A technology of tiny things; nanotechnics and civilization

A TECHNOLOGY OF TINY THINGS Nanotechnics and Civilization

WE ALL COPY one another's successes and try new things. As peopleseeking wealth, health, and power we have come up with better medicines, missiles, seeds, socks, and video games. To create these we invent. Indeed our most powerful invention was the method of invention.

Yet we cannot "uninvent" this meta-technique short of smashing ourcivilization. Thus in our diverse and competitive world, our technological inventions evolve toward the limits of the possible. So to outline our future, we must outline the possible.

Whatever is, is obviously possible. Life is. Thereforethat demonstrates the possibility of molecular machines able to build other molecular machines--the essence of both life and a new method called nanotechnology ("nano" meaning billionth, because it uses parts measured in billionths of a meter).

Whatever obeys natural law is also possible. Sciencenow understands the laws of ordinary matter and energy well enough for most engineering purposes. Nanotechnology will enable us to build new kinds of things. Physical laws let us calculate what some of those things will be able to do.

The basic idea of nanotechnology is straightforward. Welive in bodies made of atoms on a planet made of atoms, and how those atoms are arranged makes all the difference. Atoms are objects. They have size, shape, mass, and strength. A hammer is a large collection of atoms; a molecule is a small collection. both are held together with the same forces. Molecular machines are simply machines made of molecular-scale parts having carefully arranged atoms.

Chemical reactions happen when two reactivemolecules bump together in the right orientation, making atoms rearrange to form new molecules. Nanotechnology assemblers will be molecular machines that grab reactive molecules and bring them together in a controlled way, building up a complex structure a few atoms at a time.

Today, genetic engineers reprogram the molecularmachinery of living cells to make new molecules. They work at the scale of proteins--thousands of atoms. Eventually, nanotechnologists will build new, smaller machinery, and program it to make almost any pattern of atoms a designer might specify, atom by atom. Imagine an industrial robot arm, directed by a computer. It can build complex things by putting parts together, one at a time. To picture an nanoassembler, imagine that the arm is made of the smallest possible parts, each containing a couple to several thousand atoms. This makes it less than a millionth the size of the industrial arm (and lets it make motions in a millionth the time). This arm also builds complex things by putting parts together, one at a time, but the parts are reactive molecules and each assembly step is a chemical reaction.

The areas closest to nanotechnology today aremicroelectronics and biotechnology. Microelectronic engineers can design complex circuits, even computers on a chip, but they cannot arrange atoms as they please. As a result, microcomputers are billions of times bulkier than the nanocomputers of the future. Biotechnologists can use the molecular machinery of life to build things atom by atom, but they can't (yet) design new molecular machines. They have only begun to learn the art of protein engineering.

With assemblers, molecular engineering willbecome easy, almost like building with Tinkertoys. Assemblers will be able to add carbon atoms to an object, a few at a time, building up a piece of diamond-fiber composite. Dozens of times stronger than ordinary metals, this material could be used to make almost anything -- a car, a dome, a rocket -- far stronger and lighter than anything we can build today. How would you cut and shape this material to make something? In general, you wouldn't. Just as a tree has no need to carve wood, so assembler-based production systems would have no need to carve their products: they would make them true to form in the first place, atomically perfect.

Life proves that systems of molecular machinescan replicate themselves. One bacterium can copy itself in about twenty minutes, giving rise to many tons of duplicates in a few days. Other replicating molecular machines form complex patterns, such as crabgrass, redwood trees, blue whales, and human brains. Molecular machines have given Earth coral reefs, an oxygen atmosphere, and a biosphere.

An just as the self-replicating molecular machineryof a seed can make a tree, so a properly programmed replicating assembler will be able to make a house, a computer, or a spaceship. This has implications for the cost of things: A tree uses sunlight and common materials to build itself, and a tree costs almost nothing to make -- it takes no human effort, only room and time. With assembler-based technology, anything can be as inexpensive (pound for pound) as firewood, because it can be produced in essentially the same way, by growing it. (No, this analogy doesn't mean replacing forests!)

There is no new science in nanotechnology, onlynew engineering. The possibility of nanotechnology was implicit in the science known over 30 years ago, though no one saw it then. During the 1940s and 1950s, biochemistry revealed more and more of the molecular machinery of the cell. In 1959, physicist Richard Feynman touched on a similar idea in a talk: he spoke of using small machines to build smaller machines (and these to build smaller machines, and so on). He suggested that the smallest machines would be able to "put atoms down where a chemist says" to make a "chemical substance." But Feynman didn't explain how these machines were to work, and said they "will really be useless," because chemists will be able to make whatever they want without them. Decades passed with little followup.

Molecular biology forged ahead, piling up evermore impressive examples of molecular machinery in viruses and cells. While I was studying at MIT in the winter of 1976, it became clear to me that advances in biology and chemistry would make possible what we now call assemblers. The consequences seemed large, then huge, then mind-boggling. Some were wonderful, some were terrifying. My initial optimism gave to fear, and then to a more cautious hope. I gave talks on the idea at MIT, got criticism, wrote technical papers, and finally wrote a book, Engines of Creation (WER #53, p. 83), to help explain these conseqquences. Why has this effort devoured my time and attention? Simply because nanotechnology, will bring dangers and opportunities on a grand scale. We need to understand it, or we may end up doing something stupid.

The Evolution of Nanotechnology

Several paths lead toward assemblers and nanotechnology:they include biotechnology, chemistry, and micromanipulators.

* Biotechnology: Protein makes up most of themolecular machinery of life. Eventually, we will learn to design new molecular machines made of protein, including protein machines for building better, non-protein machines. These, in turn, will be able to build almost anything.

* Chemistry: Molecular machinery need not bemade of protein. As our knowledge of chemistry advances, we will eventually learn to design and synthesize molecular machines like those made of protein, but different. These will include molecular machines for building better molecular machines, which in turn can build almost anything.

* Micromanipulators: Physicists have made instrumentsfor moving a sharp, minute tip of matter with atomic precision. Eventually (perhaps) someone may learn how to use similar devices as manipulators to build molecular machines for building better molecular machines, which in turn can build almost anything.

* Combined approaches: The above techniquesmight be combined to build molecular machines able to build better molecular machines, which in turn...

As you can see, the starting point will make littledifference. All roads lead to assemblers, and assemblers will let us make almost anything we are clever enough to design.

With many paths toward it open, nanotechnologywill be a natural, evolutionary advance. Evolution occurs in ecologies, i.e., in complex systems of cooperating, competing entities.

A biological ecology is a huge, multisided competitionin which organisms compete to grab sunlight or each other's flesh; they sometimes form cooperative, symbiotic grabbing-teams. In a market ecology, on the other hand, the rules let individuals compete or cooperate, but prohibit violent grabbing of flesh and possessions. This results in isolated patches of competition -- industries -- in which teams of cooperting people compete with other teams to see which can best cooperate with suppliers and buyers around the world.

The world political system is partly a pacifist,market ecology, and partly a militarist, biological ecology. But in one regard, both the competition to serve people and the competition to dominate them push in the same direction -- toward more advanced technology based on better control over the structure of matter -- in short, toward nanotechnology. Nanotechnology will make possible both better goods and better weapons.

In a world full of competing companies and governments,only global disaster or global domination could block the advance of technology. This seems to be a fundamental principle; if so, it must guide our plans.

We need to consider what is possible with advancedtechnology so we can better guide its emergence. A brief sketch is in order, covering what nanotechnology can do for us, what it can't do for us, and what it might be used to do to us. This will set the stage for a look at what we might do to get ready. (If you want to believe in the sort of future that newspapers typically assume -- where the next century is just a jazzed-up, rundown, or wrecked version of this one -- then please keep a firm grip on your world view, stop reading, and don't consider the implications of what you've already read.)

New Options

What can nanotechnology do for us? Almost anythingwe want, in physical terms. Once we have the software to direct them, replicating assemblers can build almost anything, including more of themselves, without human labor. Because they will handle matter atom by atom, as trees do, they can be as clean as trees, or cleaner. They need not produce smoke or sludge or toxic chemical byproducts.

Since shoes and ships and sealing wax -- andspaceships and computers -- can be made from elements common in air and rock, raw materials need cost little. And since sunlight is cheap and solar collectors can be as cheap as crabgrass, energy also need cost little. In general, almost any product imaginable can be made dirt cheap, even taking full account of energy costs and environmental side effects.

Assembler-based systems can replace modernmanufacturing (and factories, and industrial corporations as we know them). Today, rich and poor countries alike shred and pollute the landscape with crude, inefficient technologies. With nanotechnology, all can be richer than the richest countries are now, yet do far less harm.

Just as trees do, systems of replicating assemblerscan construct big, complicated structures, even extremely large pieces of hardware at low cost. By manufacturing tunneling machines cheaper, pound for pound, than firewood, nanotechnology as much room near Earth's surface below ground as there is above, yet we scar the landscape with highways and railroads. Why? Mostly because of costs. With cheap tunneling and construction, we could build a transportation system based on evacuated tunnels and magnetically levitated vehicles, giving transcontinental service in under an hour, and cross-town service in about two minutes. Fast, quiet, and efficient, this underground transport would leave more open land for Earth's life, and for people who enjoy it.

By making spacecraft cheaper than firewood,nanotechnology can open the space frontier. Space holds more room and resources than anyone can truly imagine. Near Earth's sun are matter, energy, and room enough to build broad new lands with a million times the area of Earth. We can bring life to the dead rocks of space, carrying forward the tradition of the plants and animals that brought life forth from the oceans to the land.

And by spreading life to space, we can insure itagainst catastrophe. Earth is a small and fragile basket for something so precious as our only biosphere.

Nanotechnology can also provide stand-ins forlife. Today, people kill and eat both carrots and cattle. With advanced technology, there will be no need to kill animals in order to have meat. Cattle product steaks (unintentionally, of course) by providing an environment for the growth of muscle tissue. Why not have a brainless beast that sits in a kitchen cabinet, one that grows fresh meat and vegetables as a tree grows apples? By growing meat outside animals, we could remove a major excuse for killing them.

So far, I've described how nanotechnology can beused to give us more of familiar things -- goods, services, living space -- in new and better ways. But these new ways of making things will also be able to make new kinds of things.

One important application will be the furtherminiaturization of computers. Detailed study shows that assemblers could build the equivalent of a lerge, modern computer in about 1/1000 of the volume of a typical human cell. This would be a mechanical computer (they're easier to analyze than electronic computers), but moving parts on this scale can be small and fast enough to make the computer faster than today's electronic machines.

A desk-top machine could then have more rawcomputational power than any computer in the world today. In fact, it could have more raw power than all the computers in the world today combined. In these terms -- which imply nothing about intelligence -- such a machine would have the raw power of a million human brains.

Cooking this raw power into something useful isanother matter -- one of software and of designing or evolving patterns of computation that accomplish something valuable. The right patterns of activity will result in a fast-thinking artificial intelligence. (Otherwise all we have is a fancy adding machine.) This artificial intelligence applied to engineereing will give us the ability to quickly design enormously complex systems.

With this sort of design ability, we will be able tobuild molecular machines able to repair living tissue. In the body, we see molecular machines that enter tissue (white blood cells), that enter cells (viruses), that recognize molecules (antibodies), and that take apart and build all the parts of a cell (digestive enzymes, and the molecular machinery of cell reproduction). Build molecular machines with a similar range of abilities, place them under the control of sophisticated computer systems, and the result will be a system able to enter, diagnose, and repair a cell, tissue, or organ. The software seems a greater challenge than the hardware.

Since we live in bodies made of molecules, atechnology able to rearrange molecules will mean a revolution in medicine. Today, physicians cannot heal tissue; they can only provide the conditions for it to heal itself -- if it can. And some tissues, like missing limbs or damaged spinal cords, can't. With cell repair systems based on nanotechnology, medicine, will gain surgical control on the molecular level, healing tissue almost regardless of its condition.

Molecular-level repair can extend lifespan almostindefinitely (though the nature of the universe does not permit genuine immortality). And long life would not mean prolonged aging and deterioration. Wrinkled skin, clogged arteries, poor memory -- these result not from some magic influence of the calendar upon a life force, but from the disordering of patterns of cells and molecules. Restoring youthful patterns would restore youthful health.

The biopshere, too, has molecular problems. Manytoxic wate molecules have entered the groundwater; too many carbon dioxide molecules have entered the air. With replicating assemblers (and enough knowledge), we can build plant-like devices with "roots" that reach far into the ground, capturing and destroying toxic molecules. We can even take on the biggest cleanup, reversing the greenhouse effect by converting carbon dioxide back into oil and coal and putting them back in the ground. (Remember, molecular machines made our atmosphere in the first place.) With nanotechnology, we can heal both our bodies and our biosphere.

In general, those applications of nanotechnologycan mean wider choices for people. They allow independence from many of today's limites, escapes from poverty, from dependence on a global economy, and from short lifespans. They allow lives in wild futures like those dreamed of by some science fiction authors; equally, they allow lives in disciplined voluntary communities like those dreamed of by some new age writers.

Nanotechnology, being based on molecular machines,is compatible even with lives like those of our ancestors, and not only through its renunciation. Neolithic tribes made use of molecular machinery, packaged in yeast, seeds, and goats. It is only the hidden complexity of natural nanomachinery that makes possible agriculture on a human scale. Nanotechnology will follow this pattern, hiding immense complexity in easy-to-tend, self-reproducing systems.

With the coming of assemblers and nanotechnology,the world could be transformed for the better -- if you prefer health to sickness, life to death, wealth to poverty, choice to limits, diversity to uniformity, and a clean environment to one burdened by the wastes of a coarse technology.

But if you prefer calm to change, watch out.

The Limits to Growth

Change exclusively for the better is far from guaranteed. Nanotechnology will not make everything possible.

The world -- though so much larger than theEarth -- cannot yield infinite resources. Exponential growth of population, whether with long lives or short, would overrun available resources within a few thousand years, even allowing for interstellar flight. Nanotechnology offers a breathing space, but it cannot permanently cure the problem of population.

As there are limits to resource quantity, so thereare also limits to hardware quality. No matter how you rearrange atoms, some things cannot be done. Natural law (whatever it may be) determines what matter is and what it can do. It will set bounds to the strength of materials, the speed of computers, and the rate of travel. And nanotechnology itself is but a vast extension of chemistry. It can no more change atomic nuclei than alchemists could transform lead into gold, and for the same reason: chemical technology is not nuclear technology.

Nanotechnology will push many limites far, farback, but it will not eliminate them. In many years, it will carry us forward to firm and lasting limits to growth, to an era (at last!) of stable technologies. Of course, we also face practical limits set by our situation and ourselves. With our best efforts, we cannot accomplish everything that is physically possible. Indeed, in a competitive world, we sometimes can't even avoid things that are possible.

Dangers and Disruptions

Replicating assemblers will be a powerful technology,posing obvious dangers of accident and abuse. The issue here isn't whether assemblers and nanotechnology will raise problems on the scale of highway deaths or industrial accidents -- they might or might not. The issue is whether they will smash civilization or destroy the biosphere.

An industrial base able to double in minutes,rather than decaces, can serve as a potent basis for military power: Imagine an arms race in which one side can multiply its production a thousand-fold in a single day. Further, nanotechnology will make possible potent new weapons, such as devices that act like programmable "germs" for germ warfare. These abilities make nuclear weapons look tame.

World-wrecking abuse of nanotechnology is a realthreat. World-wrecking accidents are an unreal threat. True, a combination of ingenuity and criminal negligence could produce a replicator able to destroy the biosphere, but this is far from the ordinary meaning of "accident." It will be easy to make replicating assemblers that survive only with special help. For these limited replicators to run wild, they would have have to do more than break down, they would have to gain special new abilities.

Genetically engineered organisms have stirredfears of accidental runaway plagues, and replicating assemblers may seem similar. Engineered organisms are generally modified with an eye to making them useful but incompetent (imagine a microscopic version of a modern domestic turkey), yet to survive in nature they would have to compete with the most effective organisms nature has evolved. As you'd expect, they tend to lose, and hence pose no threat. But engineered organisms are at least organisms -- they are related to things that once evolved and survived in the natural world. Replicating assemblers, in contrast, need have no resemblance to anything that can't survive unaided in nature. They would then be no more likely to accidentally escape and run wild than a can opener is to accidentally turn into a spaceship and fly to the Moon.

