Here Come the Nanites!

by Thomas Caldwell

I came across this statement in a novel I read recently. Simple, but insightful. Mankind has been trying to come up with more and more technologically advanced ways to get killed over the last few centuries.

Whatever other benefits it may bring, new technology almost always means new hazards to life and limb In the good ol' Cro-Magnon days, the greatest danger we would have faced was probably falling off a cliff while pursuing our dinner, or not running fast enough and becoming someone else's dinner. Today, we risk getting run over by a car, being electrocuted by one of the many wires strung over our heads, or plummeting to our death in a disabled airplane. .

Personal computers, in comparison to many other technological contraptions, seem like downright peaceful little things. PCs pose little personal hazard, unless one gets dropped on your head. But what about the future? What PC-related perils does it hold?

Nanotechnology is a term that many of us have already heard, but few have really understand. Briefly, nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter at the molecular level, with the aim of creating new products with atom-by-atom precision. This new technology has the potential to revolutionize the industrial and medical world like nothing else in our history. But it also has the potential to do us in.

Some nanohistory
Back in the 1970s, all sorts of strange things were in style: disco dancing, wide neckties, and cryogenics freezing people in the hope of reviving them in the far and distant future. One of the folks who was looking into the problems of overcoming the side effects of cryogenics was K. Eric Drexler.

Drexler reportedly was looking at ways to rebuild the cellular damage caused by the freezing process when someone is ready to be thawed out. He came up with the novel idea of sending tiny machines in to do the job machines that he termed "nanorobots." The nanorobot/nanotechnology concept eventually became a book entitled Engines of Creation, one of several he has since authored as he and others have expanded on the concept.

Dr. Tanya Sienko, a researcher at Japan's National Institute of Science and Technology Policy, is one of only a few people actively following nanotechnology developments in Japan. She has coined terms for the two categories of nanotechnology. "Strong nanotechnology" focuses on the general-purpose assembler: a microrobot that, with the proper programming, can build anything. "Weak nanotechnology" is anything up to "strong," including the manipulation of matter at the atomic level.

Think about the potential for a second. In theory, if you can control and rearrange atoms in any way you wish, you can literally create anything. Anything! The miniature robots that Drexler originally envisioned as going into the body's cells to repair damage or fight disease are just one of countless applications. With advanced nanotechnology, we can create new sorts of construction materials, chemical compounds, electronics components....

Even food will be able to be created. The "replicators" out of the Star Trek television series are basically what we are talking about here. Except this isn't science fiction, and we won't have to wait centuries before it becomes a reality.

But we're not quite there yet.

According to Dr. Sienko, scientists have not yet reached the point of strong nanotechnology. (Some scientists claim that we never will.) "However, we are starting to see [weak] applications that could have commercial applications within a few years," she says. "Among them are computer memory design and pharmaceuticals. If drugs can be designed at the molecular level, we could create chemicals that will be taken only to specific parts of the body where they are needed, and inserted into the cells with no side effects."

Nanocomputing
Computer technology seems to be where nanotechnology will first be exploited. The ability to control individual atoms, in large numbers at one time, would give the ability to create circuits that are only one atom wide. And computers with circuits that are nothing more than individual atoms would mean processor speeds measured not in megahertz, but in terahertz (million megahertz).

"There are several levels of futuristic computer technology. The question is how much of that can be really considered nanotechnology, and how much is just simple continuation of present chip design," says Dr. Sienko. The amount of shrinkage we are talking about here is almost beyond belief. A nanotech computer the size of a current laptop, by some accounts, could conceivably hold as much computing power as now exists on the entire planet.

In Japan, leading nanotech researchers are concentrating primarily on computer applications, with the aim of creating the next-next generation of computer chip (in spite of the fact Japan has invested considerable resources into biotechnology). Among the Japanese public sector organizations involved in the development of the computer nanotechnology are the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), the Ministry of Education, and the Science and Technology Agency.

MITI seems to be taking the lead in Japan's nanoeffort, with quite a few nanotechnology-related projects already in the works under its Industrial Science and Technology Frontier Program (ISTP). These ISTP projects last from 10 to 12 years and have budgets of from JPY200 million to JPY20 billion each. No tangible results are yet forthcoming from these efforts, but it may not take long.

Most of the major breakthroughs in nanotechnology in the US over the past several years, on the other hand, have been in the area of biotechnology applications: the self-assembly of molecules into grids, lattices, and other structures with medical applications, for example. One crossover project that is going on is the design of biologically-based neural networks for AI (artificial intelligence) applications. In other words, living computers. Medical technology is combining with computer technology in an attempt to create biocomputers.

