Nanotech Scenario Series
Results of Our Ongoing Research
These pages, marked with
GREEN headings, are published for
comment and criticism. These
are not our final findings; some of these opinions will probably change.
LOG OF UPDATES
CRN Research: Overview of Current Findings
Benefits of Molecular Manufacturing
Molecular manufacturing (MM) can solve many
of the world's current problems. For example, water shortage is a serious and growing problem. Most
water is used for industry and agriculture; both of these requirements would be
greatly reduced by products made by molecular manufacturing. Infectious disease
is a continuing scourge in many parts of the world. Simple products like pipes,
filters, and mosquito nets can greatly reduce this problem. Information and
communication are valuable, but lacking in many places. Computers and display
devices would become stunningly cheap. Electrical power is still not available
in many areas. The efficient, cheap building of light, strong structures,
electrical equipment, and power storage devices would allow the use of solar
thermal power as a primary and abundant energy source. Environmental degradation
is a serious problem worldwide. High-tech products can allow people to live with
much less environmental impact. Many areas of the world cannot rapidly
bootstrap a 20th century manufacturing infrastructure. Molecular manufacturing
technology can be self-contained and clean; a single packing crate or suitcase could contain all
equipment required for a village-scale industrial revolution. Finally, MM will
provide cheap and advanced equipment for medical research and health care,
making improved medicine widely available. Much social unrest
can be traced directly to material poverty, ill health, and ignorance. MM
can contribute to great reductions in all of these problems, and in the
associated human suffering.
|Advanced nanotech can solve
many human problems.
||Technology is not a panacea. However, it can be
extremely useful in solving many kinds of problems. Improved housing and
plumbing will increase health. More efficient agriculture and industry save
water, land, materials, and labor, and reduce pollution. Access to
information, education, and communication provides many opportunities for
self improvement, economic efficiency, and participatory government. Cheap,
reliable power is vital for the use of other technologies and provides many
conveniences. Today, technology relies on distributed manufacturing, which
requires many specialized materials and machines and highly trained labor. It is a difficult and slow process to develop an adequate technology base in
an impoverished area. However, molecular manufacturing does not require
skilled labor or a large supporting infrastructure; a single
personal nanofactory (PN)
with a single chemical supply and power supply can produce a wide range of
useful, reliable products, including copies of itself to double the
manufacturing infrastructure in hours, if desired. Thus PNs, and
many of their products, are "appropriate technology" for almost any setting.
|Many diverse problems are
related to water.
||A few basic problems create vast amounts of suffering and
tragedy. According to a World Bank
document, water is a major concern of the U.N. Almost half the world's
population lacks access to basic sanitation, and almost 1.5 billion have no
access to clean water. Of the water used in the world, 67% is used for
agriculture, and another 19% for industry. Residential use accounts for
less than 9%. Much industry can be directly replaced by molecular
manufacturing. Agriculture can be moved into greenhouses. Residential
water can be treated and recycled. Adoption of these steps could reduce
water consumption by at least 50%, and probably 90%. Water-related diseases
kill thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of children each day. This is entirely preventable with basic technology, cheap to manufacture—if
the factories are cheap and portable. MNT can provide similar opportunities
in many other areas.
||Much water today is wasted because it is almost but not
entirely pure. Simple, reliable mechanical and electrical treatment
technologies can recover brackish or tainted water for agricultural or even
domestic use. These technologies require only initial manufacturing and a
modest power supply. Physical filters with
nanometer-scale pores can remove
100% of bacteria, viruses, and even prions. An electrical separation
technology that attracts ions to supercapacitor plates can remove salts and
heavy metals. The ability to recycle water from any source for any use
can save huge amounts of water, and allow the use of presently unusable
water resources. It can also eliminate downstream pollution; a
completely effective water filter also permits the generation of quite
"dirty" waste streams from agricultural and industrial operations. As
long as the waste is contained, it can be filtered, concentrated, and
perhaps even purified and used profitably. As with anything built by
molecular nanotechnology, initial manufacturing costs for a water treatment
system would be extremely low. Power will be cheap (see below). Well-structured filter materials and smaller actuators will allow even the
smallest filter elements to be self-monitoring and self-cleaning. Self-contained, small, completely automated filter units can be integrated
in systems scalable over a wide range.
|Cheap greenhouses can save
water, land, and food.
||Moving agriculture into greenhouses can recover most of
the water used, by dehumidifying the exhaust air and treating and re-using
runoff. Additionally, greenhouse agriculture requires less labor and far
less land area than open-field agriculture, and provides greater
independence from weather conditions including seasonal variations and
droughts. Greenhouses, with or without thermal insulation, would be
extremely cheap to build with nanotechnology. A large-scale move to
greenhouse agriculture would reduce water use, land use, and weather-related
Nanotech makes solar energy
||The main source of power today
is the burning of carbon-containing fuels. This is generally inefficient,
frequently non-renewable, and dumps carbon dioxide and other waste products
(including radioactive substances from coal) into the atmosphere. Solar
energy would be feasible in most areas of the globe if manufacturing and
land were sufficiently cheap and energy storage were sufficiently effective.
Solar electricity generation depends on either photovoltaic conversion, or
concentrating direct sunlight. The former works, although with reduced
efficiency, on cloudy days; the latter can be accomplished without
semiconductors. In either case, not much material is required, and
mechanical designs can be made simple and fairly easy to maintain.
Sun-tracking designs can benefit from cheap computers and compact actuators.
