Something slightly different today: a minor curveball. The topic of Nanotechnology looms large over the future of our species. Due to its all-encompassing and scientific nature, it seemed just about appropriate enough to publish on a blog such as this. The piece is adapted from multiple speeches written by myself and fellow Young Freethought editor Paul McClean. We both hope you read it with fascination and care. It leaves plenty of room for a good follow-up discussion. In particular, an issue I've purposefully ommited is the impact on religious belief of such technology. Anyway, please read and discuss.
Imagine a world, where there was no such thing as illness, a world where you could create almost anything that took your fancy at the touch of a button, a world where space travel was for everyone, where buildings never collapsed and bridges never fell. Welcome to the world of nanotechnology.
Of course, at a first glance, most of this seems to be precious little but science fiction – a collection of mankind’s greatest wishes, the folly of fantasists and naive utopians gathered and pasted together in a manifesto for the delusional. Yet this is not science fiction; sooner than you might think, this will be science fact. Nanotechnology, as I’m sure you’re aware, is the science of the small; the very small. An average human hair, for example, is 90,000 nanometres across. Of course, objects this small behave very differently to how we would expect them to, based on our everyday, Newtonian experiences. A very simple example, in recipie-like fashion, is as follows: take silicon; a dull, grey and dreary looking material. Take a nano-sized piece of the element using a ‘nano-ice-cream scooper’, and you will find it glows blue. Take a slightly larger size, and it glows red; simply due to the change in size. This is just one visual example of quantum mechanical 'weirdness'; which nanotechnology exploits, in turn exposing ‘a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality "ought to be"’ As Richard Feynman put it. However nanotechnology allows us to venture into far more intriguing possibilities than simply that of changing the colour of metals.
Try hard, very hard if you will, to conceive of a material hundreds of times stronger than steel, yet one thousand times thinner than each hair on your head. For one, I just can’t quite do it. But it might startle you to know as it first did me, we have already produced such a material: the carbon nanotube – simply a nano-sized cylinder of carbon molecules, which just so happens to be the strongest material known to humankind. Constructing bridges and tower blocks out of nanotubes would make them just too strong to fall in most earthquakes and floods. In fact, you could replace all the steel in New York’s Brooklyn Bridge with carbon nanotube cylinders merely a few nanometres across.
Yet the greatest technological prospect is to be found in space exploration. The problem with today’s space travel is cost. A rocket uses roughly 90% of its highly expensive fuel in the first moments after takeoff due to gravity on Earth. But what if we could produce a lift, of sorts, to mechanically hoist the rocket up the first three thousnad or so metres and then on into space? This easily laughable and simply incredulous idea was first proposed by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. The downfall then, as until recently, was that as soon as any 'space elevator' is erected, the strength of the Earth’s centripetal force immediately snaps it: confirming the common wisdom that the whole idea was a waste of human cortex. But, in case you didn’t see it coming, carbon nanotubes are strong enough to withstand this centripetal force. The idea was first taken seriously by NASA in the nineties and now creators of the first viable working model for a space elevator will receive a handsome cash sum in a prize sponsered by the agency that put man on the moon.
That first landing was just over forty years ago now. Yet, in reality, the expected ‘giant leap’ in space exploration envisaged since then has been nonexistent. Nanotechnology has the power to reenergise space travel, bringing down costs by a factor of one hundred. In theory it would be possible to send every human on this planet up into space, to look at their home from the greatest distance commonly feaseable. Some have talked of ‘conscience-raising’. I cannot imagine a better method than actually raising ourselves above our home and gazing down on it in all its all too human glory. We might go some way to realising the sentiments of the Pale Blue Dot. Michio Kaku, great scientist and futurist, even suggests a period of peace and stability following on from such an achievement.
So, if nanotechnology can change the way society views itself, there is surely very little it cannot do. If this space elevator is made of a material we humans have made, what if we could use nanotechnology to create materials itself? Nanotechnology does in fact have the power to manipulate individual atoms. If, therefore, atoms are the building blocks of everything we see in our world, then there is a possibility of using nanotechnology to create anything molecularly stable – be it a chair or a potato. Fast forward one hndred years, and it is possible that in every home around the world, there may be a box the size of a microwave, which can create almost anything with the twisting of knobs and the touch of a button. Starvation may become a horror of the past. One replicator per desperately unfortunate community and the extinction of hunger may be near
Capitalist economic systems and their social superstructures cannot remain unaffected by this result of engineering endeavour. If my replicator could fashion anything, industry as we know it would be ruined -with nothing to replace the millions without a job. The principle of money would become flawed as people simply feed a block of atoms into their ‘personal fabricator’ and receive a lump of coal, a nourishing meal or a handful of diamonds. Society would become incredibly unstable, and, working on the basic human attribute of greed, wars would surely break out. It just so happens that our own brilliance may well prove to be the downfall of our society.
The final possibility of nanotechnology I wish to look at is that of medicine. The current greatest dilemma in medicine is the treatment of illnesses and diseases which infect the cell internally. Current antiviral treatments do little else other than prevent the spread of the disease from one cell to another – they do not kill the infection. Nanotechnology once again comes to the rescue, as it is possible for nanobots, that is, nano robots, to enter your body, seek out the cancerous or infected cell, and destroy it. Effectively, there will be no such thing as illness ever again. This is not a hope for the future; this is happening now, albeit in a different form. In The Times on the 5th November, an article described how, next year, human trials of a ‘nano-weapon’ against prostate cancer begin. The researchers behind the treatment believe it will eliminate the need for immunosuppressant drugs and chemotherapy. They claim the ‘drug’ has virtually no side effects and will be on the global market within five years. The most incredible fact? The treatment, though currently applied to prostate cancer, can be altered to eliminate any form of cancer that existent. Now consider that on in three people will contract cancer in their lives. I wonder for how long that infamous statistic will hold true. Whilst nanobots may still be a long way off, nanotechnology and medicine are already merging successfully.
Catastrophic flipsides are inevitable with such a powerful tool. Suppose this or that nanobot with 'nano-lasers' or some other barely believable whimsy, is programmed to kill a virus. Bu then it proceeds to malfunction and self replicates (the property of self-replication, it is envisaged, will occur through a kind of chemi-robotic contamination on contact). Suddenly, a group of nanobots programmed to seek out and kill harmful cells would instead seek out the healthy ones. Death for the host is certain. But he greatest worry is surely that of military use. If nanobots can be programmed to cure people, there is an equally likely chance they could be used to kill people outright. If the military of any nation on Earth were to programme nanobots for use in a war, the result would be a monster greater than the atom-bomb. A future Oppenheimer might well find themselves repeating the same phrase as he did from the Bhagavad-Gita – ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’. A current major investor in nanotechnology? The U.S Military. 30% of the DoD budget goes straight to it.
Combining these two problems together, however, creates a situation potentially so catastrophic, that it provoked Prince Charles to demand that research into nanotechnology should be heavily regulated. If nanobots used in the military malfunction and self replicate, then instead of being programmed with instructions, ‘kill the French’, they, hypothetically could become programmed with, ‘kill everything’. The prophesized result is an eschatological scenario known as Grey Goo. That is, these robots will take over the world and reduce the Earth to nothing but a mass of goo. Once again, humankind would be undone by its very own brilliance.
Of course, all of this, if we’re honest, seems completely fictitious. Yet rewind a few centuries, and the idea of an airplane, a desk light, or a computer would have seemed utterly ridiculous too. And in fact, nanotechnology, despite being the unspoken buzz word of the decade, is not a completely new phenomenon. Stain glass windows have been around since the medieval period, and these were created by heating and cooling nano-sized particles so as to achieve their appreciable (even by atheists) myriad colours.
As we have seen, there are great problems which we must face if we wish to live in a world of nanotechnology. And yet, despite all this, it is my own view that Nanotechnology must become a part of our future if we wish to fulfil our own relentless inquiring nature of intrepid discovery. A rather crude yet apt analogy I like to use is that of the first caveman (or woman – for rhetoric's sake, I’ll stick with ‘man’). He is sitting in his cave, as the cold winter draws in, huddled against the fur of some woolly mammoth. And then he discovers fire. The fire brings him warmth and light and a place to cook food. Not that he knows it, but it also kills nearby bacteria and pathogens that could cause him and his family grave illness. He doesn’t know how lucky he is. But, simultaneously the fire can burn him and in a less than attentive moment of Palaeolithic daydreaming, he could well carelessly severerly scorch his cavernous home. Yet this new found ‘technology’ gives him the building blocks for further life, and he goes on to develop, and fulfil his hominid capabilities. Nanotechnology is like the fire: unchartered territory for us. Yet I feel we must not shy away from this scientific breakthrough. Whilst trying as best we can to be aware of the consequences we should utilise the benefits – benefits for all humanity, indiscriminate of any fictitious racial or religious boundary. In doing so, we will expand our horizons and see the Earth in a completely new manner. We must step out of our cave, and boldly enter the world of the future; the world of nanotechnology.
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