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SCHOLAR ISLAND |
Nano
"For those of you who’ve been living in a cave or are understandably overwhelmed by info over-load, nanotechnology is the inexpensive and complete control over the structure of matter, It’s the manipulation of matter, molecule by molecule. The advent of nanotechnology will result in the human ability to create limitless amounts of any substance consistent with the laws of the Universe."
Timothy Leary
Design For Dying
" As a co-founder of the Feynman Grand Prize in Nanotechnology, I believe nanotechnology will yield dramatic benefits to humankind on a scale we can scarcely imagine today. Molecular nanotechnology is coming and it will have dramatic impact…..
Marc Arnold NYT Tuesday July 6,1999
"The important point is this: Now that we can model, simulate and program biology just like we can a computer, it will be subject to the law of accelerating returns, a doubling of capacity in less than a year. These technologies will be more than a thousand times more capable in a decade, more than a million times more capable in two decades. We are now adding three months every year to human life expectancy, but....this will soon go into high gear. According to my models, 15 years from now we'll be adding more than a year each year to our remaining life expectancy. This is not a guarantee of living forever, but it does mean that the sands of time will start pouring in instead of only pouring out."
-Ray Kurzweil
"Nanotechnology could have more effect on our material existence than those last two great inventions in that domain-the replacement of sticks and stones by metals and cements and the harnessing of electricity.....Engines of Creation is the best attempt so far to prepare us to think of what we might become, should we persist in making new technologies."
Marvin Minsky
"The evangelists of nanotechnology envisage an "assembler" that could grab single atoms, shifting them around and assembling them one by one into machines with components no bigger than molecules. These techniques will allow computer processors to be a thousand times smaller, and information to be stored in memories a billion times more compact that the best we have today. Indeed, human brains may be augmented by implants of computers. Nanomachines could have as intricate a molecular structure as viruses and living cells, and display even more variety; they could carry out manufacturing tasks; they could crawl around inside our bodies observing and taking measurements, or even performing microsurgery.
Nanotechnology could extend Moore's law for up to thirty further years; by that time, computers would match the processing power of a human brain. And all human beings could by then be bathed in a cyberspace that allows instant communication with one another, not just in speech and vision but via elaborate virtual reality."
Martin Rees
Our Final Hour
"Scene is a battle field of the future. The troops await combat. Suddenly the 'enemy' appears from over the horizon in the form of a thin, rapidly advancing cloud. It consists of omnivorous locusts which with equal enthusiasm eat crops, gun metal, rubber, clothing and even human flesh.
Yet these locusts are not living creatures. They are self-replicating engines, incredibly tiny but vastly sophisticated. Such devices are seen as one of the man future applications of the growing science of 'nanotechnology'-building extremely small machines. Based on the Greek word 'nano', meaning dwarf, the word is a measurement that has come to mean a thousandth of a millionth a metre and promises to transform the world in the next century even more profoundly than computers, aircraft and satellites have transformed ours."
-Adrian Berry
Galileo and the Dolphins
"All hail the great 17th-century naotechnologist Assad Ullah!
Actually, he was a swordmaker, one in a long line of smiths who forged the legendary weapons known as Damascus sabers. They were strong yet flexible and supremely sharp, which European warriors first discovered, much to their misfortune, at the hands of Muslims during the Crusades.
The recipe for making Damascus steel was lost at the end of the 18th century, so no one knew the reasons for its remarkable qualities. But an analysis by 21st-century researchers in Germany provides a clue: Damascus sabers, they report in Nature, contain carbon nanotubes."
article: Antique Nanotubes in OBSERVATORY by Henry Fountain in New York Times
"Manufacturing using molecular nanotechnology fabrication will also be far more energy efficient than contemporary manufacturing, which moves bulk materials from place to place in a relatively wasteful manner. Manufacturing today also devotes enormous energy resources to producing basic materials, such as steel. A typical nanofactory will be a tabletop device that can produce products ranging from computers to clothing. Larger products (such as vehicles, homes, and even additional nanofactories) will be produced as modular subsystems that larger robots can then assemble. Waste heat, which accounts for the primary energy requirement for nanomanufacturing, will be captured and recycled.
The energy requirements for nanofactories are negligible. Drexler estimates that molecular manufacturing will be an energy generator rather than an energy consumer, According to Drexler, "A molecular manufacturing process can be driven by the chemical energy content of the feedstock materials, producing electrical energy as a by-product (if only to reduce the heat dissipation burden).....Using typical organic feedstock, and assuming oxidation of surplus hydrogen, reasonably efficient molecular manufacturing processes are net energy producers."
Ray Kurzweil
The Singularity is Near
"Tough omnivorous (synthetic) "bacteria" could out compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the atmosphere to dust in a matter of days."
-Eric Drrexler "Foresight Institute to promote the benign uses of nanotechnology"
"Certainly, the growing seed is gathering nourishment from its environment, but the process is no mere sticking together of the nutritive elements, for it absorbs and transforms them, and one sees nothing like this in the manufacture of an electric motor or computer."
-Alan Watts
JERUSALEM (AP)-Israeli scientists have inscribed the entire Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible onto a space less that half the size of a grain of sugar
The nanotechnology experts at the Technion Institute in Haifa say the book was etched on a surface that measures less that 0.01 square inch.
They chose the Jewish Bible to highlight how vast quantities of information can be stored on minimum amounts of space.
"It took us about an hour to etch the 300,000 words of the Bible onto a tiny silicon surface
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Book: "Our Molecular Future: How Nanotechnology, Robotics, Genetics, and Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Our World." by Douglas Mulhall
Book: "Nanocosm: The Big Change That's Coming from the Very Small" by William Illsey Atkinson
Book: "Nanoarchitecture: A New Species of Architecture" by John M. Johansend
Book: "No Small Matter: Science on the nanoscale" by Felice c. Frankel & George m. Whitesides
See Article: Wired Mag Oct 2004 "The Incredible Shrinking Man" by Ed Regis about K. Eric Drexler
See Article: Plenty Mag June/July 2006 "Weird Science: How nanotechnology could solve a host of eco-problems" by Amy Cortese
"Toward a Tele-Nanorobotic Manipulation System with Atomic Scale Force Feedback and Motion Resolution" R.L. Hollis, S. Salcudean and D.W. Abraham