Mr. Flood's Party

THE NANOTECHNOLOGY AGENDA:

MOLECULAR MACHINES AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

IN THE 21st CENTURY

By Ed Merta

Health Sciences Center Library

University of New Mexico

emerta@salud.unm.edu

Note: the views in this paper are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of New Mexico or the UNM Health Sciences Center Libary

I. Things to Come: Technology in the 21st Century

It began long ago on the windswept plains of an Earth no one will see again. Sometime within the last 150,000 years, modern humans first evolved and technology as we know it arose shortly thereafter. The two events are inseparable. The earliest Homo sapiens were different than the apes who came before. Their large, sophisticated brains and their ability for conscious thought set them apart and made them our kin. Blood of our blood, flesh of our flesh. In their brains lurked the potential to comprehend the world around them to an unprecedented degree, discern its inner mechanisms, and manipulate nature to serve human ends. Our earliest ancestors, however strange their primitive existence may seem to us, nevertheless had minds built by natural selection to make technology.[1]

The environment they lived in forced them to develop that potential. The existence and progress of technology were, as a result, inevitable. Wind, sun, cold, and rain drove the earliest humans to start fires and build homes. The threat of starvation drove them to plant crops and tame the other animals. Fear of their own kind compelled them to make weapons. The pressure of their growing numbers herded them into cities. The flourishing of cities led to roads linking the urban centers together. The wealth accumulating in the cities and their trade spurred the growth of record keeping, literacy, and science. Science yielded new tools to understand and manipulate nature. These tools led to still more knowledge and more tools, in a spiral of technological progress leading ever upward, at an ever accelerating rate.[2]

This process has been unfolding for 150,000 years as an integral part of the human experience. In the last two centuries its pace has continued to quicken until today it seems impossible to follow. We can't help but ask: where will the advance of technology go from here?

Trying to answer that question invites ridicule. No one can really know what the future will bring. The flow of history is too vast, too mind-boggling in its complexity for anyone to claim they know for certain where it will end up. It's a storm-swept river as wide as the ocean and we humans are too caught up in its tumult to see where it's ultimately going. But if we can't precisely predict the totality of history's future course in all its details, we can at least try to sketch what a few of the details might look like if certain scenarios come to pass. We can't have certainty, but we can try to see possibilities. We can fashion small pictures for our minds to lock onto out of an inconceivably greater whole.[3]

We will spend the years ahead in the 21st century since the birth of Christianity. We know, in the most general sense, that technology will play a fundamental part in determining how this century will unfold. We know that certain kinds of technology seem likely to be of especially critical importance. Computing, robotics, and biotechnology have been among the favorite candidates for such a role.[4]

Recently another has emerged. It's called nanotechnology, and it envisions the building of tiny, molecule-sized machines able to manipulate matter at the atomic level. Nanotechnology is a field still in its infancy, probably years away from practical applications. But a fervent, increasingly influential community of researchers is trying not only to make it a technical reality but a force for social transformation as well. The leaders of the nanotechnology community believe their work will give humanity technological capabilities previously unimaginable - and those capabilities, they contend, can effectively put an end to all the worst forms of human suffering.

Until the future imagined by nanotechnologists actually exists, no one can know for certain whether they're right. But looking at the visions they hold can give us a glimpse of future possibilities. A sense, however imprecise, of the issues that will shape the twenty first century and what the lives of our children might be like.

II. Overview of Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology is a field of science and engineering whose ultimate aim is to build robots smaller than living cells with the ability to arrange individual atoms into any physically possible pattern. Put another way, the aim is total control of the structure of matter, rearranging it at will via molecule-sized machines to suit human purposes.[5]

To understand this goal, we must understand the extremely small scale at which nanotechnology would operate. Large-scale objects like human bodies are measured in meters. Humans and all other life on Earth are made of membrane-enclosed building blocks called cells. A typical human body has about 100 trillion cells. Cells are measured in units called nanometers (nm); one nanometer is equal to one billionth of a meter. A typical cell measures anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 nanometers in diameter. A virus - a sub-microscopic parasite that preys on cells - is typically 50 to 100 nanometers long. The building blocks of cells and viruses are molecules - tiny chemical structures that do biologically useful tasks for organisms. Examples include carbohydrates, nucleic acids, and proteins. These molecules vary widely in size, but a typical protein molecule might measure, say, five to twenty nanometers in size. Lay 100 million of them end to end and you'd equal the height of an average human being. Molecules, in turn, are made of atoms, which average about 0.1 nanometers in size.[6]

Nanomachines - the tiny robots that nanotechnology seeks to build - would measure anywhere from 200 to 5000 or so nanometers in size. Engineers would build them out of carbon atoms arranged so as to form diamond. These diamond nano-robots would be smaller than most living cells, able to enter such cells if their designers wished. They could be equipped with arms able to grasp, manipulate, and lock in place individual atoms. Nanomachines would, in effect, resemble extremely small unmanned submarines. In addition to their external arms,