Mind-Blowing Nanotechnology in 5 Minutes
The coming nano revolution will disrupt life more than we know—especially if we screw it up.
There are several big changes on the horizon that everyone is talking about, most notably artificial intelligence, big data, biotech and climate change. But very few people seem to be concerned with nanotechnology. Much like K. Erik Drexler—author of Engines of Creation and a pioneering voice in the field of molecular engineering—I believe advances in this field are going to change life as we know it as much, if not more, than anything else.
Here’s How
The word “nanotechnology” is an easy access point, but it’s not exactly what we’re talking about here. Nanotechnology as an umbrella term can cover many fields of research and engineering that deal with very small things. The prefix “nano” means “one billionth”—i.e. one billionth of a meter—the scale at which atoms and molecules are measured. In our present time, there’s already a lot of chemistry, physics and engineering at this scale and our world hasn’t been completely upended just yet.
The thing on which I want to focus—that which could make life in the future unrecognizable to modern people—Drexler calls “atomically precise manufacturing.” This term encompasses technologies that will be able to move individual atoms with great sophistication, speed and cost effectiveness. It’ll allow us use our entire environment as a virtually limitless resources with which to build incredibly small machines that will be faster, stronger and more powerful than any machine we know today.
A Boy and His Atom
These ideas are not new. Drexler’s seminal work on the subject was published in 1986, and a few short years later IBM scientists demonstrated a crude version of atomically precise manipulation using an scanning tunneling microscope to move individual xenon atoms across a copper plate and graph their positions as little bumps. The team also created an animated short film called A Boy And His Atom that pushed the concept even further.
Scanning tunneling microscopes are super cool, but they are a primitive tool compared to what we’ll have one day for pushing atoms around. For now, this kind of manipulation is only possible in special conditions with highly sophisticated and expensive equipment. Technologically speaking, IBM’s work was a Ford Model T; one day, we’ll have a Tesla Model S.
Developing The Tools
The problem of working small is not unlike the problem of working big. Consider building a modern skyscraper, which cannot be built with human labor alone; it’s just too big.
Hoisting steel beams a thousand feet in the air and positioning them in just the right structural arrangement requires sophisticated tools. We need trucks to bring in the beams, cranes to lift and precisely position them, powered drills with titanium bits to make rivet holes and riveting guns to connect the beams. And of course we need the steel mill and the whole chain of logistics all the way back to the iron ore mine.
Likewise, human hands cannot grab an individual atom, nor even the largest million-atom molecules, and precisely position them with other atoms and bond them together into a structure we want to build. We need more sophisticated tools. What we have at our disposal today is pretty incredible in its own right, but it falls far short of Drexler’s vision of atomically precise manufacturing.
One technique used by modern day chemists to synthesize nano structures involves combining “ready-to-bond” molecular components in solution and agitating with heat, light, electric current or vibration. This causes the components to move and collide with one another until they meet at just the right orientation and “snap” together—kind of like magnetized LEGO bricks. This works great and has many cool applications, but the possibilities are relatively limited in that only certain atoms and molecular structures are compatible for forming the necessary strong and weak bonds to build larger structures just by coming into contact at the right orientation.
It’s like having a thousand-piece LEGO Star Wars set, but you can’t touch any of the individual pieces; all you can do is shake the box for an hour until twenty thrusters of an X-wing tumble out. Then combine those parts with wings, fuselage, blaster cannons and cockpits created in the same way. Rinse and repeat in a slow, onerous process with each individual subassembly and eventually you’ll hav shaken together a fleet of completed X-wings. But you can only build what LEGO sells, and only according to their instructions. As yet there are no LEGO Classic Play Sets that give you the creative free rein to build whatever you like piece by piece.
But what kinds of tiny machines would we want to build, anyway?
Molecular Machines
Once we have the freedom to build atomically precise structures, we’ll end up building parts, components, machines and systems that are in fact very familiar to us from the “bulk” world in which we live. Things like gears, switches, motors, actuated grabbing arms, propellers, locomotive legs, logic gates and data storage devices will lead to the creation of nanoscale automobiles, submarines, helicopters, computers and nimble, dextrous and programmable robots.
