Nanotech Assembly One Step Closer 44
perrin5 writes "according to Science Daily researchers at University at Buffalo have managed to assemble 3D structures of carbon,silicon, and latex by using "non uniform AC electric fields" as the shaping impetus. I've never really understood exactly what purpose nano-machines were going to fufill, especially in their early stages. Any one care to fill me in?"
Nanotech (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, imagine if you never had to take a shower or bath again, becuase there were tiny little robots that went over you in your sleep, grabbed all the dirt in their tiny robot claws, and threw it in a tiny robot garbage can.
Tim
Re:Nanotech (Score:5, Funny)
fecal matter which formed the crusties in the corner of my eye.
(Never let a Kurby salesman into your home, becuase you
learn way too much about what you sleep in)
Re:Nanotech (Score:2)
Re:Nanotech (Score:3, Insightful)
[insert obvious RMS reference here]
Don't you mean "Insert obvious Bill Joy [wired.com] reference here"? Anyone who wishes to discuss nanotech has to take into account this essay. I'm not completely convinced, but it's a chilling cautionary exposition. Nanotech can be our salvation or our doom. Pessimist that I am, I'm expecting the latter but hoping for the former.
Re:Nanotech (Score:2, Insightful)
You're joking right?
It will take so long to get nanotech assemblers to work and they are likely to be so fragile and unstable that when they break they'll probably simply NOT work anymore. I swearall this doom and gloom or utopian talk about nano tech is making me sick. Nanotech is still tech. Nanotech will not destroy humanity.
You expect too friggin' much.
Re:Nanotech (Score:2)
Re:Nanotech (Score:2, Interesting)
hopey
Re:Nanotech (Score:2)
have things changed in frace since then ?
Trust slashdot (Score:1)
Personally I like taking a shower in the morning.
What can they do? (Score:5, Interesting)
* Assembly of computer chips, atom by atom.
* Reconfigurable computing -- use the silicon to its optimum.
If we can use nanoassemblers to create macro-sized objects, such as Stephenson's feed/seed does, then each item that comes out of the assembler (maybe in your own home, using the master template) will be absolutely identical to the others; no manufacturing errors, no worrying about tolerances, because an atom is an atom.
For that matter, if items can be made quickly enough, there won't be any assembly lines at all; instead, items will be manufactured as needed. No inventories (except of raw materials)...
An economy based on nanotech would be completely different from the one we have now, and IMO mostly for the better; but the transition is going to be murder...
Re:What can they do? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hopefully, as they seem to be doing with P2P, the corporations will fail because of their lack of understanding and the distributed, hard-to-kill nature of their enemy. It will depend on whether or not you can easily get an assembler in your home and an appropriate source of materials. If you can, it's all over. If worse comes to worse, and they try and cut off the flow of materials, you might have to resort to chucking your computer into the assembler for it to be reduced to component silicon atoms and then remade, more powerful than before.
Tim
Re:What can they do? (Score:5, Informative)
There was a new technology, called "seed" technology, where an independent bunch of nanos would not only act as a factory, but would also absorb raw materials by themselves. The powers that be were quite unhappy with their loss of control over nanotech, and were actively trying to suppress the new paradigm.
Re: Transition is going to be murder... (Score:2)
There would be no more assembly-line jobs, and intellectual property would become a real bitch, if everyone has the capability of copying the latest N'Sync album atom by atom.
Maybe manufacturing jobs would be replaced with jobs fetching and purifying the raw materials.
Boot-Strapping... (Score:4, Interesting)
Build a small nano-bot sophisticated enough to help you construct v0.000000002 of the bot, which you the use to build v0.000000003, and so on until the bots become advanced enough to perform some real work.
It has many parallels to computing and construction of new processors: build a processor, and use it's power to help you build a bigger better one.
Thats my take on it anyway.
R
For example: (Score:3, Interesting)
In response to all of the smart asses wondering how this could be very useful: Ask someone at Micron or Intel perhaps. Thin layer deposition is cool, but difficult, expensive, and error prone. Transistors and capacitors are relatively simple devices when you get right down to it.
