Sanduleak
Wordsmith
Posts: 238
(1/19/02 10:53 pm)
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 Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology is a term that will become more and more well known and widespread in the coming years. I have a feeling that 25 years from now the term will be as familiar to people in everyday language as 'computer' is now.
Here's an interesting link to a portal site discussing the basics of Nanotechnology and its potential.
Nanotechnology
A small snippet from the site;
Quote:
Nanotechnology is the rapidly emerging technology of building machines and mechanisms with the next level of ultimate precision and miniturization. It uses a basic unit of measure called a "nanometer" or "nm". A nm is really really really really really really really really really small. [Though not as small as Planck length (roughly equal to 1.6 x 10-35 m) but I digress .... ]
"How small" you may ask? Here goes:
There are one billion nm's to a meter. 25,400,000 nm's to an inch. Each nm is only three to five atoms wide. They're small. Really small. ~50,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Did I mention small? Good thing I did, because they're, let me see .... small.
Nanotechnology is also all about building things using individual components at the nm scale. Super small computers [think bacteria] with today's MIPS capacity, or supercomputers the size of a sugar cube, possessing the power of a billion laptops, or a regular sized desktop model with the power of trillions of today's PC's.
Related and interwoven fields include, but are not limited to: Nanomaterials, Nanomedecine, Nanobiotechnology, Nanolithography, Nanoelectronics, Nanomagnetics, Nanorobots, Biodevices [biomolecular machinery], AI, MEMS [MicroElectroMechanical Systems], Biomimetic Materials, Microencapsulation, and many others.
Some things that become practical with mature Nanotechology [paraphrasing Dr. Drexler]:
Nearly free consumer products
PC's billions of times faster then today
Safe and affordable space travel
Virtual end to illness, aging, death
No more pollution and automatic cleanup of existing pollution
End of famine and starvation
Superior education for every child on Earth
Reintroduction of many extinct plants and animals
Terraforming Earth and the Solar System
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