Let me start by saying that I understand what nanotech is. I’ve read Engines of Creation and Unbounding the Future by Eric Drexler, I visit the Foresight and the Nanodot site several times a week. I can discuss it intelligently with your average layperson, but I’m not sure I believe it. When I hear that someone who has directly advised the president on science matters make claims that nanotechnology has the theoretical ability to extend life indefinitely, I start to wonder what the catch is. They have huge conferences at which scientist, politicians, and buisiness people all get together and talk straight-faced about things like terraforming Mars, and nanobots that kill cancer and aids and ebola and whatever other nasty may be in you. Don’t misunderstand me, seeing the year 3000 is on my list of things to do, but I never imagined that it may be possible.
What I want from all of you is an opinion. Are these people nuts? Are they dangling a carrot in front of us to get huge Govt. funding? If you read either of the above books, readable online in their entirety for free, you can’t help but start to understand how they can make these claims. I do want to believe, but my (Too Good To Be True - TGTBT) meter is going haywire. So either reasure me that I can go on believing, or tell me why not please.
I also took the time to skim through most of the 143 other Threads I found involving nanotech, none seemed to answer, or even address this question. If you know of one, I’d love to have a Cite.
I think there’s a lot of exaggeration involved, intentional or not. Frankly, I don’t see a near future where we will be able to make machines that are smart enough or safe enough to do what their proponents are talking about. I think we’ll see rudimentary nanobots at some time in our lifetimes, but they’ll be ‘dumb’. Maybe we’ll build tiny machines that can be injected in an engine block and polish the interior until their source of power runs out. But this idea of having them in our bloodstream seeking out potential clots and repairing cells seems to me to be so far away from our current ability that we don’t even know what society will look like when they are developed.
Scientific American tore Drexler a new one not long ago. Sensible thinkers point out, for instance, that the manipulative members of nanotechnology machines would have to be on the scale of atoms, and would be horribly, horribly clumsy. Richard Smalley’s critique is missing from the SciAm Website, but there’s a PDF here: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~smalleyg/rick’s%20publications/SA285-76.pdf
The problem I see here is this business of “believing” Mastema.
There are already ways to manipulate atoms, experiments at that level are being made right now.
The problem here, I think, is if the far out promises of nanotech; can they be real? It depends on the subject IMO.
Kidding aside: his criticism is mostly dealing with molecular auto-assembly, other ways to manufacture nano materials or components are here (and used by him and others); Nano-devices? Following non self-assembly methods I don’t see mayor problems.
My conclusion is to avoid the hype and concentrate only in the results; this is an emerging technology. However, do not dismiss the possibilities: As Ben Franklin put it: What good is a new born baby?
Nanotech works. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be here today. Case in point: Single-celled life. E. coli has been doing what some are poo-poohing for billions of years, and it will show up at the doubters’ funerals. We have more to learn from viruses and bacteria than we have to learn from the clockwork toys we’ve amused ourselves with for the past few eras.
The real question becomes this: Can we replicate what we see? Well, we’ve gone a good way into polymers through sheer blundering, even to the point of seqencing DNA. If we can get that far with a tool as blunt as chemistry, I think the future looks pretty bright.
I’m with Derleth on this one. Nanotech is already here in the sense that there are plenty of devices in nature that manipulate substances on a molecular level to achieve various goals.
It depends on what ‘nanotechnology’ you mean; if you mean the sort where you get what’s basically very sophisticated drugs or the means to manufacture very good materials, sure. If you mean the sort of thing common in some SF and often heard from the more vehement nanotechnology types, such as ‘drop a bucketful of this on Venus and have it terraformed in 5 years’ or ‘splash this bucket on the ground and have a space elevator in two weeks’, then no way. Nanotechnology follows the laws of physics, and various proposed nanotech ideas have problems with things like energy supply, heat dissipation, information coordination, and other bits of fundamental physics. Sure, we see that ‘nanotechnology’ works in our biology, but the fact that one thing that can be called nanotechnology functions doesn’t mean that everything anyone claims for nanotech will also work.
