Well... Get ready for Nanotechnology.
A cow is a cow is a cow. God makes them, farmers raise them, we eat them - it's a simple, predictable division of responsibilities. But what is a cow really besides some grass, water and air molecules uniquely rearranged to attrat flies and moo? Now consider the miracle of what the cow does: somehow it manages to take in those ingredients and become steak. Bessie - the ultimate meat machine. What, though, if we could replicate the process? What if we became masters of the molecular universe?
Imagine this kitchen scene, circa 2047: it's time to make dinner. But the fridge and oven are now obsolete. Instead, you go to a device resembling a microwave oven - we'll call it the Assembl-o-Tron. It has tubes running out the back that feed into a public plumbing system run by the DRM, the city's Department of Raw Materials. There's a keypad programmed with the family favorites. You hit F3 for sirloin, fries and a salad. The Assembl-o-Tron sucks at the DRM line for a dime's worth of elemental gunk. Then, billions of microscopic robot assemblers pull and tug at the individual atoms the DRM has provided: carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, maybe a few metals. In seconds, the assemblers have rearranged the elements precisely to yield the proteins and carbohydrates and whatever else makes up a good sirloin 50 years from now. Captain Picard, it's chow time! After dinner, the garbage and fine china can be dumped back into the 'