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Real Nanotechnology Getting Closer, Says Drexler
destinyland writes "Sun Microsystems has helped fund a 198-page nanotechnology roadmap — but how
close are we to real nanotechnology? A science writer asked four nano pioneers, including
K. Eric Dexler ('progress is accelerating') and Ralph Merkle ('the exponential trends continue to be exponential') Though we don't have Star Trek replicators yet, the article lists some surprising recent nano developments (artificial tissue, nanoparticle sheets, ultrathin diamond nanorods).
And the roadmap's scientists are envisioning targeted cancer therapies, super-efficient solar cells, high-density computer memory chips and even responsive 'smart' materials."
Wouldn't most of the microchips be considered nanotechnology?
I'm looking forward to JavaNE. :)
In short, 5 to 10 years.
"progress is accelerating"
"the exponential trends continue to be exponential"
Like you guys always say, that Kurzweil is such a crank, isn't he?
"Mites, like viruses, can infect or inoculate people."
At birth you will be infected with government approved nanomites to help regulate your body. I'm betting there will be a built in kill switch in case you become disruptive to the common good.
Ahh... Nanotechnology.
The next big thing.
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beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
weren't the replicators from stargate and not from star trek? don't mind me if I'm wrong, I've just memorized every single stargate episode...
Onda Technology Institute
This is a cross section of the pmos transistors in one of Intels 45nm high-k metal gate CPUs. As you can see there are many layers with a horizontal and lateral extend far below 10 nm. In fact the thinnest layers are in the order of 1-2nm - The gate stack itself consists of a multilayer stack of SiO2/HfO2/TiN, where each of the layers is only 1-3 nm thick.
How is this not nanotechnology?
Most of the known bottom up approaches that are hyped and studied at universities, such as nanoparticles and nanowires, lead to significantly larger structures.
Top down beat bottom up years ago. Sorry guys, it's a nice phd topic but the industry is already there.
Forget all that other stuff - where's the nano-bots that we can inject into fatty tissue, to deconstruct fat and make everyone gorgeous?
that, unlike all other fields of technological innovation, when one speaks of vaporware, one might actually be talking about some sort of useful hardware that literally is a vapor
so nanotechnology has at least that going for it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
just like high-T_C superconductivity, nanotech will change everything, any day now
I can't wait for that fantastic grey goo I'm always hearing about!
Bring it on, Mr. Ellison!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Boy I hope this funding is in the 4-digits or less. Does Sun have better things to spend money on? I think so.
Star Trek has the "cool" sci-fi thing, whereas a lot of people rip Star Gate, but I think the nano-tech future given by the likes of the Replicators are where this nano stuff is headed.
The single greatest shortcoming in human science is its failure to understand outcomes of complex, dynamic systems, and here we are going to make exactly that.
Doesn't get any dumber than that!
This is my sig.
that most scientists these days are 99% PT Barnum, 1% scientist.
I was watching this show called "The Universe" the other day, and they had all these cosmologists on. Ha! "Cosmologists". I'd be embarrassed to call myself a cosmologist. Everything they know right now is going to be considered wrong in 10 years!
"Science", my fanny.
Surely the technology inside of this baby qualifies as Nano(TM) technology.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
All this and they still can't make a coffee pot that can brew an entire 12 cup pot in under 60 seconds without burning the coffee.
Seriously can we get some important technology invented to make our lives easier.
For instance can I get a roomba retrofitted to water my lawn for me? For under $200 bucks?
How about some color changing siding that doesn't bust every time a golf-ball sized piece of hail hits it for less then cement siding.
Self cleaning ceiling fan blades would be nice too...
Self milking cows?
A dog poop scooper that gets under the poop without ripping up the grass...
Yeah! super hard mini-rods. That will make my toast toast faster....
ZZzzz...
Where is my poorly done art-deco nuclear powered car that conspicuously blows up after being abandoned for over 200 years and subsequently shot. Oddly this car will also smoke and burst into flames before blowing up... What the hell is burning in it? After 200 years there isn't going to be any upolhstry left....
Where was I? Who the hell are you people and how did you get on my series of tubes!?!?
Deborah where are my pills?!
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
What's next after nano materials? Radical shifts in government and society. Comments welcome.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
I had a good chuckle.
"Yeah i'll have a cheese pizza with pepperoni"
"Do you want metal-burning acid on your face with that?" PFFTTZZZ
"AAH, THANK YOU REPLICATOR OVERLORDS"
Well membrane technology could apply as nanotechnology. Certain membranes on the market can sieve protiens or even seperate ions.
The scale of the pores is in the angstrom region.
Feynman's "Plenty of Room at the Bottom" drew specific distinctions between chemistry and nanotechnology. The embarrassing lack of advancement in nanotechnology has been filled in by redefining it to include chemistry.
Seastead this.
If you define nanotech as technology of scale closer to a nanometer than a micrometer, ie less than 30 nm, then we are one chip fabrication generation away from it at the moment.
As was pointed out above, the thickness of some semiconductor layers already is down in the couple of nm range, the 30nm I refer to is the length and width of features.
