The Issues of Nano-Safety

Ineffable 27 writes "Today's New York Times has an interesting article looking at some of the emerging research into the health and safety risks of nanotech and nanomaterials." Free reg. blah blah. It's a decent article, but it's the same type of questions that groups like The Foresight Institute have been thinking about for a long long time now.

Comments

Stephenson's the Diamond age

[denubis]

To me, the most interesting part of any given technology are the cultural implications, especially as how with every advance in technology, our options become more manifest and manifold. (And if that last sentence didn't make sense, blame my cold.)

Stephenson's Diamond Age is a fascinating examination of this. Now, given that the book was written on a victorian framework (which shapes what issues are pondered) it is still an enjoyable read, and an even more enjoyable thought experiment into nanotech.

When people have the ability to build anything they want from the atom up, the only thing constraining us will be those constraints that our society dictates. (Everything else is merely requires sufficently talented engineers.) Unfortunatly, the dangerous aspects of nanotech also are only constrained by our society.

Worries about grey-goo scenarios and DNA plagues shouldn't stop us from researching nanotech -- if only for the reason that solutions to these problems can only be found through nanotechnological means.

Anyways, I digress -- for a fascinating study of nanotech, read the Diamond Age.

FUD

[BurritoJ]

The surest way to stifle innovation is to demand that the innovator prove that the invention will cause no harm. As we all know, proving a negative is a daunting task and 'harm' is a nebulous concept. All articles like this do is spread FUD. Fear of the unknown, Uncertainty about the future, and doubt in the benefits of progress.

But will nanotech even be developed?

[mongbot]

Before we start looking into the safety of nanotechhnology, I think the question of whether nanotech will ever be feasible should be addressed. Here are a few basic problems that I've yet to see any solutions for:
1. How is energy going to be supplied to the nanobots?
2. How are the nanobots going to be produced, economically?
3. How are they going to move (wheels, flying)?

I don't understand why there is so much emphasis on such a poorly-defined field of technology that has shown so little promise so far. The smaller you make things, the more difficult and expensive they are to produce. Nanotechnology seems to be just a convenient "magic" technology useful only for SF writers.

Re:But will nanotech even be developed?

[Michael Crutcher]

You know those things in your body called cells? The ones that run on sugars, create copies of themselves, and propel themselves with various techniques (flagella, cilia, etc.)?

Those are pretty damn small, and they seem to work ok. Cells may or may not be nanotechnology depending on your definition but there are definately precedents in nature that show us that nanotechnology is feasible. Viruses might be a better (smaller) example.

Re:But will nanotech even be developed?

[denubis]

Energy -- probably batteries. We're talking about very small scale here, so a nice room-temp supercon (which since we're talking about nanotech, isn't all that far-fetched) should provide for power requirements.
Produced, by other nano-assemblers.

Nanoassemblies should be the cheapest and most efficient production system around -- having many many many small machines "placing" molecules on an on-demand fasion (generally at the place of consumption.) What else do you need? There are no middle-men, there are no shipping costs, there are no store costs. Simply ship atoms and some quantity of data to you, and poof! you've got whatever.

How are they going to move? Depends on the structure and the task, just like things of today. Flying is trivial for nanotech, since (assuming sufficently strong nanotech production abilities) it's really easy to make things lighter than air. Once you do that, simply add 3 turbines going through the center of the device for thrust, and poof!.

The principle premise of true "nanotech" is that we can create machines on the molecular level. Given that the initial machines will probably be quite expensive, the initial machines can then make the next generation of machines that make machines (etc..) simply at the cost of a little energy and the moluecules necessary. Nothing else. Miniturization is only a pain when you're talking about going from a macro scale to a micro/nano scale. When your assembly lines operate on that scale, making things on the same scale is trivial.

Re:But will nanotech even be developed?

[Dr. GeneMachine]

Miniturization is only a pain when you're talking about going from a macro scale to a micro/nano scale. When your assembly lines operate on that scale, making things on the same scale is trivial.

Right. And, conveniently, we don't even have to fully go from macro to nano-scale - biological systems can supply us with many of the tools needed for nanoscale assembly. There is a lot of promising work done in the field of self-assembling nanostructures on DNA and protein basis.

Some minor nitpicks, though. I don't think that the concept of a battery in the classical sense is applicable on this scale. Energy supply will have to be organized in a more biological kind of fashion - just put your nanomachine in some kind of energy gradient, be it thermal or chemical in nature. The first generation of nanomachines will undoubtely be stationary anyway, so you could put them on top of a membrane separating for example a high-proton from a low-proton medium and let them harvest energy from the proton flux along the gradient - again a working concept established in many biological systems, for example bacteria or mitochondria.

For the same reason, I would not be concerned about movement at this stage. Later, though, I don't think it will be as simple as you put it. On the nanoscale, the fluid behavior of gaseous media is completely different from what we know, so your put-in-turbines-and-let-them-fly concept most probably won't work. But, again, we can look to biology - flagella and cilia are quite efficient ways of propulsion in media of relatively high viscosity.

Re:But will nanotech even be developed?

[198348726583297634]

he long-term theory is to create self-replicating, self-powering nanobots

doesn't that seem like an awfully large problem, though? can we even make useful robots at normal scale that self-replicate? this seems like the barrier of the sort of faster-than-light travel. possible intheory, but so far remved from what we can do that it pushes the things beyond it into the realm of pure speculation. (which is, of course, a fine activity, but let's not confuse it with things connected to thereal world.)

Re:thinking about for a long long time now...

[BrookHarty]

The article shows how companies look at the numbers, rather sad.

First.
No one has yet created a realistic test for the effects of inhaled nanoparticles; such a test could easily cost more than $1 million to design and carry out, toxicologists say.

Then.

the federal government's projection that sales of products based on nanotechnology will reach $1 trillion by 2015

Re:Viruses and playing God

[DG]

You said a magic phrase there: "self-replicating"

It is unlikely that any nanobots we'll be dealing with in the forseeable future will be self-replicating. In fact, I think the opposite problem - how to keep the damn things functional long enough to do their job - will be the more prevelent one.

As such, the major issue facing nanobots is more likely to be analogous to the "space junk" problem (what do you do about large numbers of "dead" nanobots) than to be a "gray goo" or "runaway virus" problem.

DG

Re:Nanotechology disposal

[BurritoJ]

Actually, you've got it backwards. It is impossible to prove something safe. In order to do so you have to prove that it has no dangerous properties whatsoever. The more useful test is to prove it dangerous. This is like our legal system, the decision is not innocent/not innocent(safe/not safe), it's guilty/not guilty (dangerous/not dangerous).

There is no product or substance that is 'safe'. Water drowns, oxygen burns (or makes other things burn), helium... that should be safe, it just makes your voice high and squeaky... unless there is too much of it and it displaces the oxygen (oops).

Everything has problems and causes risks, we have to avaluate those risks and mitigate them as best we can. We cannot ignore every advancement because it may be dangerous.