Nothing is as it was. Your speakers are invisible: a coating on the wall. Your shirt can change colour and cannot be stained. Your windscreen cleans itself.
Nothing is as it was. Your speakers are invisible: a coating on the wall. Your shirt can change colour and cannot be stained. Your windscreen cleans itself.
Your car is made of a new kind of steel 100 times stronger but six times lighter. Your jean pockets charge your cell phone.
Your camera is invisible: on your index finger. It’s taking a picture of the future: a strange new world manufactured by nanotechnology. A world so tiny, it has changed everything.
How tiny? When a seagull lands on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the ship will sink by a single nanometre, a drop 80 000 times smaller than the width of average human hair.
At one billionth of a metre, the scale of the nanometre allows scientists access to manipulate individual atoms which are constructed into advanced materials or miniscule devices, like a supercomputer the size of a sugar cube.
What permits the miniscule to be so mindblowing? Think of licking the surface area of a big block of fudge. Now divide that fudge into four.
When slurping over your four new blocks, you’ll notice the surfaces previously inside the big block are now susceptible to your tongue.
In effect, you’re getting at more fudge! It’s the same idea with nanoparticles: when a material is broken down into such tiny building blocks (nanoparticles are a million times smaller than an ant) its surface area is multiplied by a factor of millions – meaning that it become much more reactive.
That’s because, like your tongue has just found out, there’s so much more exposed! But nanotechnology is not all fudge and fun: it changes things.
Nanorobots are being designed to manufacture their own kind, atom by atom, producing nanofactories that could potentially build more nanofactories, to further their output of complex and useful products like self-cleaning filters, which can purify our water.
But what happens if these nanorobots get out of control? What happens people intending to do harm monopolise this kind of technology, using it to create more deadly weaponry, like self-guided bullets?
There is often something forbidding about change, but according to one expert, “An obsession with obsolete science-fiction images of swarms of replicating nanobugs has diverted attention from the real issues raised by the coming revolution in molecular nanotechnologies,” said Dr Eric Drexler, a pioneering nanotechnology theorist, “We need to focus on the issues that matter-how to deal with these powerful new capabilities in a competitive world.” One tiny step at a time.