So, according to that first graph, by the year 2025, they will be paying us to take the solar cells off of their hands? You have to hit an asymptote before then, don't you think? From the graph, it looks like the asymptote might have been reached around 2003.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
If we are going to be so gayly pedantic about it, I should point out that replicators were an offshoot of an energy to matter conversion via a complex wave generator managed by a pattern buffer!
Replication had nothing to do with nano-technology. There was no self assembly and that is the essence of nano-technology. The only real nano-tech in trek was 7 of 9's "nano probes"... and boy would I'd have liked to have given her a "mano probe.."
But of course Star Trek had replicators. Replicators were alluded to in the first Star Trek TOS and were made explicit in the TNG, although the TOS movies did have a kitchen scene and I think the TOS alluded to a galley every now and then. In any case, by TNG, the replicator as we know it was here to stay and it was more of a plot problem than breathtaking sci-fi...every time they had an episode where the Enterprise needed something, you always were left wondering.... uh, what about the replicators.
For example, the episode where Worf gets paralyzed was just terrible. I mean, yeah they played the Alex heart strings pretty well, but, if you kept your wits about you, you would ask, why couldn't they just replicate a new Worf spine and pop it in? If the replicator is capable of making real food, like something as organically complex as tea, earl grey, then, it ought to be able to crank out some walking for Worf. Or, look at Data... there was always something goofy or unique about Data, but, why couldn't they replicate him? You could just have an away team where Data gets beamed down, killed, and then you make another Data... For that matter, you could do that with people too.
But I digress.
The real point is that Star Trek always espoused a happy view of technology, particularly when it comes to nanotech. When I ripped Star Trek in the original post, the deal was that I was lamenting that so many people want to make the world like Star Trek... I have to admit, I'm caught up in it. But I think that one thing that is cool about Stargate is that it did have a pretty dark vision of evil nanodudes running around. I know that Star Trek's Borg bugged people, but man, the Stargate Replicators just really gave me the heebie jeebies. Self assembling molecular dudes coming to blow up your planet, that's some rough stuff. Let's not build those Replicators, that's what I'm saying.
This is my sig.
Why do people who've never seen Star Trek assume that the summary is wrong? Are we REALLY that disillusioned by the editors or is this just classic /. troll behaviour?
You need to check your pattern buffers!
Replicators in Star Trek had absolutely nothing to do with nano technology. Replicated things did not self assemble from molecular machines as much as they were broadcast into existence via a huge energy to matter transmitter.
My real point though, was that everyone is building stuff for the future because Star Trek is so wonderful, but, of all ironies, Stargate actually had the best example of nano-tech going wrong, in its Replicators. The Replicators were nano-beings that were created to fight some other bad guys... anyway, it didn't work out the way the nano-inventors had planned and the Replicators were actually some of the worst, most evil, villians in the universe of sci-fi.
Unlike Galactica's Cylons, the Replicators never sissied out... "Nice Centurions" at the end of Galactica. The Replicators would have NONE of that!
This is my sig.
Whatever things people may like to call "nanotechnology," there is really only one important distinction. Can we assemble atoms in any desired configuration? That is what is commonly termed molecular nanotechnology, and it is what most people originally meant.
Once this and fusion are out of the way, life will start to get very interesting; the foundation of our economic systems will become irrelevant as scarcity will cease to be a useful concept.
The goals they're putting out for nanotechnology are generally real and reasonable (more efficient energy conversion, more targeted drug delivery, better chemical sensors, integration of biological and electronic systems). What is unreasonable is that they're essentially getting credit in the media (and in form of investments) for work which they have not done.
None of these guys has worked in a nanotechnology lab. None of these guys has tried to build something starting from atoms. I'm doing both. I work at an Ivy League University in a leading lab for some of the technologies prominently mentioned in that article, but I barely have funding just for this summer. The guy who invented the DNA origami work they're so excited about was recently fired by his University (did not get tenure). A little more support, both in the media and by the companies funding the Forsight Institute, would be really, really welcomed by those of us actually doing the work.
The MIT Media lab is great, but they're not known in the field for being experts on nanotechnology. Not mentioned is the world's best collection of nanotechnology researchers, which happens to also be at MIT, in the physics and engineering departments. If you're at MIT and you want to have a future in nanotechnology, forget the Media Lab, and find one of the professors working with Gene and Mildred Dresselhaus.
Forget nano, my 4 year old processor was created using a 9000 femtometer process!
It's about accelerating "real nanotechnology", and lab nanotech is already building the technology base. US National Labs hosted the project. Sorry, no nanobots.
http://crnano.org/timeline.htm
"Molecular manufacturing (MM) means the ability to build devices, machines, and eventually whole products with every atom in its specified place. Today the theories for using mechanical chemistry to directly fabricate nanoscale structures are well-developed and awaiting progress in enabling technologies. Assuming all this theory works--and no one has established a problem with it yet--exponential general-purpose molecular manufacturing appears to be inevitable. It might become a reality by 2010 to 2015, more plausibly will by 2015 to 2020, and almost certainly will by 2020 to 2025. When it arrives, it will come quickly. MM can be built into a self-contained, personal factory (PN) that makes cheap products efficiently at molecular scale. The time from the first fabricator to a flood of powerful and complex products may be less than a year. The potential benefits of such a technology are immense. Unfortunately, the risks are also immense."
