Nanotechnology War, and Just How Big Are Nanobots Anyway?

Many ideas come forward in discussions of possible nanotechnology wars. It is interesting and scary to contemplate a war using electromechanical nano-weapons. (My assumption is that we will have electromechanical nanotechnology in place before we develop biological nanotechnology, though that will win out eventually.) Would an aircraft dump a bucket of nanobots over a country like dust? Would the air currents waft them all over the world? Or would they be brought in with a shipment of goods? Since the technology exists to provide nanobots with radio receivers, could they be commanded as to when, what, where, and how to attack? Since radio suggests the possibility that nanobots would have GPS-like capability, would everything within a particular set of borders suddenly begin to rot from a concentrated nanobot attack, while nothing on the other side of the border would be touched? Would nanobots home in on particular cells in the body and cause the heart to stop, or deadly toxins to be produced by previously benevolent cells? Would independent nanobot factories the size of a human hair be deployed to continuously manufacture nanobot armies and reinforcements, like extremely sped-up hives of bees? And how would you defend against nanobot attack?

The Nanotechnology Future

In the future, the transition I have previously proposed (link) can be expected to proceed from electromechanically-based nanotechnology to biologically-based nanotechnology (though there may be considerable parallel development).  During the prevalence of electromechanical nanotechnology, which I expect will last at least a few decades, the manufacturing of the devices will probably need to be implemented on a massive and extremely cost effective scale.  If a thimble full of nanobots is needed to protect a person from cancer, clean your basement, or disinfect a restaurant kitchen, for example, there will be a need for thousands of tons of nanobots and larger microbots. 

Will the Need for Sustainability Create a More-Virtual Future?

Watching how one of my children has come to sometimes live almost as much in a virtual world as in the real one, I have to contemplate where our communications infrastructure and systems might be in twenty years or more.  My other two children concern me more because they are not staying in touch with the world of the internet, and it is something I find increasingly useful in both my job and personal life.  As I hunt for a new job on-line, I worry that they will be less well-equipped for life in the future.

The Future of Personal Communications in North America

The economic globalization we are currently experiencing will continue, given the continued ease and low cost of moving products and information around the world. This will continue to affect national economies, moving the relative buying power of individuals towards a global average as it levels the economic playing field. As a result, those in the middle classes who live in the richest countries, and who have enjoyed a high standard of living for the past few generations, will experience a decrease in buying power. In the absence of other major changes, the rate of change will taper off as incomes and standards of living normalize to a new level. In essence, globalization will reach a state of what might be called maturity. The question that concerns me now is, will that new economic average level provide the buying power for the average person to have the sort of modern high technology personal communications tools prevalent in the developed countries today?

Sustainability and Product Quality Improvement

As Dr. Saul Griffith was reported to have said in his talk at the eTech conference in March of 2008, and as I mentioned in a previous entry (link), in a sustainable future we can expect to have one tenth as much stuff, and make it last ten times as long. This will mean achieving quality and durability levels in the items we use everyday that will support, or at least approach this. There is more to this, however, and the implications for business are interesting.

Housing Starts and Sustainability

For decades I’ve heard the media using “housing starts” as a key indicator of economic activity and the state of the economy, and it has always concerned me.  It just seems intuitive that we can’t keep starting new housing forever, and it smacks of a growth-oriented mindset that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense given what we know today.  In fact, doesn’t it seem intuitive that sustainability will mean low, stable numbers of housing starts?

Future Healthcare: Universal or Private, How Do We Get There?

There is widespread agreement that today’s healthcare system in the United States is ineffective and problem-ridden.  From having somewhere near one fifth of U.S. citizens living with no health insurance (link), to hospitals closing in the poorest areas (link), to massive amounts of medical fraud (link), extremely high costs of qualifying new treatments (link), and ever-expanding drug company profits (link).  It is interesting that the worst health system problems seem to be in the richest free-market economy in the world.  Is this an indication that when a medical system is comprised mostly of privately held, for-profit corporations it is incapable, systemically, of serving the average citizen as might be expected?  While some countries with universal health care systems of one type or another also report problems, I have to wonder if any of them approach the incredibly complicated, ever-worsening U.S. health care system. 

A Parallel: Human Biology and Achieving Sustainability

I’m not a biology expert, but I keep thinking about the parallel between how the human immune system works and how we as a species address the need for sustainability.  Just as the human body generates and “trains” immune system cells with the keys (molecular structure) to recognize and deal with microbial threats to the body, the human species must generate new members with the knowledge, understanding, creativity, and ability to deal with the problems we confront ourselves with, and our environment presents to us. Human groups that work against knowledge, science, and understanding parallel certain infections of the immune system, and are among the problems that, in the end analysis, are essentially threats to our survival as a species. So how do we produce a future population of humans capable of dealing with groups that work against sustainability, creating and maintaining a sustainable ecology, increasing the probability that we will survive in the long term, and minimizing suffering along the way?  Can we learn from the parallels that can be drawn between the ways our bodies work and the ways global human society works?

Incentives for Improvement Leading to Sustainability

As has been discussed here and elsewhere, good public information and the education to understand and internalize it are essential to making needed changes in daily behavior, but I don’t think that is enough. Actual incentives need to be applied to speed up the process and change our direction. I also see incentives for individuals being different from those for corporations, as their goals are different, but I’m wondering: how are they different, and how can we provide more effective incentives to each?

Business in a Sustainable World

How will corporations and the economy change if the public internalizes the concept that we all need to buy one tenth as much stuff and make it last ten times as long? Is the thrift store one of the big businesses of the future?

More on How “Growth” is Regarded in U.S. Culture

I wrote an entry before (link) about my feelings on the way the press in North America uses the term “growth”, and how the concepts of increased consumption, population, land use, and corporate profits are lumped together.  It is constantly implied that more people must consume more of everything for the economy to be healthy.  I believe this will have to change, however, to achieve sustainability, but how?

Sustainable Homes of the Future

Will trees someday be genetically engineered to grow around spaces and form our homes?  Will they grow the required plumbing, wiring, ventilation ducts, etc. into their structures?  Or should we just be asking … when?

Should We Slow Scientific and Technological Progress to Avoid Unbalancing Our Ecology?

A lot of the recent concern about the risks of genetic engineering and nanotechnology, as well as overuse or misuse of natural resources, focuses on the possibility we could unbalance our global ecology with potentially problematic or even disastrous results.  Obviously we need to be very careful of any new technology, but can we afford to hold back technological progress on any front, given the global problems we face from overpopulation, pollution, climate change, etc.?

A Simple Approach to Climate Change

I was fortunate enough, thanks to Cory Doctorow’s entry on BoingBoing.net (possibly my favorite multi-contributor blog of all time), to catch Cory’s notes on a keynote speechby Dr. Saul Griffith at the O’Reilly ETech Emerging Technology Conference titled “Energy Literacy”, given on March 4, 2008.   In his speech, Dr. Griffith set out some simple steps that need to be done to stabilize the global climate and achieve a sustainable energy infrastructure.

Although this exercise involves some oversimplification, I believe the concept is straight forward and meaningful.  As Dr. Griffith explained, from a global perspective we need to:

More Nano-Thoughts on Future Technological Possibilities

The emergence of nanotechnology in recent decades gives much fodder for speculation and daydreaming, and many questions around the potential of nanotechnology to help us acheive sustainability have come to me. As I find the topic intriguing, I will share some of my questions and speculations with you here, and hope to live long enough to see at least some of the knowledge involved being found, studied, and used to make life better for all life on Earth. Please read on, and I welcome you to add your ideas, concerns, and thoughts in the comments.