You hear nanotechnology used more and more often these days - and it has made some impact in everyday life. But the real change and payoff will occur much further down the road when real molecular manufacturing is possible.
Dr. Eric Drexler, author of Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, has been pushing this field for twenty years, and it's finally starting to go mainstream.
What Is Nanotechnology?
A nanofactory is Dr. Drexler's concept for safe production of everyday objects from a desktop device that converts raw material molecules into finished products. In a matter of hours! Various predictions put the nanofactory in the 2020 to 2030 time-frame.
Once the basic capability exists to build large objects - such as a hand-held computer - from molecules and atoms, we will be able to build anything we want to build. This changes how life will be lived more than anything since the printing press.
How Will We Use Nanotechnology?
For example: Your health will be dramatically improved when your immune system has assistance in the form of intelligent virus detection capability. A tiny robot the size of a blood cell can add tremendous detection capability to your existing body immune system.
In a larger context, nanotechnology will allow the creation of incredibly strong materials that allow you to build such things as a global warming moderation system, or an asteroid defense system. Whereas such systems could be built now to some degree, those systems become cheap and readily available with the advent of nanotechnology.
Taking the meteor defense as an example, with today's technology it would be a $500 million system to build something that could deflect a small meteorite from a collision course with the earth. It would be as complex as the International Space Station. Details of these systems are documented at NanoFuture2030.
Whereas with nanotechnology - and specifically with nanofactory manufacturing capability - you could:
* send a fifty pound package to the moon,
* have that package mine its own resources from the surface of the moon,
* build a launch capability,
* throw completed spacecraft subsystems into orbit around the moon,
* and send that spacecraft off to an asteroid where it would set up, build, and implement a thrusting device on the asteroid that would move it away from a collision course with Earth.
All this would occur without human intervention and without cost, other than the original package delivered to the moon.
This may sound like science fiction, but with nanotechnology in the mix, science will become much more powerful than anything we've seen so far.
Suzann Kale writes technical articles for http://www.NanoFuture2030.com and other sites. A graduate of Northwestern University, her articles have appeared in national magazines and on the web.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Suzann_Kale
Dr. Eric Drexler, author of Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, has been pushing this field for twenty years, and it's finally starting to go mainstream.
What Is Nanotechnology?
A nanofactory is Dr. Drexler's concept for safe production of everyday objects from a desktop device that converts raw material molecules into finished products. In a matter of hours! Various predictions put the nanofactory in the 2020 to 2030 time-frame.
Once the basic capability exists to build large objects - such as a hand-held computer - from molecules and atoms, we will be able to build anything we want to build. This changes how life will be lived more than anything since the printing press.
How Will We Use Nanotechnology?
For example: Your health will be dramatically improved when your immune system has assistance in the form of intelligent virus detection capability. A tiny robot the size of a blood cell can add tremendous detection capability to your existing body immune system.
In a larger context, nanotechnology will allow the creation of incredibly strong materials that allow you to build such things as a global warming moderation system, or an asteroid defense system. Whereas such systems could be built now to some degree, those systems become cheap and readily available with the advent of nanotechnology.
Taking the meteor defense as an example, with today's technology it would be a $500 million system to build something that could deflect a small meteorite from a collision course with the earth. It would be as complex as the International Space Station. Details of these systems are documented at NanoFuture2030.
Whereas with nanotechnology - and specifically with nanofactory manufacturing capability - you could:
* send a fifty pound package to the moon,
* have that package mine its own resources from the surface of the moon,
* build a launch capability,
* throw completed spacecraft subsystems into orbit around the moon,
* and send that spacecraft off to an asteroid where it would set up, build, and implement a thrusting device on the asteroid that would move it away from a collision course with Earth.
All this would occur without human intervention and without cost, other than the original package delivered to the moon.
This may sound like science fiction, but with nanotechnology in the mix, science will become much more powerful than anything we've seen so far.
Suzann Kale writes technical articles for http://www.NanoFuture2030.com and other sites. A graduate of Northwestern University, her articles have appeared in national magazines and on the web.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Suzann_Kale
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