I understand there’s supposed to be a lot of potential for eentsy-teentsy robots that scrub the plaque out of your arteries or whatever – they’re already a staple of science fiction – but how are these robots to be powered? Is it possible to make an electric storage battery of relevant size?
They will be powered by hand waving, which also solves all the other nanotechnology problems.
More seriously, they will need to be powered chemically, but as you might have guessed from my first answer, I’m really skeptical that “nanobots” will ever exist in any useful form. I think the concept of tiny little machines is just an indication of how limited our imagination is - just think of what the Victorians thought the future would be like - huge steam-powered contraptions! And, what do we have?
iPhones.
we can technology that can power things from afar. Have you seen those cell phone mats you put your phone on to charge at night? We can charge devices wirelessly although it hasnt hit the market yet but the tech is there
But, is it possible to scale those remote-charging technologies to nanosize?
Well, the simplest approach is looking how natural nanobots are powered: ATP, for example.
In “A Deepness in the Sky” Vernor Vince describes powering microdot computers by pulsing a low power microwave every second or so - not enough power to fry you, but enough that it cn generate power on a tuned antenna.
This is the essence of it - ATPase is actually the molecular machine that synthesises STP, kinesin is another chemically-powered molecular machine that has been studied extensively.
Understanding how these complexes work is the key to synthesising ‘nanobots’. We’re miles away, of course, but we can synthesise simple motors that do meet the mechanical requirements of doing work. I’m familiar with the field in the chemistry area, where people try and build molecular machines to do particular tasks. The design and synthesis of these molecules is one thing, but a bigger challenge has been to understand the physics and statistical mechanics behind mechanical motion at the molecular level - it’s a lot different from just looking at how a motor works in every day life and trying to miniaturise the concepts.
This has largely been done, AFAIK, so the next few years should see some advances in application.
Yes, it’ll be something like ATP.
The major misconception is most people’s minds is that there’s a fundmental difference between “biochemistry” and “nanotechnology.” Nanobots can be described as little robots, but then so can ribosomes.
What we have to do is convince the freaking artists to start drawing nanobots as lumpy molecular complexes with active sites, not as metal-skinned machines with manipulator arms.
Oh, like self-winding watches!
More seriously, I agree. They’re generally talked about as if we could take a car with a high-powered PC installed, and magically shrink it down to the size of a virus, keeping the same reliability and controlability as a car. Except it’s a whole network of cars, precisely coordinated with each other.
I think dracoi is also on the right track. Except that when you start describing them that way, you realize that the word you’re looking for to describe a biologically active molecule is ‘drug’. Which doesn’t sound nearly as cool.
Bill? Why are flapping your arms so damn hard?
I caught teh monkey pox! I’m dieing here dude!
People with nanobots in them will drink an occasional glass of kerosene to keep them running.
There will be nanobots running around with windup keys keeping the rest going.
I think power is one of the main issues in nanotechnology. I suppose in the body, you might be able to tap into the body’s own energy sources. I think the nanotech might have a bit of trouble with remote RF power. On one of the huge differences between nanotechnology and macrotechnology is the surface to volume ratio. Charges and things like that build up and change their behavior very quickly.
The other really really big problem with nanotechnology is manufacture. I’ve seen plenty of seminars where they take a few nanotubes and connect them to make a device like a transistor radio. In order to make these things, they have to go into a layer of nanotubes and grab each nanotube and place it one at a time. The nanotube had to be picked for specific electronic properties as well, because they can’t yet separate them based on electronic properties (at least not very well).
Papers published in journals often have a pretty high bias towards looking more successful than they really are. When they show you a sample of perfectly ordered molecules, they are really showing you the best picture they could find out of hundreds.
At the moment, the most useful aspects of nanotechnology relate to bulk material properties. These are very interesting properties, and will lead to some pretty cool things. The large surface to volume ratio makes them potentially useful for computer memory. New replacements for ITO in transparent conductors are on the horizon.
