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Throughout history, humankind has struggled to gain more and more control over the environment. First, fire was created to control warmth. Then came tools, which allowed the control to cut, pound, and drill into materials to make various things. As our into technology improves, we gain more and more control over the material world. But what would happen if we gained ultimate control, the ability to manipulate individual atoms to produce anything physically possible?
Is this kind of ultimate control over matter possible? What kind of technology would allow this, and how far off could it be? Yes, nanotechnology, and possibly less than 20 years! That's right, the all new technology called nanotechnology may soon arange individual atoms to in order to create anything!
Nanotechnology, or nanotech, is the science of the extremely small. Mainly, it focuses on artificially arranging atoms to create objects on an Atomic scale. Soon, Nanotechnology made it advanced enough to build tiny, self replicating robots that are the size of molecules! These machines could take individual atoms from a source material, sort them out, and place them together to create anything it was programmed to. It could even produce an exact copy of itself! These magnificent little robots could do numerous things, including:
- Refine and process elements, such as iron, gold, uranium, or any other chemicals or elements
- Produce new materials such as alloys, crystals, plastics, and diamonds
- Produce structural compounds like proteins, carbon buckyballs and nanotubes, and new types of crystals and polymers
- Repair and maintain complex systems. Ex.:
- Supplement immune system and repair bodily damage
- Produce self-repairing robots, materials, and machinery
- Synthesize items, such as food, artificial limbs, computers, and even spaceships
- Destroy specific things, such as poisons, viruses, bacteria, and cancer cells
- Reproduce more nanites
Despite what you might think, there has been many recent advances in the field of nanotechnology, and there is no known reason that atomic scale robots are not possible. After all, nanotechnology would not be the first technology to completely change the world. For example, just take the Industrial Revolution, solid state electronics, computers, and genetic engineering! Obviously, nanotechnology would not be the first to change the world!
Since the advent of the scanning tunneling microscope, scientists have had the ability to manipulate and rearrange individual atoms. Because of this ability, there have been many breakthroughs in the field of nanotechnology:
- One of the earliest breakthroughs in nanotechnology came when researchers working for IBM Corporation manipulated individual Xenon atoms to spell out their employers name, "IBM".
- A more recent breakthrough occurred when researchers used a new technique of manipulating atoms, which gave them much greater control, to produce the First "Computer" on a atomic scale. This was really a simple abacus, but it made the point of making the first atomic scale calculation.
- An even more recent event happened when researchers at MIT produced an atom laser, which shoots a concentrated beam of atoms.
- Another advancement was that of a working gear system made of less than 10,000 atoms modeled on a computer. This has yet to be built.
- A microprocessor made of individual atoms has also been designed on a computer. There are many types of atomic-scale processor designs.
How will these nanites work?
Each individual nanite would act much like a robot, only on a atomic scale. In order to complete a complex task, many different nanites would work together. Some of the types of nanites in a nanite "crew" would be:
Using this method, the nanite group cannot malfunction and eat the world. Instead, even if some of the nanites malfunctioned or mutated, there are many safeguards that prevent them from being dangerous. Three main safeties are:
Mission
Control
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