Of course, there's a lot of work necessary before this sort of thing could be done. It sounds like it's only working right now on some semiconducting materials. The article states: "[it] can be used to direct and manipulate almost any particle...whether the particle has a net charge or not...", but then "Alexandridis is developing models to predict how various particles, and combination of particles, will behave under the influence of different electrical fields". Further, the article notes that the structures only stay together while the electric field is maintained. When it is removed, the structures fall apart. They're, uh, working on that small problem. Once both of those problems are solved, there's the issue of doing the nano-construction repeatedly and on a massive scale. Lots of science and engineering left to that.
Now, medical purposes I don't buy quite so much myself. Non-invasive surgeries, including threading a thin wire into your brain to eliminate a potential aneurism and breaking up galstones with a laser, already make scary things into outpatient procedures without the need for this insane level of miniaturization. Protein construction for drug synthesis might be viable, if it could be done more reliably through nano-construction than the "splice genes into random simple bacteria until one works" method.
Re:For example: (Score:2)
Of course, one of the great things about nanotech (pointed out by others) is that once you do it once you can do it again, via mechanical means. It doesn't matter how you make the nanoscale manipulators the first time, what matters is using them to make the wide range of manipulators you need to manipulate ANYTHING, at which point you don't ever have to figure that bootstrapping part out again.
As for medical purposes, you have to think beyond just doing what we do now on a smaller scale. You'll never HAVE organ failure. Your organs will of course be allowed to carry out their jobs as normal but damage will be helped along when it cannot repair itself. Severed blood vessels will repair themselves. The only thing that will kill you (hopefully) is severe shock due to trama, or being diced up enough :) Also consider being able to change almost anything with gene therapy using nanotech to deliver stem cells. Eventually when we use it to decipher more of how the body works we won't need stem cells, we'll be able to do the work with nanomachines, but this is a useful interim step.
Of course this is all speculative, there's an awful lot in between here and there, but it should all be solvable. People are stubborn. :)
Practicality (Score:1)
This is exactly the kind of stary-eyed, far-fetched sort of thing that is too many decades off to be realistic and is exactly why I was saying I saw few medical uses in the near future. Nano-machines complicated enough to do anything without outside assistance, especially on that scale are at least 20 if not 50 years away. Aside from other issues, there is the matter of the sheer amount of power one of those would require. That's a lot of energy density with something so small. Wait, you want it powered by the energy of muscle contractions? More likely such a machine would be fried by those very potential differences.
And the same issues applies to the assumption of some kind of bootstrapping process. Creating nano-machines using nano-machines is a pipe dream. A very appealing imagery, true, but it comes across the same problems as above. You're looking to pack an incredible amount of sophistication into something very small. The energy it would need to control in order to make smaller items may well be enough to break the very bonds holding it together! To speak nothing of the liklihood of its breaking apart due to the heat of the energy necessary to drive such a complicated process. Think your Athlon gets a fair amount of heat density?
Nice dreams, but not practical.
Ask me again in 1000 years... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nanotechnology is a long term investment. Its for people who expect to be around, and have to live with the consequences of their present day actions.
But if you absolutely need an answer on what initial value it's going to have, here's one for you: hydroxyapatite.
Otherwise known as rebuilding your tooth enamel an atom at a time, following tooth decay, instea of putting in these big metal wedges which cause them to crack and which leak mercury, or grinding them down to little nubs and capping them with steel and porcelin.
It's amazing how many new technologies get their start at dentists offices... like, oh, say, anesthetics.
-- Terry
Re:Ask me again in 1000 years... (Score:1)
for capping teeth for like, 15 years. Now
we use this cool polymer stuff that cures when
exposed to light. It looks a feels mostly like
enamel.
Book Review (Score:3, Insightful)
It was originally written for a rigorously nontechnical audience and I decided, what the hell, paste it in here with no modifications for the dashslot crew.
