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The future of nanotechnology and space exploration

Adapted from The Atlas of the Future

Futurology tends to be more fun but less accurate the further into the future we go. Indeed, except for a few fields such as regular, mathematically predictable events, predictions any more than a few years away are built on quicksand. It is impossible to be accurate except by luck, but it is still useful to discuss those elements of the future of which we have some warning, to outline some of the things that we know could happen. We can’t account for technologies that have yet to be invented or major events that are yet to happen.

One area we know is possible but have not yet achieved is nanotechnology, which must qualify as the most hyped technology of all time. On the one hand, if it goes well, we have a utopian future with no food shortages or disease, a life of leisure and immortality. On the other, if it goes wrong, we are threatened by the prospect of everything on the planet, including us, being reduced to sickly goo. The central pillar of the range of applications offered by this magic are the ability to easily manipulate matter at the atomic scale. If we can build tiny machines atom by atom, that could build replicas of themselves, atom by atom, then very soon we could go from one machine to billions of them. All we have to do is to provide the raw materials. We could design and build, or have built, nanomachines to build almost anything simply by sticking atoms together in the right architecture, only limited by the laws of physics. We could make any food by dropping mud, water and air into a machine and having the nanomachines reassemble the appropriate atoms into the food we require. Taking this technology to the limit, factories based on such atomic technologies could be grown effectively from a small seed which contains the building instructions and a few parents of a few species of nanomachines. Since the Earth contains the raw materials needed, we wouldn’t need to provide anything else. Even the distribution of more geographically localised materials between sites is no problem. Tiny insect-like robots could carry whatever is needed. By having nanotechnology machines roam around our bodies repairing damage, we could greatly assist our natural repair systems, delaying the damage caused by age and keeping us in the peak of health. People who have their bodies or heads frozen when they die are placing their hope in nanotechnology to be able to repair the damage that caused their death, or to copy information stored in their brains for upload into an android at some later date. Whether this will ever be possible is open to debate, but certainly, billions of nanoprobes connecting to every cell in our brains offers some hope of connecting our minds to machines. Applications then range from telepathic communication with others across a network, super-intelligence via a transparent connection to ultra-smart computers, even the potential to back up our minds in case of accidental death. However, such potential will be several decades in the realisation.

Most of these nanotechnology uses are of course science fiction today, but there is nothing here that is obviously impossible. Biology manipulates atoms all the time, using a mixture of chemical and physical processes. Just as we are already learning from biology in the fields of electronics, materials and even organisational structure, so there is still much more to learn. It is only a matter of time. We will probably see some nanotechnology appearing in ultra-high speed electronics in the next few years, with the rest coming on stream over the next few decades. Nanotechnology can increase the speed of electronics because it allows components to be smaller and more densely packed on a circuit, so faster components have smaller delays between them, resulting in faster overall speed. One approach that shows promise is to use carbon fullerene tubes as wires on a chip, linking together molecular sized switches. Both of these exist now, but connecting them together to make useful devices is beyond our current technology.

Nanotechnology is hailed by many as the greatest technology of the 21st century. If it weren’t for the even greater promises offered by the information technology that it contributes to, this may well be correct.

The dangers of nanotechnology are similar in some ways to those in genetic engineering. While genetic engineering of bacteria or virus to wipe out some crop pest could accidentally produce new human disorder, so nanomachines designed to rearrange or build organic molecules may also cause us harm or use us as raw materials. However while these nightmare scenarios make good science fiction stories, they are unlikely in practice assuming we adopt basic precautions.

Nanotechnology also offers a distant hope for space exploration. By encapsulating our minds in a tiny capsule along with some universal assemblers – nanotechnology machines that are designed to construct any other required form of nanotechnology machines – we reduce the size of a spaceship from hundreds of meters to a tiny fraction of a millimeter. We can then accelerate these devices to almost light speed and send them off by the million to explore. On locating a suitable planet, they may unpack, releasing nanomachines to assemble whatever is needed for habitation before finally making an android for the human mind to upload to, completing the mission. It is strange that the technologies of the very small and the very large should be linked.

Considering the current progress in exploring our universe puts humankind in context. With our best efforts, we are only just starting to explore our back yard and that only by sending machines, since we can’t afford to send people. In spite of landing men on our moon 30 years ago, and a few noble but aborted efforts to schedule Mars landings, it will be many more years before we are exploring other planets in our solar system in person, let alone planets around other stars.

However, with advanced artificial intelligence, we will still be able to explore via our machines, which can do the exploring and effectively send a postcard home. Machines can be made much less vulnerable than our organic bodies to hostile environments, such as high g forces, extreme temperatures, unbreathable atmospheres or radiation, so using them instead of people makes a lot of sense. Artificial intelligence is essential to allow these machines to act on their own initiative. The distances involved are so vast that it can take signals 20 minutes to make the trip even from Mars so real time remote control is not possible. Using virtual reality, the data gathered in missions can be used to construct a similar environment here on Earth for us to experience second hand. This is a distant second best compared to being there – just virtual tourism – but it will have to do for now.

Star Trek offers a good yardstick by which we can measure our progress. The first generation of Star Trek used computing technology and voice synthesis that looks primitive by today’s standards. The Next Generation series had an android called Data. Computers will exceed his performance specification by 2020. We could build the illusion of a Holodeck using virtual reality today, and add the reconfigurable matter in 25 years using nanotechnology to give the full capability. We have already seen the first generation of phaser. We even know in principle how to make shape shifters such as the T1000 robot in Terminator! However, our teleportation technology can so far manage only a single atom, can only affect gravity by the tiniest margin, we have no idea how to build inertial compensators and warp drive, although theoretically possible, looks like being the most expensive technology imaginable. Sadly, though our progress is rapid in many areas, the most important technologies in Star Trek look far from feasible. We may be stuck here for quite a while!