Imagine swarms of submarines with little propellers that hunt and destroy cancer cells by injecting them with life-saving drugs. Or helicopters that find and neutralize pollution or toxins in the air. Or a fleet of nanocars or insect-like nanobots patrolling farmlands for pests, repairing damage done by drought and infusing soil, crops and food with vital nutrients. You might even choose to have an army of molecular machines injected into your bloodstream to serve as a supercharged immune system, preventing infections, healing injuries and even slowing the aging process. The possibilities we can think up now are almost limitless, and of course, there are those future applications that we can’t even imagine yet.
In his novel The Diamond Age, Neil Stephenson creates a fictional world where molecular machines are ubiquitous—in the air, soil, water, food and coursing through our bodies. Manufactured and deployed by competing governments and corporations, these “mites” are constantly engaged in an invisible war with one another as they jockey for position to fulfill their function. Like many works of science fiction, The Diamond Age explores the dark side of this nanotechnological world (and with delightful 90s, cyberpunk flare). But if we can look past the doom and gloom, there’s really an incredible future to behold.
So if our current methods of nanoscale manufacturing—chemical synthesis, i.e. shaking the box of LEGOs—won’t get us there, how are we ever going to accomplish these amazing feats of engineering?
Assemblers
Drexler introduced us to the concept of assemblers—programmable molecular machines that can directly interact with matter on the atomic scale. These machines will break molecular bonds in order to harvest atoms from the environment and create new bonds as they construct a machine. I always picture it like playing a game of StarCraft.
In each game of StarCraft, players start with little more than an army of worker units at their disposal (called SCVs, drones or probes). These workers can be assigned to harvest resources from the surrounding environment, then those same units can be directed to build more worker units, as well as the necessary structures for a fortified base and a diverse army of war machines that will battle other players for control of the map. Unlike other games, a human player doesn’t really have direct, fine-grained control over any one character in StarCraft. Similarly, assemblers will be our SCVs, drones and probes for the nano world—the key piece of infrastructure that will allow us to build the miraculous molecular machines we can only imagine today.
But this still doesn’t solve the problem of how humans can actually achieve atomically precise manufacturing—I mean, how do we build the assemblers in the first place? To do this, we’ll have to go through a long technological evolution in which we painstakingly shake the box of LEGOs in order to build not just the machines and structures we ultimate want, but the tools to get us there. Essentially, our first goal is to build assemblers so that we can keep building. The first primitive assemblers will be used to make more complex and sophisticated assemblers, so on and so forth, until we have achieved a kind of all-purpose, universal assembler that can build us anything—including more assemblers. Pretty cool, huh?
But wait, something feels very wrong about this…
Gray Goo
There is indeed something very wrong, and Drexler is quick to describe just how bad we human beings can screw things up if we are not careful—or even if we are. On this topic, Drexler coins the term “gray goo,” which describes a catastrophic, world-ending scenario where by some accident of reproduction by assemblers making more assemblers, these little machines will start reproducing out of control.
At an exponential rate, these rogue assemblers will harvest matter until they cover the surface of the Earth and consume its every last atom. Life on Earth will cease to exist in a matter of days. In its place will be nothing but an endless ocean of self-replicating nano assemblers — now idle without resources to power them or raw material to work with . Countless lumps of shapeless, formless, lifeless matter as far as the eye can see. Gray goo.
Much like artificial intelligence, big data and biotech, there comes with nanotechnology the possibility to transform our world into a utopia as well as to completely destroy everything we’ve ever known. Gray goo might sound silly, but so, too, does the idea of A.I. becoming self-aware and precipitating a violent, robotic overthrow of humanity. There’s no shortage of such doom-and-gloom articles out there, yet the epic pitfalls of nanotechnology don’t get the same attention. But I predict that as we inch closer and closer to atomically precise manufacturing as K. Erik Drexler imagines it, scientists, engineers and the general public will start to take this more seriously. Hopefully, by then it’s not too late.
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