Nano-fabrication

My utopian future is full of delicious roast chickens.

Nano means small. Really really small. One nanometer is a millionth (10^-9) of a meter. It is too small to see. Picture a million dollars in a giant stack of one-dollar bills on top of each other, take a dollar out and that’s your single nano. But you may not need that dollar, or even a million dollars. If nano-fabrication becomes a reality, you won’t need money ever again.

It sounds like the hopeful sci-fi ramblings of an optimistic fantasist. A distant utopian future. And if we survive the impending climate apocalypse, the rise of AI, war, famine, pandemics, Trump and Putin, if we can survive all of that, then the future might be a fun place.

Nano-fabrication is technology beyond 3-D printing. Imagine a contraption in your kitchen, maybe the size of your microwave or fridge, and it can literally make stuff out thin air. It can re-arrange the atoms and molecules in the air to make a roast chicken. I couldn’t possibly predict what this roast chicken will taste like, but I love the idea.

Impossible you say. You can’t make something out of nothing. Yes, but even air is made of stuff. Bonded oxygen molecules. Add a bit of hydrogen and you have water. There are all kinds of interesting particles floating in the air. There is data in the air. Shake a bit of chicken stock about and there you go.

More likely this wondrous machine will be the ultimate recycler. A molecular re-assembler. You feed it all your rubbish, and it will break it down into atoms. Dis-assemble then re-assemble those atoms into whatever is programmed. There will be no more household waste and any old crap will become a commodity. Substrate to be recycled into something useful. Waste would become wanted. Rubbish dumps would disappear, the atoms and molecules involved would revolve in an endless cycle of re-invention.

But this is only one of the advantages of having a nano-fabricator in your kitchen. These machines will be able to create anything, any material thing you want or need. You won’t need to buy anything. There will be no use for money when anything you want can be manufactured on the spot. Food, appliances, furniture, clothes, you could download the template for an electric car. Fabricate the individual parts and have your tiny robot army help you assemble it.

Nano-fabrication will drastically transform society as we know it. We wouldn’t need banks, supermarkets, malls, petrol stations, farms or mines. You could design and create your own wardrobe. Any kind of retail, wholesale, manufacturing or primary industry would become obsolete. We wouldn’t need money. We wouldn’t need to work. Capitalism, working for the Man to pay your debts would be a thing of the past. It would be a whole new way of living, but it wouldn’t happen overnight. Capitalism would surely fight back like the oil barons and carbon criminals of today.

One of the most satisfying things about this technology is that it would make billionaires worthless and completely pointless. It would make all their wealth hoarding meaningless, they would have no importance and everything they own would be of no value. The only things that might be of any value in this future will be art, human creativity. We will be able to spend all our time, creating, playing, reading, writing, studying, gardening, cooking, eating and exercising. Not for money but because you want to. We will all live long healthy lives because we will have personal nanobots inside us. In our bloodstream, tailored to our individual metabolism, killing diseases, fighting infections, maintaining the chemistry, keeping us happy and healthy.

The science is complex. There are two different approaches. The bottom-up and top-down. Inspiration for the bottom-up approach comes from biology where nature has harnessed chemical forces to create the structures needed by life. Growing a plant or in the same way, a person. We humans are the living embodiment of the bottom-up method. Scientists hope to copy nature’s ability to produce clusters of specific atoms, which can then replicate and self-assemble into more-elaborate structures. This is how you would fabricate my roast chicken. Bottom-up.

The top-down approach involves taking an existing structure, disassembling it, and rearranging its atoms. This is how you would recycle your rubbish into something useful. Humans have already been building integrated circuits in electronic devices using this technology. These circuits are fabricated atom by atom, using nanomachines. The process is slow and laborious requiring precise, expensive machines but this is early proof that nature is no longer the only nano-fabricator.

My utopian future full of delicious roast chickens is still a long way off. There are two big problems with nano-fabrication. Both problems have delightfully un-scientific names. There is the sticky fingers problem. At a molecular level it is hard to separate atoms and make them stay where you want. They tend to bond with their natural attractors. Keeping a free oxygen O atom from immediately sticking to another O atom and forming O₂ is difficult. There is a reason our atmosphere is made of O₂, CO₂, and H₂O. Those little atoms love each other.

If you could stop them sticking, you then have the fat fingers problem. A nanobot would need tiny mechanical arms to do its assembly work with hands and fingers. The fingers would probably need to be smaller than the atom they grasp, to place it with precision. The trouble is that a finger cannot be smaller than an atom. Nothing can be smaller than an atom. The fingers will always be too fat.

Presuming we overcome the sticky fat finger problems, we would most likely need a trustworthy AI to oversee billions of nanobots. And a trustworthy human to programme the AI. Not all humans are trustworthy, so the technology has the potential to be abused or used for harm instead of peaceful evolution. Swarms of evil nanobots programmed to dis-assemble you and your loved ones is not what we want in our utopian future.

Then there is the possibility of death by grey goo. A catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotech where out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all the biomass on Earth in order to make endless copies of themselves. Ecophagy, the consumption of the ecosystem. It won’t be an army of Terminators killing us, it will be robots too small to see.

Looking at the tiny, molecular building blocks of life is just as mind boggling as looking at the size of the Universe. There are a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of hurdles to overcome. There are many existential issues in front of us right now for our researchers and scientists to save us from. But nanotechnology could save and sustain humanity for thousands of future generations. It is a vision of the future we should pursue.