinc, tin, and others) in most applications, and with better performance.
These changes can greatly relieve the pressures of resource scarcity, now a growing cause for international tension. For materials that are still in demand, improvements in the cost and performance of industrial equipment can reduce the costs of mining, refining, pollution control, and remediation. (Note that earlier estimates of APM production costs took a narrow view of the economic context, and hence did not take account of prospective reductions in the costs of required raw materials and energy.)
• Water. The growing scarcity of water for human and agricultural use ranks high on the list of global problems, all made worse by population growth, environmental degradation, and climate change. Abundant energy and improved, lower-cost capital goods can address this problem directly by lowering the cost of desalination and water transportation, drawing freshwater from the sea.
Atomically precise fabrication can produce membranes with tailored water-transporting molecular pores, enabling higher performance systems for reverse-osmosis desalination, and (of critical practical importance) can lower the cost of producing, cleaning, and recycling membranes and other filters and surfaces subject to fouling.
• Agriculture. Agriculture consumes more than 80% of the world’s freshwater supplies, and also pollutes them, tying resource and environmental concerns to the potential for improving agricultural methods.
Across most of the twentieth century, grain production grew faster than population. That trend has flattened since 1990 and has begun to decline, while food prices have recently trended sharply upward. Concerns about the impact of climate change and water shortages have reinforced fears of a food shortage. Once again, APM-based production capacity improves the prospects for meeting demand while respecting environmental constraints.
The world has increased food production by three main methods: by expanding the area under cultivation, by applying chemical fertilizers, and by planting crops with higher yield. Each of these methods faces diminishing returns as new fertile lands become scarce, the incremental benefits of fertilizers decline, and the potential for plants to be more productive approaches limits determined by temperature, soil, and available water—a limit that can destroy crops entirely in drought years.
Enclosed agriculture (greenhouses, for example) can greatly increase and stabilize yields, largely freeing agriculture from constraints of temperature, soil, and water. Compared to unprotected environments, where the vagaries of location and climate determine growing conditions, using controlled environments can commonly raise the productivity of land by a factor of 10 or more.
Optimizing growth conditions requires enclosures that control temperature (usually warm, never too hot), humidity (usually high, but not saturated), and sunlight (typically bright, but diffused, not direct), and that provide soil with ample nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. A well-controlled enclosure can also exclude pests without using pesticides, and can recycle nitrogen and phosphorous, retaining them to fertilize crops without contaminating streams.
To accomplish this on a large scale requires an abundance of physical capital: the structural components for building the enclosures, the equipment they must contain—pumps, pipes, and filters for water reprocessing, as well as heat pumps and thermal storage to regulate temperatures—and, finally, sources of power to make them all work.
The rewards of expanding the use of enclosed agriculture would include not only higher yield per hectare, but also better food quality, freedom from pesticides, extended growing seasons (in many regions, year-round production), freedom from constraints of soil quality and available water, and protection from drought.
From a biospheric perspective, benefits would include reduced water demand and contamination, and a way of supplying human needs for food while reducing the overall footprint of agriculture and relieving pressures that drive the deforestation of Amazonia. Cleanly increasing agricultural yields by a factor of 10 would change human life and the face of the Earth.
Transforming Environmental Concerns
Transforming the material basis of civilization can transform the impact of human beings on the Earth, perhaps for the better. Although lowering costs could enable greater destruction, I am persuaded that cleaner, low-impact technologies can lead to better net outcomes, provided that people who care about the fate of the Earth keep pushing to make it better. The prospect of greatly expanding production while simultaneously reducing environmental impact offers an opportunity to resolve some of today’s most intractable conflicts and to set a new pattern for how human civilization coexists with the rest of our world.
Radical abundance can serve many purposes, including some that had seemed incompatible. Rather than thinking of radical abundance as “more,” or as a shift in a familiar trade-off, it’s better to think in terms of shifting entire trade-off curves upward, enabling outcomes that are better from a range of perspectives, including perspectives that seemingly clash. This can (and should, and might) change politics.
• Environmental Restoration. Physical challenges can make environmental restoration costly or ineffective. To do a good job of repairing a strip-mining scar, for example, it may be necessary to move many millions of tons of rock and soil. Efforts to remove toxic chemicals and heavy metals from soils today are both expensive and incomplete. All points on the trade-off curves are unsatisfactory.
Once again, APM-based production can improve the cost and performance of the necessary equipment. Beyond this, APM-level technologies can provide new capabilities for capturing and sequestering toxic materials from groundwater and soil, and for more subtle challenges of remediation.