Is it really necessary to prefix "diamond nanorods" with "ultrathin"? Is this to differentiate them from superfat diamond nanorods?
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
"None of these guys has worked in a nanotechnology lab. None of these guys has tried to build something starting from atoms. "
I call shenanigans. Every one of these guys has substantial nanotech street cred going back 20 years or more. Every single one of them has "worked in a nanotech lab". Most of them FOUNDED the discipline of Molecular Nanotechnology.
Drexler did the first substantial theoretical work on precision mechanosynthesis of molecules, the limits and restrictions on carbon-carbon mechanosythesis, charted possible paths to research and development, and so on. Oh and besides providing the theoretical underpinnings for molecular manufacturing (a new term that had to be created because opportunists like Dr. Richard Smalley successfully co-opted the term "nanotechnology" all the while trying to kill the credibility of Drexler and mechanosythesis approaches), Drexler is one of the strongest voices promoting thinking ahead about the risks and ethical implications of widespread use of molecular machines. The Foresight Institute was set up in large part to think ahead of nanotech development and be prepared with ethical and legal guidelines for the development and use of molecular nanotechnology. Oh, and he got the first EVER PhD in Nanotechnology.
Hall, besides being the founding chief scientist of Nanorex (who are developing open-source computational tools to support research in structural DNA nanotechnology), he's published a trunkload of papers on various aspects of nanotechnology. You can find a list here
Merkle did some of the first work on computational modeling of carbon-carbon nanostructures for mechanosynthesis. He worked as a research scientist at Zyvex, the first commercial nanotech research company, for several years. He's apparently still actively researching. His list of recent research papers, along with Freitas's, are here
Freitas is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Molecular Manufacturing. He's published a raft of papers (see link above) and did the first practical research on the theoretical underpinnings of nanomedicine, which he published in his book NANOMEDICINE.
They may not be pushing atoms around with an AFM (or whatever you are doing), but they are laying the foundations for the science and engineering of molecular manufacturing.
Show some respect.
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
Sorry, you're wrong. Drexler didn't come up with "nanotechnology." Smalley's Nobel prize winning nanotechnology work was done 6 years before Drexler got his PhD and published his famous book, and neither of them came up with the original definition of nanotechnology (which was not molecular machining). There are plenty of people who got PhDs in "nanotechnology" before Drexler did, but they were all content for the piece of paper to say physics, chemistry or engineering. I don't think they're bad guys, and I don't think molecular manufacturing is crazy (pay attention to the changes Drexler made in his theories after his discussions with Smalley, they were useful, and as a good scientist he has adjusted his thinking to take into account new data). You'll notice I didn't complain about their goals! I'm complaining that these guys are not being good members of the community in this interview, that those of us who are working in the hands-on side of nanotechnology could use some help, and that these guys need to be sure to mention some of us when they're out talking with Congress and the press about our work. It always pisses me off to see theorists talking about experimental results as if it's trivial to do, and as if there's not even any point to mentioning who managed to do it.
This attitude that you just get an AFM and "push" atoms around (or whatever I'm doing) and it's a piece of cake is typical of what is left in the wake of such absent-minded theorists. I mentioned that I'm working on some of the technologies they talked about. I guess it's good enough for them to be excited about, but I'm some schmuck for actually doing it? Imagine now you're involved in funding nanotechnology research. Do you feel that someone just "pushing atoms around" should get funded? Do you wonder why they're having trouble getting experimentalists to work on molecular manufacturing?
An Australian company named Starpharma seems to be well out in front. go here to read what they have in the market and whats about to be released http://www.starpharma.com/ I always tell my friends imaging life before plastic then imaging the same changes will occur when nano products are readily available in the market Starpharma already has products in the market and one interesting anti viral gel for herpes, AIDS, HPV, just about to be released Disclaimer: i own shares in the company - SPL
Again, shenanigans. I never claimed Drexler came up with Nanotechnology. I said he did the first substantial work on machine-phase nanotechnology... something Smalley spent well over a decade trying to discredit. I remember the arguments and counter arguments back in the early 90s. Of course lots of scientists have been working at the nano-level before and since. My point was that for that specific type of proposed nanotechnology (mechanosynthesis, assemblers, dissassemblers, etc) that these guys did the first serious theoretical work. I still stand by that based on the evidence.
The reason you got attitude from me was that your dismissive attitude towards them and their achievements. I certainly respect both theoretical and experimental research in this or any other scientific field. However, it looked like you were minimizing the importance of the necessary theoretical portions and elevating the experimental. THAT is what I was pushing back against.
I certainly wish you and your compatriots great luck and success in your efforts. I fully understand that without guys like you, its just equations on a page or simulations in a computer ... worthless unless applied.
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon