ABSTRACT
Nanotechnology
is the process by which objects smaller than 100 nanometers are built one atom
or molecule at a time. Its ultimate goal
is to create a Universal Assembler that takes in raw atoms in one side and
delivers finished products out the other.
Nanotechnology was mostly a dream
until the invention of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope and the Atomic Force
Microscope. Now it was possible not just
to see individual atoms, but to move them as well. Some technologies are already in use, from
clothing, to cosmetics, to medicine. Of direct impact to the field of computer
science is the expected surge in storage capacity.
It is not too early to consider the ramifications of
employing such a revolutionary technology. As is the case with all new
scientific developments, the legal system has not addressed nanotechnology in
any significant manner. Perhaps now is the time to study any legal
ramifications, so the legal and scientific communities can work together to
develop any necessary regulation.
INTRODUCTION
Manufactured
products are made from atoms. The properties of those products depend on how
those atoms are arranged. If we rearrange the atoms in coal, we get diamonds.
If we rearrange the atoms in sand (and add a pinch of impurities) we get
computer chips. If we rearrange the atoms in dirt, water and air we get grass.
Since
we first made stone tools and flint knives we have been arranging atoms in
great thundering statistical herds by casting, milling, grinding, chipping and
the like. We've gotten better at it: we can make more things at lower cost and
greater precision than ever before. But at the molecular scale we're still
making great ungainly heaps and untidy piles of atoms.
That's
changing. In special cases we can already arrange atoms and molecules exactly
as we want. Theoretical analyses make it clear we can do a lot more.
Eventually, we should be able to arrange and rearrange atoms and molecules much
as we might arrange LEGO blocks. In not too many decades we should have a
manufacturing technology able to:
- Build
products with almost every atom in the right place.
- Do
so inexpensively.
- Make
most arrangements of atoms consistent with physical law.
Often
called nanotechnology, molecular nanotechnology or molecular manufacturing, it will let us
make most products lighter, stronger, smarter, cheaper, cleaner and more
precise.
BUILDING WITH ATOMS
Atoms are the building blocks for all matter in our universe.
You and everything around you are made of atoms. Nature has perfected the
science of manufacturing matter molecularly. For instance, our bodies are
assembled in a specific manner from millions of living cells. Cells are nature's nanomachines. Humans still have a lot
to learn about the idea of constructing materials on such a small scale.
Consumer goods that we buy are made by pushing piles of atoms together in a
bulky, imprecise manner. Imagine if we could manipulate each individual atom of
an object. That's the basic idea of nanotechnology, and many scientists believe
that we are only a few decades away from achieving it.
Nanotechnology is a hybrid
science combining engineering and chemistry. Atoms and molecules stick together
because they have complementary shapes that lock together, or charges that
attract. Just like with magnets, a positively charged atom will stick to a
negatively charged atom. As millions of these atoms are pieced together by
nanomachines, a specific product will begin to take shape. The goal of
nanotechnology is to manipulate atoms individually and place them in a pattern
to produce a desired structure. There are three steps to achieving
nanotechnology-produced goods:
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- Scientists
must be able to manipulate individual atoms. This means that they will
have to develop a technique to grab single atoms and move them to desired
positions. In 1990, IBM
researchers showed that it is possible to manipulate single atoms. They
positioned 35 xenon
atoms on the surface of a nickel
crystal, using an atomic force microscopy instrument. These positioned
atoms spelled out the letters "IBM.
- The
next step will be to develop nanoscopic machines, called assemblers, that can be programmed
to manipulate atoms and molecules at will. It would take thousands of
years for a single assembler to produce any kind of material one atom at a
time. Trillions of assemblers will be needed to develop products in a
viable time frame.
- In
order to create enough assemblers to build consumer goods, some
nanomachines, called replicators,
will be programmed to build more assemblers.
Trillions of assemblers and replicators
will fill an area smaller than a cubic millimeter, and will still be too small
for us to see with the naked eye. Assemblers and replicators will work together like hands
to automatically construct products, and will eventually replace all
traditional labor methods. This will vastly decrease manufacturing costs,
thereby making consumer goods plentiful, cheaper and stronger. In the next
section, you'll find out how nanotechnology will impact every facet of society,
from medicine to computers.
WHAT WILL WE BE
ABLE TO MAKE?
Nanotechnology
should let us make almost every manufactured product faster, lighter, stronger,
smarter, safer and cleaner. We can already see many of the possibilities as
these few examples illustrate. New products that solve new problems in new ways
are more difficult to foresee, yet their impact is likely to be even greater.
Could Edison have foreseen the computer, or Newton the communications
satellite?