Energy can be stored efficiently for several days in relatively large
flywheels built of thin diamond and weighted with water. Smaller energy
storage systems can be built with diamond springs, providing a power density
similar to chemical fuel storage and much higher than today's batteries.
Water electrolysis and recombination provide scalable, storable,
transportable energy. However, there is some cost in efficiency and in
complexity of technology to deal safely with large-scale hydrogen storage or
||Solar solutions can be
implemented on an individual, village, or national scale. The energy of
direct sunlight is approximately 1 kW per square meter. Dividing that by 10
to account for nighttime, cloudy days, and system inefficiencies,
present-day American power demands (about 10 kW per person) would require
about 100 square meters of collector surface per person. Multiplying this
figure by a population of 325 million (estimated by the US Census Bureau for
2020) yields a requirement for approximately 12,500 square miles of area to
be covered with solar collectors. This represents 0.35% of total US land
surface area. Much of this could be implemented on rooftops, and conceivably
even on road surfaces.
|Living spaces can be greatly
||A person's living space has a significant effect on their
quality of life. The ability to exclude insects will greatly reduce certain
diseases. Thermal insulation can increase comfort and often reduce energy
consumption. Water and sewage piping and fixtures increase sanitation and
decrease disease. House styles are as varied as cultures, and living spaces
cannot and should not be standardized worldwide. However, building supplies
and home systems (e.g. power, plumbing) require less diversity, and useful
components may be built from predesigned plans. In many areas of the world,
something as simple as a water filter or a mosquito net can save many
lives. Such small, simple products would cost almost nothing to produce. In areas that already use rectilinear apartment construction, including most
inner cities, double-layer, vacuum-insulated wall panels can greatly
decrease noise transmission between adjacent living spaces as well as
providing excellent thermal insulation. Living space reform cannot be
approached as a single problem with an easy solution, but the worst problems
can easily be addressed piecemeal.
|Computers will be cheap
enough for everyone.
||Molecular manufacturing can create computer logic gates a
few nanometers on a side, and efficient enough to be stacked in 3D. An
entire supercomputer can fit into a cubic
millimeter, and cost a small
fraction of a cent. With actuators smaller than a bacterium, a thin,
high-resolution computer display will be easy (and cheap) to build. With
GHz mechanical frequencies, a mostly-mechanical device can sense and produce
radio waves. Thus computation, communication, and display are all feasible
with pure diamondoid technology. Computers, PDAs, and cell phones can be
cheap enough for even the poorest people on earth to own one, and contain
more than enough processing capability for a voice interface for illiterate
people. Distributed networking hardware can likewise be very cheap, and
distributed networking software, though not trivial, is already being
developed. The whole world could get "wired" within a year.
|Nanotech can help the
||Environmental degradation is a serious problem with many
sources and causes. One of the biggest causes is farming. Greenhouses can
greatly reduce water use, land use, runoff, and topsoil loss. Mining is
another serious problem. When most structure and function can be built out
of carbon and hydrogen, there will be far less use for minerals, and mining
operations can be mostly shut down. Manufacturing technologies that pollute
can also be scaled back. In general, improved technology allows operations
that pollute to be more compact and contained, and cheap manufacturing
allows improvements to be deployed rapidly at low cost. Storable solar
energy will reduce ash, soot, hydrocarbon, NOx, and CO2
emissions, as well as oil spills. In most cases, there will be strong
economic incentives to adopt newer, more efficient technologies as rapidly
as possible. Even in areas that currently do not have a technological
infrastructure, self-contained molecular manufacturing will allow the rapid
deployment of environment-friendly technology.
Improved medicine can be widely available.
||Molecular manufacturing will
impact the practice of medicine in many ways. Medicine is highly complex, so
it will take some time for the full benefits to be achieved, but many
benefits will occur almost immediately. The tools of medicine will become
cheaper and more powerful. Research and diagnosis will be far more
efficient, allowing rapid response to new diseases, including engineered
diseases. Small, cheap, numerous sensors, computers, and other implantable
devices may allow continuous health monitoring and semi-automated treatment.
Several new kinds of treatment will become possible. As the practice of
medicine becomes cheaper and less uncertain, it can become available to more
|Removing causes of distress
may reduce social unrest.
||Much social unrest can be
traced directly to material poverty, ill health, and ignorance. Molecular
manufacturing can eliminate material poverty—at least by today's standards;
post-MM standards may be considerably higher. Products of molecular
manufacturing can greatly improve health by eliminating conditions that
cause disease, including poor sanitation, insects, and malnutrition.
Widespread availability of computers and communication devices can provide
exposure to other cultures and diverse points of view, and create an
understanding of a broader social context in which to evaluate actions and
beliefs. (Unfortunately, mass communication also gives demagogues a wider
audience, which may undo some of this benefit.) MM certainly will not cure or prevent social unrest, but it will
remove many tangible causes of distress.
DEVIL'S ADVOCATE —
Submit your criticism, please!
So you're going to give away all this technology for
free? What are you, communists?
No. We've thought hard about how to preserve intellectual
property rights and the capitalist system, while providing basic lifesaving
benefits to people who can't afford to purchase them. See
A Solution that Benefits Everyone for details.
What about governments that want to keep their people
This is a clear violation of human rights. CRN hopes that
blatantly abusive governments would quickly be replaced in a post-MM world.
World action on this issue has often been inadequate, but the benefits of MM
should bring the issue into clearer focus, increasing both the desire and the
ability to correct large-scale human rights violations, including deliberate
Next Page: Medical
Benefits of Molecular Manufacturing
Products of Molecular
Overview of Current Findings