Probably the first advances into nanotechnology will be surfaces. 2-D is much is much easier to control than 3-D. One of my colleagues is looking into printing nanometre structures onto surfaces for such applications as electronics, optics, bioassembly of cells etc. IBM is looking at commercialising a very clever technique way of using polymers to control the size of magnetic particles onto HardDisks. However, we are still a long way from intelligent bacterial sized machines, but 40 years perhaps. One step at a time
Yes, bacteria and our own cells currently peform several of the more “unbelievable” claims of nanotechnology, such as repairing cellular damage and searching out hostile invaders. Which is why these things seem at least feasible, if not easily achievable. Nanocomputing and/or Quantum computing as well as nano-data storage are some of the more fantastic things that I expect to see in the next 10 or so years.
If you could eliminate harmful bacteria and viruses from our bodies, and repair damage at the cellular level indefinitely, even without the more miraculous regenerative abilities, what would be the average life span?
In what should probably be a separate question, would a life expectancy of 200 years necessarily be a good thing for humanity.
Keep in mind the cells in our body are alive. The release waste, consume energy which we (as a whole organism) provide, etc. A nano-bot (or nanite, or whatever they’re called :P) would have to somehow be incorperated into this system to function. This involves getting around autoimmune functions etc.
Well, the problem with human bodies, is that the DNA in our cells degrades over time. Once the degradation reaches such a point, the cells can no longer replicate themselves, and our cells die. So, in theory, if you can repair the DNA on a molecular level, you can live forever, granted you don’t get your brains blown out…
But, you see the general idea.
Nanotechnology holds everything that they promise and more. Expect to see nanites repairing our bodies in 50 years, maybe less.
I think the main problem right now with nanotechnology, is that we don’t have a reliable enough power source. Once we refine our sources of power, expect to see a huge leap in technology.
This is really an opinion poll. That said, yes if all those wonderful nanobots in our body could repair all the damaged DNA we might indeed live forever. But billions of years of evolution have not suceeded in preventing DNA from gradually degrading and why we think we will be have a technology to do that any time soon escapes me.
On the other hand, imagine someone predicting the state of aviation today 100 years ago. So your guess is as good as mine.
You are correct. I asked the question wrong, although I received great answers anyway. I should have asked for factual info regarding the why’s and whynots of Nanotech’s success or failure.
Opinions would have followed unasked for.
I suppose to correct this situation, I’ll ask a different question.
The only side of the nanotech story that I am familiar with is the side of people like Eric Drexler and Ralph Merkle. Every detractor that I have heard knock nanotech has used the potential for very bad things as the basis of their detraction. This argument can be expressed for nearly all new technology, more so in the case of very powerful techs like Nano. What are the REAL arguments against? I realize that there are still technical problems to be addressed such as the one Nametag brought up about the clumsyness of atomic manipulators, but these are discussed ad nauseum on the naonotech pages and it seems clear that a solution will be reached. So what will be the biggest stumbling block to the advent of full bore nanites including, but not limited to, medical nano-robots? i.e. What is the likelyhood of these things within our lifetimes? (Assume 50 years.)
I would assume from the reading I’ve done that simple nanites will come up around 2015. They won’t be able to do much. Ray Kurzweil hypothesized that all they would do is get pushed around our systems and if they saw something wrong they would start to yell. Then some type of machine would figure out what its yelling about and you’ll go to a hospital to get it fixed. By about 2050 we’ll have advanced ones that do the healing on their own and do lots of other neat things (mining, replication etc) However I would forsee a lot of nanite realated problems arising. Could you imagine nanite cancer? Nanites that keep replicating at incredible speeds and you end up with massive tumors in days. Normal cells could do nothing to stop them, and other nanites would be as effective as normals cells are to cancer cells. Radiation would probably not help either. Nanotech will never be completely perfect. While some diseases will become easily done away with the help of nanites, other more dangerous problems will come.
Well, the problem is that ‘nanites’ isn’t really well-defined, is it? According to an awful lot of nanotech proponents, life is nanotech, so we’ve had medical nanotech since the first vaccine at least. You really need to specify which flavor of nanites you’re talking about before the question makes much sense. It could be anywhere from ‘we’ve had it for years’ to ‘that violates several laws of physics’ depending on what exactly you’re looking for.
How long an individual piece of machinery lasts is not relevant if it’s really easy to make new ones. It’s really easy to make new E. coli bacteria (so easy you’re doing it right now, in fact). The ultimate goal of nanotech is to replicate that in a way humans can control.
I for one have invested heavily in a company working in bananatechnology, starting in 2008 with a less-slippery peel and culminating in 2024 of a banana that peels itself.
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