The Promise of Molecular Nanotechnology

One of the major game changing future technologies awaiting us is molecular nanotechnology. This truly amazing future technology may just be the single greatest technological paradigm shift mankind will ever go through due to the far flung possibilities that the development of such technology presents to us.

Two areas where molecular nanotechnology will revolutionize our lives are in the fields of industry and economics. As it stands, the means of production generally sits with businesses and factories. Companies produce goods that we, in turn, buy as consumers. But nanotechnology changes that because as it becomes widely available to people anyone will be able to have their own nanofactory in their home that can produce whatever goods they wish for the cost of the energy used to produce them.

This is accomplished through the presence of countless microscopic nanobots that assemble objects out of individual atoms. This shifting of the means of production will fundamentally change the field of economics as things will no longer be bought and sold. As John Maynard Keynes predicted as far back as the 1930s, the human race will simply go unemployed forever, but that's okay if everyone has a nanofactory or so we hope.

That's called Technological Unemployment, a topic for a whole other post, but suffice it to say that Mankind's economic problem will be solved forever, for better or worse. In as little as five decades from now, you may well be retired and living comfortably with your very own nanofactory whiling away your days in a virtual reality while your androids serve you martinis. No doubt it will be a painful road getting to that stage.

Another aspect of molecular nanotechnology is its potential abilities in the field of medicine. Some day in the future there may be billions of nanobots flowing through your blood stream preventing disease, scouring out viruses, repairing wear and damage and generally making you immortal for all intents and purposes. Well, unless your nanofactory malfunctions and vaporizes you. The very beginnings of this coming revolution are already here right now in the form of nanobots that are being developed by MIT that will be injected into type 1 diabetics and will monitor their blood sugar levels in real time and automatically release insulin as needed, in theory eliminating the disease entirely as the nanotech serves as a defacto artificial pancreas. This technology is not as far away as you might think, it's on a timeframe of years, rather than decades.

But the possibilities of molecular nanotechnology do not end there. Another take on the idea is a concept known as utility fog, a term first coined in 1993 by Dr. John Storrs Hall. This is where it gets wild. He was thinking of ways to replace car seatbelts with a fog that could stiffen and protect the occupants of the car. But the idea extends far beyond seat belts. For example, you could fill the atmosphere of your planet with countless tiny nanobot assemblers that could do such things as build objects from individual atoms and have them materialize seemingly out of thin air. If you needed a wrench, for example, you would simply say "nanobots, wrench" and the nanobots would assemble it for you atom by atom.

If you likewise needed an empire state building or a radio telescope, one could be constructed from atoms by the nanofog. And when you didn't need it anymore, they could disassemble it creating an endless cycle of atomic recycling. To get even wilder,  you could have the fog lift you up and carry you through the air, or even allow you to fly like superman at hundreds of miles per hour without the need of an airplane, completely protected and propelled by the nanofog alone.

And then there is the final step. This is the one that not too many people are thinking about yet, but science fiction writers such as myself certainly are. This step is the transcendence of the human race to become the fog. In theory, the fog could serve as a giant collective supercomputer and the human race could download itself into the fog and live in virtual reality utopias.

If the formerly human denizens of the virtual cloud utopia wished to stop back by and visit the real world every now and again, they could simply materialize. The nanotechnological fog could assemble a biological or technological body for them and there they would be. If they wished to dematerialize again, the nanotech would disassemble and reintegrate them seamlessly back into the fog.

And, interestingly enough, all of this may solve the Fermi Paradox along the way. A fog civilization with a full mastery of molecular nanotechnology would be extremely difficult to detect at any distance, as they would probably only be emitting very low levels of RF perhaps on level with our cellphones and produce very little waste heat that could be seen in the infra-red. They would be capable of existing anywhere including as a cloud floating through deep space. Could the human race someday appear as a simple bank of fog covering an otherwise natural looking and apparently uninhabited Earth? At least in principal, it might just be possible.

And that calls into question the famous Kardashev scale with its type I, II, and III civilizations. Advanced civilizations may not evolve into galaxy spanning empires. Rather they may just grow introverted. They may live in their virtual utopia universe and ignore the real one entirely. In short, the real universe may simply stop mattering to a highly advanced civilization.

But, in the end, it's always harder to create something than it is to talk about it, so there may be engineering hurdles that never allow nanotech in general to go much beyond anything other than being an artificial pancreas. Or it could be some variation of far more. We shall see. But one thing is for sure, the development of nanotechnology will be one of the biggest milestones in human technological development. And if concepts such as the Technological Singularity turn out to be the case, that's yet another topic for a future post, then we may have technology like this far faster than anyone could have imagined.