Even if we avoid the abuse of nanotechnology -- avoidingworld war or the boot of technological dictatorship -- we will still face disruptions from basically beneficial uses. Replicating assemblers will sweep away the foundations of our present economy. Mining, manufacturing, and shipping will wither it in the face of machines able to make almost anything, anywhere, using just dirt, air, and sunlight. Hardware will matter little; software for making hardware will matter a lot.

Replicating assemblers will be able to make almostanything as cheaply as firewood, and in just as decentralized a way. Modern corporations chiefly coordinate people to work as parts of vast, complex machines; when complex machines become small, and homesteads can grow anything from tractors to supercomputers, who will need today's huge organizations? With its use in production and medicine, nanotechnology can enable us to eliminate poverty and disease, but it will also eliminate most corporations and industries. Will corporations try to stop it, and perpetuate misery to protect their position and profit? And will dictators then forget ahead, to seize absolute power?

What is to be done?

Advances in many fields carry us toward nanotechnology,and all major powers are pursuing those advances. As a technology of tiny things made of ordinary materials, it cannot be monitored from satellites. I see no way to stop such a thing, short of invading every country and filling the world with incorruptible police. In a world armed with hydrogen bombs and full of real people, this somehow seems unlikely. if we can't stop nanotechnology, we must try to understand it, live with it, and use it as best we can.

Are good outcomes possible? It seems so, thoughI'm not offering any odds. This sketch of nanotechnology is too quick and rough to support any detail on this matter, but two points seem solid:

First, we need better understanding as individualsand as a society. Our survival may depend on our ability to tell sense from nonsense regarding a complex technology that doesn't exist yet. The nonsense will be abundant, no matter what we do: any field on the borders of science fiction, quantum mechanics, and biology is well positioned to import a lot of prefabricated crap; any field where experiments and experience aren't yet possible is going to have great trouble getting rid of that crap. When someone says "nanotechnology" and begins to expound, beware!

Second, a political movement to deal with nanotechnologymust be a movement to guide advance, not to stop it. I've already argued that attempts to stop it would be futile; here are some reasons for thinking such efforts would be socially irresponsible:

* Efforts to stop it would waste a tremendouslyvaluable resource -- the time and attention of that small minority that knows and cares enough to do anything at all.

* Efforts to stop it would cause further waste byconsuming the efforts of the knowledgeable activists who would try to counter and redirect the stoppers.

* Useful efforts to guide this technology mustbring together activists and technical experts -- but efforts to stop it will tend to push these experts into a hostile camp, dividing potential allies to everyone's harm.

* What might seem like progress in stopping advanceswould instead drive research further and further from public scrutiny and control, first from universities and then from private companies, leaving secure, secretive military laboratories in the lead.

* The greatest possible success of democraticmovement to block this technology would merely drive it still further from public scrutiny and control, by ensuring that the democracies do not lead the way.

Since stopping it seems impossible, and attemptsto stop it seems irresponsible, why not apply the time-tested sour-grapes principle and conclude that stopping it isn't even something to want? After all, blocking nanotechnology would condemn millions of people to misery and disease, and condemn the Earth to further ravaging by desperate people seeking food and shelter with crude technologies. In contrast, success in guiding it could make many dreams come true.

What is to be done? First we need to become betterinformed about the basic facts of the coming revolution, about its real opportunities and dangers. Then we need to build a broad movement, one with room for people who are pro-progress, but who take dangers seriously, and for people who are pro-caution, but who recognize the momentum of technological advance. With a broad movement -- diverse, but not fatally polarized -- we will have a broad debate and will become yet better informed.

As nanotechnology comes near, it will seem morereal. Concern will grow, and with it the sort of activism, knowledge, and organization that can make a difference in the world. If we hang together and hammer out a sound approach, we just might be ready when the breakthrough arrive. We have years to prepare, to gather our wits and our strength, and to seek a measure of wisdom.

If we succeed, we could end up alive and free ina world worth living in.

COPYRIGHT 1987 Point Foundation
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