Scatterplot of current R&D funding and
scientists/engineers per capita in various
countries.
The US, Japan,
and China are clearly in the lead today — and China has
declared
nanotechnology to be a priority.
Of course, this doesn't necessarily reflect who will develop
molecular
manufacturing first. Here's a bit from Ed Regis' book
Nano : The Emerging Science of Nanotechnology:
[Drexler's] reasoning here was that if nanotechnology was going to
be developed anyway, whether he helped it along or not, then it was
crucial that it be invented here in America, or at least by one of the
free democracies wherever they were located, East or West. This was
crucial because the first nation to develop nanotechnology would
thereby become the world's dominant power, "the Leading
Force".
That nation, whoever it was, could build weapons that no other
country would have defenses against. Its citizens would become healthy,
wealthy, and young overnight. It would be Them against everyone else.
Moreover, it was not out of bounds to imagine one of the more
unspoiled worldly monarchies being the first to develop nanotechnology.
Nanotechnology research, after all, was not "big science" in the usual
sense. You didn't need anything like a Manhattan Project or an Apollo
program or a Superconducting Supercollider effort to get the thing
going. Conceivably, you could do it in a garage. You could do
simulations of molecular machines on a personal computer; you could
create billions of molecular structures in a test tube; you could
custom-make DNA in a desktop synthesizer. All you needed for the great
breakthrough was a laboratory, some extremely smart people and
programming, and lots of luck at getting things right.
The above was written in 1995. "Healthy, wealthy and young" will
perhaps not happen
overnight, but after only a few years is indeed imaginable. Tabletop or
industrial nanofactories would allow their owners to fabricate any
quantity of medical equipment with raw materials and the engineering
design being the only costs. To truly defeat old age will require a
thorough understanding of how the
7 mechanisms of senescence do damage
and how to heal that damage without unhealthy side effects. Health will
be boosted greatly by injecting ourselves with artificial antibodies
and bacteriophages when they are developed, which should be before the
closing of the second decade of this century. Wealth is probably the
easiest item on the list to achieve, because what we consider wealth is
largely based on material products, which can be manufactured in
abundance when fabrication processes achieve high throughputs and are
entirely automated.
Say you have a 10 kg nanofactory invented in an arbitrary country on
January 1st, 2020. Let's say that the design is similar to the
Phoenix
nanofactory, in which case we'll work with the following
assumptions:
The size, mass, energy requirement, and duplication time of this
nanofactory design depend heavily on the properties of the fabricator.
... a tabletop nanofactory
(1x1x1/2 meters) might weigh 10 kg or less, produce 4 kg of diamondoid
(~10.5 cm
cube) in 3 hours, and require as little as fifteen hours to produce a
duplicate nanofactory.
Say that this first nanofactory is used to make a duplicate
nanofactory, then both nanofactories are used to make duplicates, and
so on, until you have 200 million units, ready for distribution to the
majority of households in the nation. How long would this take? Under
28 duplication cycles, or approximately 18 days. In our model that
would be January 19th, 2020. Assuming another week for distribution,
this would put nanofactories into most homes in under a month since the
technology was initially completed.
To compare, the time
it took for
the Internet to be adopted by 50% of American households since its
invention was about 15 years. The MP3 player and cell phone have
arguably taken far less time to achieve 50% adoption, more like a few
years. Nanofactories could achieve 50% adoption in weeks, possibly
months or years if the price is kept artificially high, which is
Michael Vassar's scenario in his
Corporate
Cornucopia paper. In any
case, once a nation has 200 million nanofactories and the necessary raw
materials, it could theoretically fabricate 2.3 billion metric tons of
product per year, mostly durable goods, a productivity rate much
greater than those seen in contemporary economies.
Early
nanofactories would likely have high power and feedstock requirements,
so the
exponential explosion outlined above would be rather delayed. The
described model
is partially based on the assumption that, unless a nanofactory has
relatively low power requirements and can accept non-perfect feedstock,
it isn't really going to be mass produced anyway.
The question is, will the technology be available to everyone, or will
it be guarded by a jealous few?
On the downside, restricting nanotechnology would have a horrible
negative effect on many of the poorest people in the world, who have
little access to housing, electricity, water, and other basic needs.
Because the marginal cost of manufacturing an additional product using
a nanofactory is so close to zero, people in poverty have the most to
gain if nanotech is widely adopted, and the most to lose if it is
restricted.
On the other hand, nanotech opens up a dangerous Pandora's box of
problems that few people have even begun to understand. Nanoengineered
weapons are in fact one of the greatest threats to humanity's future
that have yet been imagined. Even if the threat of extinction were as
low as 1/100, that's a 1/100 chance of the entire human future being
destroyed, a future that potentially consists of trillions and
trillions of beings experiencing worthwhile lives.
It would be
ethically prudent to hold back this technology until we can be better
reassured that we can handle it with minimal risk. Unfortunately, in
the real world you can't hold back a technology once international
research gets started and investors are pouring money into it, which
has already happened for nano. The upshot is that it might actually be
beneficial for humanity if nanotechnology did end up being released to
the public slowly, or in low-performance versions that make for a more
fluid transition from manufacturing technologies of the past. But is
that really practical once other companies and governments see the
tremendous power of the technology and start developing their own
versions?
By 2020, and potentially as early as 2010, we will know enough about
carbon chemistry, kinematic self-replication, and nanoscale positional
control to build a desktop nanofactory — a machine that uses many
trillions of tiny arms to put together macro-scale products. Because
tiny arms can move incredibly fast, they will be radically productive.
It has been
estimated that a 100 kg nanofactory will be able to
manufacture its own weight in product in about three hours, perhaps
less.