The same could be said, of course, for early integrated circuit and core memory. Today we think nothing of a processor with multiple cores each running billions of clock cycles per second, or a USB drive the size of a tie clip that will store a library shelf of data. It will take time for the manufacturing technology to catch up with the basic operating possibilities, but it would be more surprising if manufacturing were a limitation than the basic problems with thermodynamics and electrostatics.
If by nanobots you mean super-miniaturized assembly line robots, then I’d agree. But the basic principles of operation for nano-scale technology already exists, and has for billions of years. It’s not that the principles are uncommonly sophisticated, it’s that we’re extraordinarily clumsy at manipulating it. “Production-level” nanomachines (capable of more than simple chemical reactivity) will almost certainly not just look like bacteria; they’re very likely to be derived from bacteria, redesigned to perform whatever tasks we intend, and running most likely off of ATP or some similar molecule derived therefrom.
Stranger
People used to think the sound barrier was unbreakable, so certainly the light barrier will be broken, right? Honestly, that sounds like what you are saying.
With integrated circuits it was just a matter of improving lithography. If you want to count microprocessors as nanotechnolgy, then yes, it’s here and now. If you are talking about nanotubes and other nanostructures that chemists have discovered then you need a technology that doesn’t exist. There is no manufacturing technique on the horizon. Don’t get me wrong, I think nanotechnology research is positively essential. There will be new technologies, but constructing a transistor radio by individually selecting nanotubes and carefully putting them together in a circuit with macroscopic leads is largely masterbatory. It’s about as useful as the guys that positioned atoms to say IBM. Anybody with an AFM can do it.
Not even close. The sound barrier was an engineering problem; the speed of light limit is a law of physics. We already had things that went past the speed of sound; bullets for example. The difficulty was in getting a plane to do that. And by the same token, we already have proof that nanomachines are possible; living creatures. We don’t have or know of anything that can pass the speed of light.
Basically, calling nanomachines impossible amounts to calling life impossible, which we know isn’t true.
No, that’s what you’re saying. And no, the development of modern microprocessors and RAM storage wasn’t just a matter of improving the state of the art of lithography. There were a number of technical innovations in VLSI design, IC manufacturing, solid state material development and quality, et cetera that led to a computer that you can carry in your pocket and communicate remotely. All of this was predicted, in crude fashion, by visionaries and science fiction authors who knew that it was not physically impossible although none were knowledgeable about the specific manufacturing technology that allows for this.
Similarly, Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson do not know how we will be able to build nano-machines in a production context, but the capabilities that they envision may be possible. Molecular mechanosynthesis–assembling molecules not by bulk chemical reactions but by the use of some assembly “mechanism” that functions directly on the molecular scale–is already performed in gene sequencing. Admittedly, the genome is a “pretty simple” molecule to synthesize, being essentially just a doubled chain with four bases connected by organophosphate and 2-deoxyribose, but the basic principles of assembling a DNA molecule are understood to the point that they can be routinely synthesized. Designing and synthesizing a complex protein is a far more difficult task, but there is nothing about it that is in contradiction of the physically possible, or indeed, vastly beyond conceivable technology, and it is a field in which as we become better at the basics at building complex molecules, we can build better tools to help us build more refined molecules. Eventually we’ll build molecules the same way the body makes proteins; by catalyzed translation from a molecular code sequence to a peptide sequence, which is then joined into a conformal structure.
Stranger
This is precisely my point. So it’s not really as extreme as the speed of light. It is more comparable to fusion power. There are many many technological feats that need to be overcome before we are close to nanobots. The fact that some jackass can envision what nanotechnology can possibly do is worthless. Everybody already knows that. It is only the how that matters, and the how isn’t anywhere on the table.
Your citing science fiction authors?
Eric Drexler did recommend Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age, and it seems that Stephenson read Drexler’s Nanosystems book too. Not everyone, however, agrees with Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology.
Yes, in particular, Richard Smalley, a guy that actually did nanotechnology research. I’ll take his opinion any day over, Drexler, a guy that made a bunch of really cool stuff up.