Products, Power, and Impact

Three reasons why advanced nanotechnology will be so transformative -- and quite possibly disruptive.

1. Scaling laws: A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. An "Intro to Nanotech" site says...

To give a sense of that scale, a nanometer is to a meter what an inch is to 15,783 miles (a billion inches), well over half the distance around the Equator (12,451 miles).

Or think of a person that’s 6 feet tall (1,830,000,000 nanometers). A hair from that person’s head is around 50,000 nanometers wide: if you could split that hair into 50,000 separate strands, each would be a nanometer wide.

At such a tiny scale, things move much faster. Why? Because the distance traveled is so much shorter. Actions that take a few seconds at normal size -- say, a robot arm picking up a part on an assembly line -- will occur millions of times quicker inside a nanofactory. This super small size means not only speed, but also far greater functionality. Products made this way will be smaller, stronger, more durable, and smarter too, because tiny supercomputers will be packed into almost everything that's made.

2. Factories that make factories: A key factor in nanotechnology's explosive potential is that it will provide not just new products, but a new means of production. Imagine taking a factory the size of several city blocks and shrinking it down to a countertop version. Now imagine that you can instruct that nanofactory to make another identical factory. All you have to provide is external power and inexpensive raw materials. Wait a few hours and instead of one nanofactory, now you have two. Those two can make four, four can make eight, and so on. After several sets of doublings, you could conceivably have many millions of factories. That's exponential proliferation.

3. Cheap, rapid prototyping: Today, when a manufacturer plans to develop a new product (or significantly modify an existing one), they must allow for months -- if not years -- of designing, building, testing, and refining protoypes. It's an arduous, expensive, and time-consuming procedure. But with molecular manufacturing, vastly accelerated product improvement will be possible. New prototypes could be manufactured within hours -- at almost zero cost -- then tested, refined, and made ready for mass production as soon as the next day. Clearly, this has serious implications for weapons development, among other things.

Combine these three factors and you get what economists call creative destruction. How soon will it occur? Well, that's the problem. Nobody knows. It might be 20 years from now, 15 years, 10 years, or possibly less. What we urgently need is well-funded and wisely managed studies to better understand the technology and its power.

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Comments

[Bernard Price]

Small, self orienting, machines within machines, replicating themselves or what would appear more appropriately to be described as "growing" a product, analogous to the many biological process that create complexity from the simplest of inputs - sun, water and organic raw material. This is nothing new, much as other macroscopic products and technologies either by accident or cleaver study mimic efficiencies developed in the natural word developed after millions of years of "operating" and fine tuning ( flight, bone structure, etc.) to the responses/inputs of the natural environment. The development of true "nanoproducts" - not sure what that is but something with substance that is somehow a "fruit" if you will of the three impacts noted above. There are what seems to be endless claims and claims I think backed by basic research that promise amazing properties. Scaling up from the nanoworld dimensions may not only prove difficult for some concepts but also some it stands to reason will be victims of the macroscopic physics taking over and loss of the promising capabilities seen on the nanoscale. Perhapse most troubling of all as we learn the fundamentals of creation or evolution ( deference to your politics ) that we as well have an equal likelyhood of creating "nanodisease" and in fact if human experience is any guide we most certianly will hose-up something on our march useful/gainful products. Proceed with caution.

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

Bernard,

1) Modern nanofactory designs are a lot simpler than what you describe. There are no replication or swarms involved in making products. The most recent Burch/Drexler design doesn't even require hierarchical machinery.

2) The scaling-law advantages of small machines can be preserved by running many of them in parallel. This requires redundant design, but that's a very small cost relative to the orders-of-magnitude benefit.

3) There is essentially no connection between molecular manufacturing and biological disease. Other nanotechnologies may be more risky in this regard.

Chris