NANOTECHNOLOGY

What if you could turn air into diamonds? What if you could fix all the damaged cells in your body and eliminate any infections or cancers? What if you could create almost anything you wanted out of sunlight and garbage? Nanotechnology promises to do all that in the future, but like almost any technology that can bring great benefits, it can also bring great dangers. Nanotechnology is machines built on a scale of nanometers. Just as a millimeter is 1/1000 of a meter (your thumbnail might be 10 to 20 millimeters across), a nanometer is 1/1,000,000,000 of a meter (about 5 to 10 atoms long). This means that nanotechnology would be built up atom-by-atom, which is not the way humans build things now, but is similar to the way that Nature builds. All living things come from strings of atoms, protein molecules, that make copies of themselves. Assembling atoms is how trees, humans, and other forms of life are born, grow, and live. Nature builds from the atoms up. Since human hands are too big to handle atoms, we build down from giant chunks of atoms. From an atom's perspective, a pencil is a giant chunk of atoms, and putting it in a pencil sharpener is a very clumsy way to remove lots of those atoms. The wood in the pencil was built up from atoms by a tree. Humans cut the tree down and then build down to the pencil by breaking away many of the atoms. Since humans first started making things, we have developed finer and finer control. Smashing stones together made the first stone tools millions of years ago. Advanced technology makes today's computers with tiny electronic switches just a micrometer (1/1,000,000 of a meter) across. Even that advanced technology builds down from big crystals of silicon instead of up. Scientists and engineers started thinking about how to get the kind of control that Nature has. They are trying many different approaches and it may not be long before one of them, or a combination of a few of them, works. Nanotechnology works by manipulating matter on the atomic level. It builds machines up by placingatoms precisely instead of building down by breaking away lots of atoms from a big chunk of them. Nobody knows exactly how it will be built because nobody has yet come up with a practical method to build nanotechnology. When it can be built practically, however, there are plans for how to build more. Tiny nanotechnology robots, or nanobots, will be able to move around, sense their environment, and handle atoms. They could be programmed to make more nanobots, which could also make more nanobots. Their energy could come from many sources, including light. In some ways, they would appear to be alive, eating sunlight, handling atoms, and making children nanobots, if that is what they were programmed to do. Technology is used to make technology, like breaking stones to make a stone knife, which you can use to make a spear or carve other tools. Nanotechnology could be used to make more nanotechnology. If a nanobot is created that can make another nanobot in one day, then on the second day each one could make another, so there would be four. On the third day, the four nanobots would each make another, sothere would be eight. In one month, there would be 1,073,741,800 nanobots. The number of nanobots doubling everyday is a guess, but doubling is the kind of growth that we see in the history of technology. The power of a computer that you can buy for $1000 doubles every two years. For a longtime, the accuracy of clocks doubled every 30 years (the first mechanical clocks "lost" 15 minutes every day). If doubling does occur, then nanotechnology will be everywhere soon after someone can finally make it somewhere. Nanotechnology may change us in many ways. First, it could change us physically. If nanobots patrolled our blood streams, looking for invaders (just like our white blood cells already do), we be able to program them to protect us against any infection. If nanobots fixed cells that developed cancer or simply became old, we might be able to live as long as we want. Larger changes could come in how we would live. Imagine a world in which almost any design could be turned into the real thing. Instead of downloading music from Napster, you could download the design for an airplane and have your nanobots build it for you. That would change how we work and how we play. If you did not have to worry about food and shelter, would you sit around all day playing video games, or would you search out the secrets of the Universe? Engineers and scientists change nanotechnology by figuring out how to build it in the first place, and then how to improve it. Teachers will educate on how to use it. Architects and artists will imagine and create the designs of what it will create. Politicians and activists will debate how it should be used. Everyone will decide how he or she will use it. Everyone may also have to decide what dangers it may bring. There may be many roles for people to play that are hard for us to imagine now. Ten years ago, nobody would have thought of students creating a website for their school, but that is a role that allows young people to have an impact. Nanobots could, in theory, recognize any kind of atoms and then assemble them into any kind of structure. That means that they could make anything for which their programs have a design. That is how nanobots may be able to grab carbon atoms out of the air (humans exhale carbon dioxide and cars exhaust carbon monoxide) and then build with those carbon atoms. Diamonds are just carbon atoms arranged into a crystal structure, which is a very simple design. Complex designs for incredibly tall buildings that reach up to satellites, personal airplanes, toxic waste recycling factories, or a "Holodeck"(from Star Trek) will allow nanobots to create those things, too. Nanobots could create food by mixing water with the carbon they pull out of the air. We would use nanotechnology to create nearly anything we could design. This could be done to save people from starving to death, or to conquer another country. Even something simple like fire has both costs and benefits. It sometimes burns down houses and kills people, but it also keeps us warm and cooks our food. Nanotechnology is much more powerful than fire, so it will have bigger costs and bigger benefits. Many people in the world do not have enough food and starve to death every year. Many also die of diseases. Nanotechnology may be able to create nearly unlimited amounts of food and cure almost any disease known. That same power could create weapons by people who want to use them to attack others and by people just trying to defend themselves. An accident could happen and nanotechnology could start causing harm that nobody intended. Like any technology, nanotechnology needs to be evaluated. We can decide what the costs and benefits are and how likely each may be. If we can build nanotechnology so that it saves many lives and has only a small chance of hurting anyone, then we will probably evaluate it as "good" and continue to develop it. If the chances of it destroying all life are too high, then we will probably evaluate it as "bad" and stop developing it. There are two problems with this, though. First, it is very hard to predict the impact of a technology. The inventor of the laser had no idea that it would eventually be used in CD players and in eye surgery. Second, even if most of us decide that a technology is too dangerous, there are many people who may not agree or might just keep on developing it anyway. Even thought here are problems, the best path is for as many people as possible to understand powerful new technologies so that they can be involved in evaluating it. Otherwise, someone else will make the decisions and we may not like the results.

Activity: U.N. Address on Nanotechnology.

Write a speech to the United Nations, explaining why you think nanotechnology is a good or bad technology. Justify and explain your decisions.