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.

Yet another warning that we need to manage the development of A.I. very carefully.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/661478/END-OF-HUMANITY-Artificial-Intelligence-could-destroy-us-WITHIN-DECADES-warns-expert

KIC 8462852 The Alien Megastructure Star

Much ado was made at the end of 2015 over a strange star known as KIC 8462852 or "Tabby's Star" after Dr. Tabitha Boyajian, one of the scientists investigating it. The mystery began when a group of citizen scientists known as "The Planet Hunters" were looking at light curves taken by the Kepler spacecraft in 2011. Within these light curves, the planet hunters can see dips in brightness that happen when a planet moves in front of its parent star blocking the light just a little bit. This is how hundreds of exoplanets were found using Kepler, which is remarkable in and of itself. However, one light curve looked very, very strange. Like unprecedented strange.

Within the light curve of Tabby's star, enormous multi-day dimming events were apparent where very large objects or swarms of objects were seen passing in front of the star blocking as much as 22 percent of its light. Compare that to our solar system where at the same distance gigantic Jupiter would block only about 1 percent of the sun's light. Something very large indeed was blocking the light from Tabby's star.

In their original paper, Boyajian and her colleagues concluded that very few natural phenomena could be responsible for that amount of blocked starlight, and none of those explanations fit very well with what they were seeing in the light curve. Ultimately, they concluded that the most likely explanation was a swarm of comets breaking up causing the light to dim from dust and gas. This, however, was not a great explanation, merely the best plausible one. Then, Jason Wright at Pennsylvania State university offered another possibility: that the light was being blocked by gigantic alien megastructures.

That may sound like far-fetched science fiction, but in reality it's not. An object called a Dyson sphere was cited as one possible type of megastructure that might fit the bill. A Dyson sphere, or more probably a Dyson swarm, could be built by an advanced alien civilization to harvest solar energy from their star. We ourselves are already starting our  own primitive Dyson swarm in the form the multitude of spacecraft in solar orbit that we have launched over the decades, so the idea is not that much of a stretch for a civilization considerably older and more advanced than our own. The trick however, is in catching them in the act of having the sphere. The odds are likely low that we would just happen to be looking at just the right moment in time to catch a glimpse of a Dyson sphere due to the relatively short window in geologic time that such a thing might exist. This part of the story has recently become even more complicated because there may be indications that if it is a Dyson's Sphere, it is currently under construction. More on that in a minute.

In an attempt to resolve the question, SETI radio astronomers pointed the Allen Telescope Array towards Tabby's star to look for radio and laser emissions. They saw nothing. But that may not mean too much. The result is not all that surprising, given that Tabby's star is 1,480 light years away which would require extremely powerful radio transmitters pointed directly at us for us to hear them. It seems unlikely that an advanced alien civilization would do that on purpose unless they wanted to contact us. But given the distances, they have no way of knowing that we are here. From their perspective they see us 1,480 years in the past, about the time when the western Roman Empire had just fallen. That was long before anyone here emitted any radio waves for the aliens to pick up. And, of course, there's no guarantee that an alien civilization would care to contact a civilization far more primitive than their own.   

It was at this point that the story began to lose the media's attention. But the story did not end there and several intriguing new developments have come out over the last few months. It came in the form of a paper by Dr. Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University. Using photographic plates from Harvard that were taken over the course of a century, he discovered that Tabby's Star not only dims periodically, but has been dimming overall for over a century. This is a very short time for a star of this class to dim as much as it did. Stars like this dim over timeframes of millions of years, not hundreds. He concluded that the unprecedented long-term dimming that he observed, and the light curve dips seen by Kepler must be due to the same phenomenon when Ockham's razor is applied. For this to be a phenomenon related to a group of comets, he calculated that it would require 648,000 giant comets orchestrated to pass in front of the star in order to explain the century long trend. That is considered to be implausible. Whatever this is, it doesn't appear to be due to a swarm of comets.

The second development was known about but not well talked about in the media when the story was hot. It involves a specific feature within the Kepler light curve that presents an interesting mystery. Around day 800 during Kepler's run, a single, large dip occurred over several days that presented very smooth geometry. While this could be interpreted in several ways, one of the ways is that a giant isosceles triangle passed in front of the star.

This is interesting for those willing to entertain the possibility of alien megastructures. It has been suggested that the easiest way to announce to the universe that you exist is not by building huge radio beacons, those require incomprehensibly massive amounts of energy, but instead constructing a huge object, like a baffle, perhaps out of Mylar or a similar material, in such a shape that is not possible in nature. Then you make it pass in front of your star and then anyone with a Kepler spacecraft can see it. A triangle might be one such shape. It's worth noting though that comets are isosceles triangle shaped, but there's a catch, to make this particular signature in the light curve, the comet's tale would have to be pointing towards the star. Very odd, but not impossible, in fact the original Boyajian paper gives an explanation for how that could happen, but this new comet implausibility issue may call that into question and that certainly deepens the mystery.

But then we run into problems with the alien megastructure idea. While I consider the megastructure hypothesis unlikely, I am a science fiction writer rather than a scientist so I'm allowed to speculate a little more than they can. The amount of dimming Schaefer observed is very significant, about 20 percent over a century. That's a lot. For an alien race to create structures that rapidly in order to account for the overall dimming trend, they would have to be in one serious rush. To a point that it seems impossible. But maybe not, at least if you're willing to entertain ideas of future technology.

Building giant objects very rapidly might eventually be possible through the use of self-replicating nanotechnology. Evoking the Grey Goo, a single self-replicating nanobot could in theory exponentially reproduce like a virus and consume the entire mass of the earth within two days. That's a lot of work over a short time. Needless to say, nano-technology theoretically can also build things very rapidly. But to create megastructures of this apparent size that block that much light would require enormous amounts of matter. Think completely disassembling the planets in your solar system amounts of matter. So is it possible that an alien civilization is constructing a Dyson's swarm very rapidly using nanotech? Well, yeah, possibly. Or the phenomenon behind Tabby's star could just be a wild goose chase with a natural explanation that we haven't thought of yet. Only time will tell.

So there you have it, that's where the Tabby's Star story is as of April 11, 2016. What could be the biggest news story in centuries is still ongoing, with the possibility of alien megastructures still not discounted. Of course, it could still get discounted, and very probably will, but for now this is the most tantalizing hint we've ever seen that we are not alone, even more so than the famous 1970's Wow! signal of SETI fame.