• Reversing the Primary Driver of Climate Change. With APM-based production and products, energy sources and most energy uses can be engineered for a zero net carbon footprint; liquid hydrocarbon fuels, for example, can be produced using hydrogen from water and carbon from recycled CO2.
Reversing the effects of past emissions, however, would require atmospheric CO2 capture on an enormous scale—some 3 trillion tons—a remediation task that appears to be beyond the capacity of the industrial civilization that created the problem. The energy requirements are daunting. Even if CO2 is captured with high efficiency, the necessary energy is roughly equivalent to 10 years of today’s total global electric power production. This reflects the irreducible thermodynamic work required to compress the entire industrial-era CO2 surplus from a dilute gas to liquid densities (roughly 1,021 joules).
From an APM perspective, however, this challenge seems manageable. APM-level technologies can provide thermodynamically efficient means of capturing and compressing CO2 from the air, while the required energy could be provided in 10 years by scattered photovoltaic arrays with a total area 0.5% as large as the Sahara Desert (the equivalent of a single 200×200 km array).
By these means, APM-based production could provide sufficient carbon capture capacity to return the Earth’s atmosphere to its preindustrial composition in a decade, and at an affordable cost. This places a solution to the CO2 problem within reach—but only eventually, after an unknown and risky delay.
Taken together, unexpected prospects for averting the collision between civilization and the limits of the Earth offer reasons for hope where hope has been scarce.
As progress accelerates toward the APM revolution, we as a society would be well advised to devote urgent and sober attention to the changes that lie ahead, taking account of both what can be known and the limits of knowledge, as well. At the moment, however, even the basic facts about this kind of technology have been obscured by confusion and science-fiction fantasies.
The aim of my most recent book, Radical Abundance, is not to convince, but to raise urgent questions; not to persuade readers to upend their views of the world, but to show how the future may diverge far from the usual expectations—to open a staggering range of questions, to offer at least a few clear answers, and to help launch a long-delayed conversation about the shape of our future.
K. Eric Drexler
About the Author
K. Eric Drexler, often described as “the founding father of nanotechnology,” is the author of Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (Anchor, 1986), Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation (Wiley/Interscience, 1992), and Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization (Public Affairs, 2013).
Adapted from Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization by K. Eric Drexler. Available from PublicAffairs, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2013.
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APM (aka bottom up assembly) is very difficult
Submitted by RonFromNM (not verified) on Fri, 01/17/2014 - 9:47pm.
Eric, I love your thinking about possibilities. I was a member of your Foresight Institute back in the early 90s after having read your Engines book and after a career in industry am pursuing my PhD in nanoscience. APM is extremely appealing, but working daily in the trenches and studying the literature, let me tell you, this goal still is extremely difficult, which is why we have pursued \"nanotechnology\" in the form which you somewhat deride. Atomic level precision manufacturing \"bots\" essentially require de novo design of what can most closely be compared to enzymes. This is something that remains an elusive goal... the Rosetta project is a case in point of the most successful approach thus far. Bottom up assembly, which is another near equivalent to very, very early APM is most difficult of all. My two cents is the enabling technology is going to be from top down MEMS semiconductor manufacturing hybridized with bio and nanofluidics. And there needs to be a way to make money in the transition to the ubiquitous cheap production methodologies you envision. I'm hopeful, but this is going to be a slog in the real world.
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Nanotechnology in phases
Submitted by Brad Arnold (not verified) on Thu, 01/16/2014 - 4:25am.
In my opinion, the breaking apart nanotechnological advancement into phases is a luminary and useful philosophical and educational tool:
http://www.thatsreallypossible.com/news/852/nanotechnology-superhumans/
\"Phase 1 features the creation of Passive Nanostructures. Phase 2 features Active Nanostructures. These active structures are able to interact with their environment at the molecular level. It effectively allows us to reprogram nature. When we gain the ability to create these Active Nanostructures (phase 2 nanotechnology products), we will also have the power to create phase 3+4 nanotechnology products, which are already being designed: Three-dimensional heterogeneous molecular nanosystems, where each molecule in the nanosystem has a specific structure and plays a different role. Put simply, it will be technologically possible to create nanobots, that can be programmed to perform specific tasks.
Basic phase 1 products are already on the market. Phase 2 products are currently in the laboratory experimental stage; we can expect to see phase 2 products on the market within 20 years. Advanced phase 3+4 products are already in the computational experiment and modeling stages, and are expected to be on the market within 30 years.\"
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