Molecular Nano Technology
Molecular Nano TechnologyManufactured products are made from atoms. The properties of those products depend on how those atoms are arranged. If we rearrange the atoms in coal we can make diamond. If we rearrange the atoms in sand (and add a few other trace elements) we can make computer chips. If we rearrange the atoms in dirt, water and air we can make potatoes. Todays manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. Casting, grinding, milling and even lithography move atoms in great thundering statistical herds. It's like trying to make things out of LegoToy blocks with boxing gloves on your hands. Yes, you can push the LEGO blocks into great heaps and pile them up, but you can't really snap them together the way you'd like.
In the future, nanotechnology will let us take off the boxing gloves. We'll be able to snap together the fundamental building blocks of nature easily, inexpensively and in almost any arrangement that we desire. This will be essential if we are to continue the revolution in computer hardware beyond about the next decade, and will also let us fabricate an entire new generation of products that are cleaner, stronger, lighter, and more precise.
It's worth pointing out that the word "nanotechnology" has become very popular and is used to describe many types of research where the characteristic dimensions are less than about 1,000 nanometers. For example, continued improvements in lithography have resulted in line widths that are less than one micron: this work is often called "nanotechnology." Sub-micron lithography is clearly very valuable (ask anyone who uses a computer!) but it is equally clear that lithography will not let us build semiconductor devices in which individual dopant atoms are located at specific lattice sites. Many of the exponentially improving trends in computer hardware capability have remained steady for the last 50 years. There is fairly widespread confidence that these trends are likely to continue for at least another ten years, but then lithography starts to reach its fundamental limits.
If we are to continue these trends we will have to develop a new post-lithographic manufacturing technology which will let us inexpensively build computer systems with mole quantities of logic elements that are molecular in both size and precision and are interconnected in complex and highly idiosyncratic patterns. Nanotechnology will let us do this.
See
http://www.crnano.org/overview.htm
The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology is predicting that we will "almost certainly" have MolecularNanoTechnology within 20 years (WithinTwentyYears).
Isn't "molecular" redundant with "nano"? Won't plain NanoTechnology do?
Actually no. EricDrexler has a reason for this. You can find it here (http://www.foresight.org/Updates/Background1.html#Spearheads). It was formerly entitled Micro-Nano.
It used to but then a bunch of researchers working in semiconductors decided that they'd get more money out of the NSF if they co-opt the word in order to ride the wave of excitement generated by the replication and atomic precision implied by NanoTechnology.
At the one nanometer range, you haven't quite gotten to individual atoms. You're at the tens of atoms. Hundreds of atoms?
Merged from MolecularComputing?
One might be able to build computers by using molecules as switches, wires, and memory elements.
The problems:
See http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/news.20060324_carbonnanotube.html
All this chatter about building the next generation of supercomputers into our wristwatches is way cool and all, but I want the kind of nanotech that folks like JohnVarley? write about. Built in nanofactories producing nanites that clean your body of unwanted bacteria and viruses. Nanobots that manufacture sensing instrumentation remotely so that you can see what's going on deep in the ground or inside your body. Lots of applications reaching all over the place. Truly, the world will be a different place once the nanoforge becomes a reality.
Now, if we can just fund the basic scientific research...
[Nanotech progress discussion moved back to WithinTwentyYears, where it belongs.]
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