1. Improved
transportation
- Today,
most airplanes are made from metal despite the fact that diamond has a
strength-to-weight ratio over 50 times that of aerospace aluminum. Diamond
is expensive, we can't make it in the shapes we want, and it shatters.
Nanotechnology will let us inexpensively make shatterproof diamond (with a
structure that might resemble diamond fibers) in exactly the shapes we
want. This would let us make a Boeing 747 whose unloaded weight was 50
times lighter but just as strong.
- Today,
travel in space is very expensive and reserved for an elite few.
Nanotechnology will dramatically reduce the costs and increase the
capabilities of space ships and space flight.2 The
strength-to-weight ratio and the cost of components are absolutely
critical to the performance and economy of space ships: with nanotechnology,
both of these parameters will be improved…3 Beyond
inexpensively providing remarkably light and strong materials for space
ships, nanotechnology will also provide extremely powerful computers with
which to guide both those ships and a wide range of other activities in
space.
2. Atom
computers
- Today,
computer chips are made using lithography -- literally, "stone
writing." If the computer hardware revolution is to continue at its
current pace, in a decade or so we'll have to move beyond lithography to
some new post lithographic manufacturing technology. Ultimately, each
logic element will be made from just a few atoms.
- Designs
for computer gates with less than 1,000 atoms have already been proposed
-- but each atom in such a small device has to be in exactly the right
place. To economically build and interconnect trillions upon trillions of
such small and precise devices in a complex three-dimensional pattern
we'll need a manufacturing technology well beyond today's lithography:
we'll need nanotechnology.
- With
it, we should be able to build mass storage devices that can store more
than a hundred billion billion bytes in a volume the size of a sugar cube;
RAM that can store a mere billion billion bytes in such a volume; and
massively parallel computers of the same size that can deliver a billion
billion instructions per second.
3. Military
applications
- Today,
"smart" weapons are fairly big -- we have the "smart
bomb" but not the "smart bullet." In the future, even
weapons as small as a single bullet could pack more computer power than
the largest supercomputer in existence today, allowing them to perform
real time image analysis of their surroundings and communicate with
weapons tracking systems to acquire and navigate to targets with greater precision
and control.
- We'll
also be able to build weapons both inexpensively and much more rapidly, at
the same time taking full advantage of the remarkable materials properties
of diamond. Rapid and inexpensive manufacture of great quantities of
stronger more precise weapons guided by massively increased computational
power will alter the way we fight wars. Changes of this magnitude could
destabilize existing power structures in unpredictable ways. Military
applications of nanotechnology raise a number of concerns that prudence
suggests we begin to investigate before, rather than after, we develop
this new technology.4
4. Solar
energy
- Nanotechnology
will cut costs both of the solar cells and the equipment needed to deploy
them, making solar power economical. In this application we need not make
new or technically superior solar cells: making inexpensively what we
already know how to make expensively would move solar power into the
mainstream.
5. Medical
uses
- It
is not modern medicine that does the healing, but the cells themselves: we
are but onlookers. If we had surgical tools that were molecular both in
their size and precision, we could develop a medical technology that for
the first time would let us directly heal the injuries at the molecular and
cellular level that are the root causes of disease and ill health. With
the precision of drugs combined with the intelligent guidance of the
surgeon's scalpel, we can expect a quantum leap in our medical
capabilities.5
6.
Use of Natural Resources
·
Rather than clear-cutting forests
to make paper, we'd have assemblers synthesizing paper. Rather than using oil
for energy, we'd have molecule-sized solar cells mixed into road pavement. With
such solar nanocells, a sunny patch of pavement a few hundred square miles
could generate enough energy for the entire United States.
Famine would be obliterated, as food
could be synthesized easily and cheaply with a microwave-sized nanobox that
pulls the raw materials (mostly carbon) from the air or the soil. And by using
nanobots as cleaning machines that break down pollutants, we would be able to
counteract the damage we've done to the earth since the industrial revolution.
7.
Manufacturing and Industry
World's
smallest abacus with molecules as beads. Built at IBM Research Division's
Zurich lab.
Nanotechnology will render the
traditional manufacturing process obsolete, For example, we'd no longer have a
steel mill outfitted with enormous, expensive machinery, running on fossil
fuels and employing hundreds of human workers; instead we'd have a nanofactory
with trillions of nanobots synthesizing steel, molecule by molecule.
·
Scientist
believes that all industry would disappear except software engineering and
design. We'd simply design, engineer, and do a molecular model of any product
we wanted, and then software could tell a nanobot how to make it.
THE DARK SIDE OF
NANOTECHNOLOGY
What
will happen to the global order when assemblers and automated engineering
eliminate the need for most international trade? How will society change when
individuals can live indefinitely? What will we do when replicating assemblers
can make almost anything without human labor? What will we do when AI systems
can think faster than humans?