Nanites
Still, the most exciting direction this field is going in seems to be towards little robots (nanites) that could be the factory workers of the future. Microscopic construction robots designed to build almost anything at the molecular level could set off another industrial revolution. "This could be considered what I call 'strong nanotechnology' because it is a combination of robots, miniaturization and information technology," says Dr. Sienko.

Trying to program nanites would, to say the least, be a bit of a challenge. The original idea for giving nanites their instructions was to transmit a program by using broadcast communications. This would enable the nanorobots to be easily controlled and, if things got out of hand, the transmitter could just be turned off.

Units that could operate with autonomy, however, would need a computer coding system similar to Mother Nature's own nanotechnology: DNA. This is the programming code of every living thing, including us, and it seems to work fine.

The dark side of the force
In all technology, there is room for misuse. Nanotechnology has the potential for a lot of serious misuse. The sinister applications of nanotechnology are as near as your dreams or rather, your nightmares.

If you are dealing with something like nanorobots the product of several scientific disciplines over which no single country has a monopoly it will be almost impossible for any country or world body to control or prohibit the development of nanoweapons. Wars of the future might not involve actual human combat as much as they would a series of preemptive strikes against the "enemy's" nanorobots. Given the proper materials and instructions, nanorobots can build almost anything. Give them instructions to destroy something, and they will do it with just as much efficiency.

Will governments be able to control nanotechnology development? At this point it is rather doubtful, no matter how sinister the application. Nanotechnology is an interdisciplinary field that requires all sorts of knowledge to make it work (chemistry, biochemistry, biology, physics, materials science), and no one type of science, or nation, holds all the keys. So many fields are applicable to nanotechnology that trying to control the flow of knowledge would force the virtual halt of all research and technological advancement.

On the nightmare side, the military could use nanotechnology to create a bug that would break down tanks or airplanes at the molecular level literally devouring the vehicle while leaving its human occupants unscathed (but a real problem if you happen to be a fighter pilot who flies into a cloud of the things). And the opposite application is possible. Nanites could be developed that would devour only the organic components (the soldiers) so a tank can be reused by the other side. And unlike a neutron bomb or nerve gas, there would be no environmental clean up to worry about afterwards. (Not worried yet? Then just try to imagine the Aum Shinrikyo folks getting their hands on this stuff.)

Unlike an atomic bomb, which needs enormous industrial capacity and is still a hard commodity to come by, nanotechnology research is not (and almost cannot be) under any sort of government or military control. The US military doesn't seem to be very interested in nanotechnology (at least, not publicly), but that could change if things start to materialize.

Besides the human preoccupation with war, there is also human folly and stupidity. What if a system runs amok and can't easily be shut down? Let's say a mad scientist programs some nanites to make rubber balls out of backyard dirt. And suppose a few of them get away and end up in his neighbor's back yard, ruining a neighborhood barbecue. Some of the nanites ride home with the guests on the soles of their shoes, and eventually all the dirt on the planet is turned into clusters of rubber balls. No specific instructions would not be necessary to do us in. Just carelessness.

Or a doomsday nanite might be programmed to reproduce itself with any and all material it comes into contact with. The Earth would be gone in no time.

This leads back to the question of programming nanorobots. High on the lists of researchers now looking into ways the things would be programmed is a way to introduce self-correcting codes: the nano-equivalent of a "death gene" that would stop the things at a certain point ( say, when they finished making 10,000 rubber balls). Still, anyone who used a computer knows bug-free software doesn't exist.

Currently, nanotechnology is nowhere near the level of us having to worry about the end of the world. But it could get there sooner than we think.

Some of the first experiments that are being done involve the use of scanning tunneling microscopes to manipulate individual atoms on a substrate. All that has been achieved so far is drawing pictures, but things are likely move ahead very quickly.

Material created atom-by-atom could be available in our lifetime. "I would estimate within 20 years, and I wouldn't be surprised if shows up within 10," says Dr. Sienko. "It's a technology you can see coming towards us at the speed of a freight train."

Suggested references:

http://www.foresight.org

http://nanotech.rutgers.edu/nanotech/

K. Eric Drexler; Engines of Creation (Anchor Books, 1986; ISBN 0-385-19973-2); text available on the Web at http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html.

K. Eric Drexler, Chris Perterson, and Gayle Pergamit; Unbounding the Future (Morrow, 1991; ISBN 0-688-09124-5).

Neal Stephenson; The Diamond Age (Bantam, 1995; ISBN: 0-553-09609-5; fiction)