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.

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?

[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.