Tue 9 Mar 2010
Nanotechnology is destined to be both positive and negative. Everything is that way, but the more powerful something is, the more intense the results. I want to talk about how nano is important to us today because it is our only hope against big natural disasters.
I’ve been watching a lot of TV on History and they often show very interesting programs on what happened in the past that severely affected humans or the biosphere in general. Today we are in danger more than in the past due to our highly developed infrastructure. We have accomplished great things because we have better medicine, better communications, better transportation, better education, etc. But at the same time we have become dependent on these huge and complex technologies. We have a few weeks of food in the pipeline. Many things can upset the apple cart – a small meteorite, airborne plague, megavolcano, terrorists with a dirty bomb, or an economic crisis that somehow leads to true financial failure. What we’ve been through economically in the last few years is nothing but a hiccup compared to what is possible.
In other words, we live in and depend on a china shop of delicate and valuable technologies, and any bull that gets loose could bring the whole thing down because we are not resilient beyond an unspecified limit.
Will we have useful and relatively mature nanotechology before a bull arrives? I’d say we have twenty to thirty years before the individual has access to nano converters that can take in raw materials and generate food directly. I’m sure we will have water purifiers and effective solar power long before food creation is possible. I mean nano versions of these things that pop out of a knapsack and set up shop and produce what is needed in sufficient volume to keep a family alive indefinitely.
I’d like to have a self sustaining package at home that can supply food, shelter and communications. Once that happens, the human race can survive a meteorite or plague or anything else. Doesn’t mean you would not lose a few billion people in a disaster, but it would mean the survivors could rebuild and continue to live under almost any conditions. Anything would be better than the brutal, scavenger society that would arise today after any disaster that disrupts the food supply.
What would that package have to do? Food creation is the most difficult, but it could extract nutrients from raw organic material you can not eat, with a lot less effort. Water could be pulled out of the air with refrigeration or dirty water could be purified. Solar power is essential to a survivor because communications is the only way to prevent total destruction of society. The ability to create large solar panels from raw materials allows any survivor to communicate, to be part of society and to obtain or provide help to others.
So, the essentials are food creation or extraction, water purification, electrical power for light, communication, heating and cooling, and medical drug and tool creation for pain control, curing disease and basic health. It would be cool to be able to manufacture such things as paper, bandages, salt, soap, gunpowder, aspirin.
Once we have the capability to give each person this tool kit, the human race can survive almost anything less intense than the sun going red giant.
Anyone looking for a career might consider nanotechnology and it’s mature form of molecular manufacturing of any desired object from atoms and molecules. We are not there yet and we will need people in these high tech industries.