Apologies if you think it overly long or drifts off topic, or just sucks in general.
Should nanotech really catch fire and turn out to be somehow actually workable, the LONG term implications are weird, to say the least.
Potentially very creepy stuff.
BOOK REVIEW: Nano, Ed Regis, Little Brown & Co., 1995
There's a monster living under the bed. And I've got the proof. It's called Nano, the emerging science of nanotechnology: remaking the world - molecule by molecule. And it concerns itself with exactly that.
It's a scary motherfucker.
Scary as hell, in fact.
Ed regis takes us on a guided tour of hell. And it's one of those extra creepy hells that you'd find in an old Twilight Zone episode. One where all the damned had fervently hoped, wished, and dreamed for exactly what they wound up with.
My guess is that this fucker is coming and there's not a thing in the world any of us can do to stop it.
Our tour of the coming nightmare is told somewhat as a biographical sketch of a certain K. Eric Drexler. It follows him around from the time when he first really glommed on to the realization that this incredibly outre shit just might work (read: there's really nothing to stop it) down to the near present, wherein he shouts of riches and evils beyond the ken of imagination to a world filled with people who are mostly deaf. Like one of those unpleasant recurring dreams you have. Like hell.
Along the way, ER takes time to explain the scenery in a way that allows us to more completely understand the chilling implications of it all.
I'm sure that you are a lot like me. That is, you probably know more about the lyrics to Dead Kennedy's music than you know about goofy shit like molecular bonding, enzymatic reactions, and other wooly boogers of similar esoteric boredom inducement. ER, bless his heart, explains crap like this only when it's really necessary and in a style that could mislead you into thinking shit like this might actually be fun to muck around with.
No small achievement, that.
After finishing this pecker, I feel like I actually know what's going on.
I'd rather not.
It's brutal.
Allow me to digress for a bit, if you please. Years ago, when it finally dawned on me as to the full ramifications of genetic engineering, I was seized by a vision most bizarre that I occasionally would twit my son with. The "Steak Tree". Which is exactly what it is. A tree upon which would grow delicious sirloins, rib eyes, or whatever you wanted. With real hemoglobin, cholesterol, muscle tissue, the works. Anything producible by our good friend, DNA. Anything. And all that that implies.
Turns out that I was a piker.
By quite a bit, too.
Drexler envisions a "meat machine".
I quote: "The machine might be about the size and shape of a microwave oven, for example, and it would work the way a microwave oven did, too, more or less. You'd open the door, shovel in a quantity of grass clippings or tree leaves or old bicycle tires or whatever, and then you'd close the door, fiddle with the controls, and sit back to await results. Two hours later, out rolled a wad of fresh beef."
Unlike my "tree", Drexler's "machine" isn't limited to things that ultimately come from DNA. Artifacts produced via nanotechnology are limited only to what the laws of physics impose on them. If you've ever peeked at a physics text or maybe read The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, you'll immediately realize that the restrictions on Drexler's "meat machine" are hideously loose and permissive.
It's all allowed. Manufactured items, diamonds for free, living/nonliving hybrids, duplicates of yourself complete with the fucking thoughts preprogrammed into you head, horrible new virus things that aren't really viruses but are instead maybe little mechanical sherman tank doodads no bigger than a pneumococci that are programmed to maybe place nasties like thallium atoms in very specific locales, reproducible people that not only can't be killed (they'll just make more of themselves) but that could conceivably self replicate and take over the whole fucking world. Half man half cyclotron crosses....all of it. And a whole lot more.
Disposable humans.
Disposable SELVES for fucking sakes.
All dwelling in a world where the business of producing goods and services via the efforts of people or "traditional" manufacturing processes has been abolished.
Throw some crap into the box, stand back a while, and pull out...whatever the hell you can imagine.
Including more boxes. It's endless.
Where do humans fit in a world like that?