THE RIGHT TOOLS IN THE WRONG HANDS
As with computers, nanotechnology and programmable assemblers could become ordinary household objects. It's not too likely that the average person will get hold of and launch a nuclear weapon, but imagine a deranged white separatist launching an army of nanobots programmed to kill anyone with brown eyes or curly hair. And even if nanotechnology remains in the hands of governments, think what a Stalin or a Saddam Hussein could do. Vast armies of tiny, specialized killing machines that could be built and dispatched in a day; nano-sized surveillance devices or probes that could be implanted in the brains of people without their knowledge. The potential misuses of nanotechnology are vast.
HOW LONG?
The single most frequently asked question about nanotechnology is: How long? How long before it will let us make molecular computers? How long before inexpensive solar cells let us use clean solar power instead of oil, coal, and nuclear fuel? How long before we can explore space at a reasonable cost?
The scientifically correct answer is: I don't know. The single most frequently asked question about nanotechnology is: How long? How long before it will let us make molecular computers? How long before inexpensive solar cells let us use clean solar power instead of oil, coal, and nuclear fuel? How long before we can explore space at a reasonable cost?
From relays to
vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits to Very Large Scale
Integrated circuits (VLSI) we have seen steady declines in the size and cost of
logic elements and steady increases in their performance.7
- Extrapolation
of these trends suggests we will have to develop molecular manufacturing
in the 2010 to 2020 time frame if we are to keep the computer hardware
revolution on schedule.
- Of
course, extrapolating past trends is a philosophically debatable method of
technology forecasting. While no fundamental law of nature prevents us
from developing nanotechnology on this schedule (or even faster), there is
equally no law that says this schedule will not slip.
·
Much worse, though, is that such
trends imply that there is some ordained schedule -- that nanotechnology will
appear regardless of what we do or don't do. Nothing could be further from the
truth. How long it takes to develop this technology depends very much on what
we do. If we pursue it systematically, it will happen sooner. If we ignore it,
or simply hope that someone will stumble over it, it will take much longer. And
by using theoretical, computational and experimental approaches together, we
can reach the goal more quickly and reliably than by using any single approach
alone.
Like
the first human landing on the moon, the Manhattan project, or the development
of the modern computer, the development of molecular manufacturing will require
the coordinated efforts of many people for many years. How long will it take? A
lot depends on when we start.
CONCLUSION
Nanotechnology
touches our lives more than most probably would think. This is not a word we hear to often and
therefore, may have the tendency to ignore it and figure it is for the scientists
to worry about. However, it is a topic
that needs to be discussed more in schools, newspapers, books and more. As we saw, nanotechnology is shaping some of
the most important areas of our futures.
With
recent threats of terrorist attacks using such agents as biological and
biochemical warfare, American citizens, are becoming more interest in the ways
in which detection and prevention can be attained. Our country continues to put a large amount
of funding and research into the military in hopes of scientific advancements,
such as those in the field of nanotechnology.
The progress within this field is becoming crucial to the United
States. Steps have been taken in order to
produce the best technology possible, and with the proposal of bottom-up nanotechnology,
these devices will hopefully guard our citizens and troops fighting in war from
the hazards of biological agents.
In
closing, we hope that research on this topic continues and are anticipating the
results and creation of the first nanotechnology based materials and
objects. This field has many promising
features within it… it’s time we start utilizing our abilities to create such
powerful items.
REFERENCES
1)
Thomas Lawrence McKendree, "Implications of molecular nanotechnology
technical performance parameters on previously defined space system
architectures." Paper presented at the Fourth Foresight Conference on
Molecular Nanotechnology (1995).
2) National Space Society, "Position paper on space and molecular nanotechnology"
3) Admiral David E. Jeremiah, USN (ret.), "Nanotechnology and global security." Presentation at the Fourth Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology (1995).
4) Ralph C. Merkle, "Nanotechnology and medicine"
5) Ralph C. Merkle, "How long will it take to develop nanotechnology?" http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/howlong.html
6) "Computers: History and development," Jones Telecom. & Multimedia Encyclopedia (Jones E-globe Library)
2) National Space Society, "Position paper on space and molecular nanotechnology"
3) Admiral David E. Jeremiah, USN (ret.), "Nanotechnology and global security." Presentation at the Fourth Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology (1995).
4) Ralph C. Merkle, "Nanotechnology and medicine"
5) Ralph C. Merkle, "How long will it take to develop nanotechnology?" http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/howlong.html
6) "Computers: History and development," Jones Telecom. & Multimedia Encyclopedia (Jones E-globe Library)
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