Nano Future 2030

Nanocells – a concept based on the idea of augmenting your cells instead of trying to fix your "body".

Your cells are your body. They are individuals in the sense that billions of one type make up an organ or muscle. If you know how to keep that one cell working optimally, then you probably have done a significant job of taking care of your "body".

At first glance, it may seem daunting, since we have more than 250 different types of cells in our bodies. But you don’t have to do everything at once.

We have the choice of picking out a few cell types to augment intensely or target all cells at a very basic level to support the entire body.

To pick a few cells for augmentation, we might try heart muscle, skin, liver, bladder, nervous system. The ones that most often go bad. Those organs contain many types of cells with many functions critical to the operation of the cell.

To augment the entire body at once, you have to stick to simple augmentation efforts in every cell of the body. This is simpler and might have greater effect on general health.

For instance, general cell augmentation would try to prevent internal cell actions like cancerous replication, DNA modification by virus, cell wall damage, or pollution from outside chemicals. It could monitor cell chemistry and signal a higher order communication system when ph or ion levels move outside of a safe range.

That higher communication system is part of a data accumulation network setup by groups of cells to consolidate their data and to present a compressed data stream of important facts to upper management. The top level management is the human composed of these cells. For example, the human could be notified when his physical activity stresses his body beyond its ability to handle or adapt to the stress. Sort of an early warning system that augments the pain pathways that we presently have for feedback.

How do we get these nano cells? At first it will be by injection or oral consumption of billions of robot modules designed to find an unoccupied cell of a certain type and to set up house keeping in that cell. And then to link up with other cells and become part of a larger communication system of cells.

Another route is to set up installation modules in the bone marrow and as new blood cells are specialized, they also are injected with a nanocell module to setup housekeeping. When the cell dies naturally ( assuming you allow that to happen for any reason ) the module is recycled and put into a new cell.

The goal is to have a nanocell module inside every cell in your body. It is not clear if you could stop all cell death or would want to do so. Skin cells flake off and die in millions per day, but that is natural and without redesigning our skin, I don’t see how to prevent those cells from dying. In that sense, dying is natural.

But having heart muscle die, seems unnecessary. Certainly, cancer is unnecessary. Preventing cancer and heart attacks would be among the first benefits of a nanocell system.

After seeing the resistance to genetically engineered crops, it is hard to imagine that food produced by a nanofactory would be welcomed with open arms by everyone. I suspect that it will be the last frontier to be conquered by molecular manufacturing. And even then, only the early adopters will serve tidbits at a party or garnish a meal at home with flavored rice or diced watermelon from your personal nanofactory.

It’s too high tech to use for everyday food needs unless food becomes hard to get or you have no money to buy the "good" food grown on a commercial farm. Hopefully that will change as we gain experience and the technology is able to proficiently reproduce natural grains and vegetables.

I would expect to see private groups working on hardware and open source software to produce "free food". It’s the old dream of freedom, but in a new guise. Provide each person with a food machine they can own and with which, they can feed their family from organic debre or grass and you have freed them from the most obvious dependence on society. While that could be bad if it tears society apart, it could also create a society where the individual is free to grow without the need to work for daily survival. I suspect that any outcome will be hard to evaluate from our present perspective and can be seen as a natural evolution rather than a choice we have to make.

Things are going to change. And I doubt we have a lot to say about how they change. I vote for personal freedom without understanding what that means in terms of outcome. Another may vote for social stability with equal innocence. My vote is motivated by the desire to remove restrictions. The other could be motivated by a fear of change. Who is to say which one is better?

The southeast USA is experiencing the worst drought they’ve seen in decades. Someone called it a 100 year drought. I doubt that nanotechnology can do anything to help at the moment, but it is a great example of what we hope to handle a decade or two from now.

The drought is a resource problem. Our population is large and that makes any shortfall painful. If we had working nanotechnology it would not be a problem. I mean real nanotechnology, the kind that allows you to build anything you can design. We have a decade or two to go before that is available.

Taking the Southeast water shortfall as an example, I’d like to point out what mature nanotechnology can ( …. I mean will ) do.

Reclamation

Waste water in your home can be purified and reused. Even if the concept is repugnant, we will get over it. Think of Nature’s water cycle as a big purification machine, we need to capture that capability and use it in our own home. A nano machine would be purchased as a design you download from a web site. That design software would deliver the information to your own nanofactory, a unit about the size of a microwave oven, which sits on a table in your kitchen or perhaps is built into the walls of your home. This nanofactory would create small modules the size of golf balls. After it extrudes one hundred or more, you drop them down the bathroom toilet, one at a time.

The modules unfold, assemble themselves into larger devices and attack the sewer system with the purpose of reconfiguring it for water recovery. What they do is based on a design worked out either by a contracting firm or by the devices themselves. It depends on how smart they are, which depends on how many years have passed since the nanofactory and general purpose AI became available. Ten years out, a contracting firm will handle it. Twenty years out, the modules are smart enough to do everything themselves. They have a performance goal assigned and they make changes to your sewer system to meet that goal.

In a city system, water is still needed to move waste through the pipes under the streets. If you removed too much water from everyone’s home waste system, the city system would fail. Urban human waste systems are designed to run on running water. Cities will prohibit you from introducing human waste into their system with a water level below a certain value.

At some point you will have to decide to get off the city waste system entirely. That means you must convert all waste to reusable or disposable forms. Nanotechnology is the only technology capable of perfect conversion because it works at a molecule and atomic level.

The modules you dumped down the drain, will reconfigure your pipes, install a water purification package, a solid waste converter, build storage tanks underground and totally rebuild your home waste system. Water gets removed from solid waste. The water is as pure as water can get. There are no germs, minerals, smells, or chemicals of any kind in the water. In fact, some things like minerals will be restored to provide taste. The solid waste will be broken down into carbon, oxygen, and a host of other elements or harmless compounds and used to construct furniture, clothes and repair parts.

We will become a society fully at peace with total conversion, but the first few years will be hard as kindergarten humor attempts to resolve the social stress of animals who must live with their own waste products. Just because that diamond chandelier was made from your own shit, it still shines bright.