Roadmap Progress Update

We've got more information now about the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems, being developed by the Battelle research group and the Foresight Nanotech Institute.

From a story by Kathy White of ExtremeNano:

"This [roadmap] is going to be a major undertaking," Foresight president Scott Mize said. "We hope this will chart the way to develop productive nanosystems."

"Our roadmap is going to encourage collaboration across many, many industries," said Battelle vice president Alex Kawczak. "We are shaping the future by providing the framework for collaboration that has the great potential to impact all industries in the next 10 to 30 years."

The roadmap will serve as a basis for formulating research and commercialization agendas for achieving these capabilities.

Productive nanosystems will drive research and applications in a host of areas, providing new atomically precise nanoscale building blocks, devices and systems.

In case the term 'productive nanosystems' is new to you, here is what Eric Drexler says on his website:

Advanced productive nanosystems (that is, molecular manufacturing systems) will enable the fabrication of large, complex products cleanly, efficiently, and at low cost. Among the feasible products of advanced productive nanosystems will be:

* desktop computers with a billion processors
* inexpensive, efficient solar energy systems
* medical devices able to destroy pathogens and repair tissues
* materials 100 times stronger than steel
* superior military systems
* additional molecular manufacturing systems

Advanced systems provide a long-term objective, but even early-generation systems will have great practical and scientific value. Developing early-generation productive nanosystems is a practical objective today.

That's what the Roadmap Project is working on. It's expected to be ready by late 2006. And by the way, Sun Microsystems has signed on as a corporate sponsor.

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