Yes yes, I know I know, you've about by now decided that I've lost my fucking mind. Can't really blame you. In truth, I hope I have lost my mind. Along with K. Eric Drexler, Ed Regis, and an ever growing list of others.
Yes indeed. Here's to hoping we've all lost our minds.
Don't forget chemicals, drugs and composites (Score:3, Insightful)
And I can't wait until we can manipulate atomic strucutres using the strong and weak forces directly, instead of these large, clumsy electrical fields. Geez, it's like doing brain surgery wearing oven mitts.
Re:Don't forget chemicals, drugs and composites (Score:1)
Politics/economics, not technology (Score:4, Informative)
Obviously "The Diamond Age" has been pointed out as one possible future. Rather an odd one, as it has both dystopic and Utopia features to it. Usually literature focuses more on one or the other.
Joe Haldeman brought out another possibility in "The Forever Peace" where he invoked similar capabilities to The Diamond Age, but with a completely different model of control. In The Diamond Age, nanotech construction was available to anyone at a market price. In The Forever Peace, the US government managed to convince everyone that nanotech was inherently dangerous, and ran a small number of NanoForges on a very limited basis. At least public use was very limited.
Greg Bear's use of nanotech in Queen of Angels, Slant, and Moving Mars is somewhere between, but probably closer to Haldeman than Stephenson.
I also just finished A Deepness In the Sky by Verner Vinge, which skirted nanotech, and brings up an interesting contrast.
Briefly, nanotech in science fiction takes on two forms, replicators and itsy-bitsy machines. The Diamond Age had both models. Greg Bear used mostly replication in Queen of Angels and Slant, with itsy-bitsy machines in Moving Mars. Haldeman focused on replication.
Obviously replication becomes an interesting issue framing today's copyright debates. Itsy-bitsy machines are interesting in the context of today's security/privacy debates, since the most basic use seems to be surveillance.
Replication was also touched on much earlier, in a story (name forgotten) where aliens give us a replicator. Of course first you replicate the replicator, then watch the economy break down as goods become free. Some even wonder if giving us the replicator was a prelude to an invasion because of the economic effects. Then someone hits on the idea of Originals, and the economy is saved! Copyright triumphs, effectively.
Fortunately we're a long way from any of these concerns. In the meantime, I hope for some moderately itsy-bitsy machines, most notably the pill camera as I approach 50.
has not solved the scarcity problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Take a look at what's underlying the whole copyright debate, and you'll see that the real end product is scarcity, itself. It's ironic, in that originally the publishers' role was to make media less scarce. In the process of spreading knowledge and arts, they became choke-points. As technology threatens to make their distribution role obsolete, they seek to strengthen their choke-point role. In other words, their product is scarcity. If it's not scarce, it doesn't make money.
If/when nanotech ever gives us replication technology, expect to see the same kind of response out of the classical manufacturing sector.
Perhaps in our fight against copyright abuse, we should also be examining scarcity, itself. When scarcity truly exists, it appears to create an economy. Is 'created scarcity' a 20th century invention, or what is its historical role? I guess England created a manufacturing scarcity in the Colonies to give themselves a market for manufactured goods, kind of the essence of "The Company Store".
Scary Sci-Fi about Nano (Score:1)
Basically, years before the novel begins, a nanobot that turn organic material into more of itself using only radiant heat for fuel gets loose and "blooms" until the entire earth is consumed by it. Mankind retreats to the outer solar system where it can defend wih cold the now highly develped "Technogenic Life Forms" that inhabit the inner region.
It's a pretty fun and exciting book that I highly recommend. It's also a good companion to Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science," as it sees the potential for nanobots to evolve in the way of cellular automata.
Engines of Creation (Score:1)
This book is a classic reference to nanotechnology and discusses some of the more interesting applications, consecuences, etc.
Re:In order for nanomachine to create ne thing use (Score:1)
Re:In order for nanomachine to create ne thing use (Score:1)
Hmmmm... (Score:1)
Finally, a condom Howard Stern can use.
Ahem.