Nanofactory technology will begin with an
assembler — a reprogrammable
molecular machine capable of making a copy of itself. An assembler
would be extremely small, composed of maybe a couple million atoms.
This is about the same as a ribosome. For a reference, see this picture
of some nanoparts next to a virus:
An assembler would basically be an artificial ribosome. Ribosomes
are
the little machines in the cell that manufacture every protein in your
body. Its basic design hasn't changed in over a billion
years.
Feasibility arguments for molecular nanotechnology (MNT) are
well-documented in the literature. Its not a question of if, but when.
The technological and sociological impact of personal nanofactories
(PNs) is certain to be extreme. If regulations permit it, you will be
able to construct, right in your very home, just about any structure
allowed by the laws of chemistry and available feedstock. All current
manufacturing, communication, and transportation processes will be
fundamentally restructured over a period of mere years or even months.
The first nanofactories are likely to use carbon feedstock, meaning
most of the products will be made out of diamond. Water may be used as
a ballast for some diamond products.
Products built using MNT will be extremely cheap: around the cost of
their raw materials. This is because human labor, the primary cost of
manufacturing today, is largely subtracted from the equation. Carbon is
extremely cheap, and can be mined by the megaton from practically
anywhere. Power requirements are modest. Made of diamond, a nanofactory
will not require much maintenance.
Quickly, typical products made of plastic, ceramic, or metal will be
redesigned to accommodate the new diamondoid medium. There will be
diamond plates, diamond tables, diamond cutlery, ovens, coffee makers,
microwaves, tiles, walls, chairs, televisions, cameras, printers,
scanners, shelving, windows, computers, pens, notepads, pottery,
showerheads, and so on. Something like 90% of all manufactured products
will be replaced by diamondoid versions. This is what Neal Stephenson
was thinking when he wrote a book called
The Diamond Age.
The father of nanotechnology, Eric Drexler,
lists a few things which
would become possible with MNT:
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
MNT has been called "magic", and the word choice is not entirely
inappropriate. We will be able to build products with greater
performance and more diverse functionality than anything you or any
university Ph.Ds have imagined. All shortages of energy, food, water,
and shelter will be rapidly solved, as long as nanofactories are made
available to developing countries. Subdermal heaters, nanoproducts
designed to do little more than generate waste heat, will eliminate the
problem of obesity practically overnight. The size and range of
products will be limited only by whatever regulations are built into
the first round of nanofactories. Hopefully these regulations will be
extremely strict. You see, nanofactories will be the most dangerous
technology that mankind has ever faced, thousands of times more
dangerous than nuclear weapons.
Given an unrestricted nanofactory and a few million dollars worth of
programming and engineering, here are a few products that you could
manufacture in almost arbitrary quantities, given a couple months
manufacturing time:
Sniper rifles that weigh less than 5 kg, capable of firing a
lethal projectile at Mach 10 towards any target within my line of
sight.
Extremely light and strong armor capable of stopping 10 kg
explosive shells moving at 10 km/sec.
Metal
Storm systems which fire as many as 1,000,000 projectiles per
minute through ballistics arrays.
UAV
swarms capable of actively neutralizing very large rockets,
providing comprehensive area denial, working together to disassemble
buildings, etc.
Gigawatt-class, solar array or nuclear-powered microwave beams capable
of completely melting tanks, aircraft, destroyers, incoming missiles,
etc. from hundreds of miles away.
Isotope separation systems that enrich uranium
efficiently, at great speeds, giving enough fissile material to make
bombs in days rather than years.
Gigantic lenses capable of redirecting sunlight towards
arbitrary coordinates in extremely high concentrations; a solar furnace.
Missile
swarms composed of individual missiles about 1 meter long, carrying
1 kg warheads, manufactured by the millions, capable of traveling
through the upper atmosphere and surviving reentry.
Because products made out of diamond can be extremely strong and light,
100 kg of carbon gives you a very large bang for your buck. For
example, a Mercedes S-class today weighs about 2,000 kg, but with
diamondoid building materials, this weight could be reduced
tremendously, if desired — the primary motivation to preserve the
vehicle's current weight would be the preservation of inertia, rather
than engineering limitations. An automobile made out of nanodiamond
could have an absurdly low weight, on the order of a hundredth of an
ounce, not including fuel. If this sounds fantastic to you, take a look
at what is already possible today:
This tiny block of transparent aerogel is supporting a brick
weighing
2.5 kg. The aerogel's density is 0.1 g/cm^3.
Anyway, the point of all this is simple: nanofactories need to be
extremely restricted in the products they can build, or there are going
to be big problems. The open source, anti-digital rights management,
P2P-generation needs to get this. Information may want to be free, but
if weapons designs are readily available and manufacturable in the
post-MNT world, there are going to be problems of the likes we've never
seen. To minimize the risk of danger, the safest option is to have all
product designs authenticated by a central authority. Yes, that scary
phrase, "central authority". This central authority needs to be capable
of determining which designs are safe, maintaining an extremely high
level of nanofactory security, and enforcing the law when people try to
circumvent it. The libertarian dream of minimalist government,
unfortunately, must be discarded.
When it comes to
managing magic, decentralized solutions simply
won't do. There needs to be a global standard and global regulations.
Rogue states won't do, either. One rogue nation could use MNT to
manufacture enough weapons to turn the capitals of any opposing nation,
no matter how large, into a series of smoking craters. This is a risk
we shouldn't be willing to take, and once the potential of MNT starts
to
sink in with higher-level government officials, they
won't.
Life extensionists: realize that the greatest risk to living longer is
not actually aging, which we will eventually defeat cleanly, but
existential risks of the type we frequently discuss, including
superintelligence and nanotech arms races. You can extend your expected
future life more by lowering the probability of these disasters than
through any other means.
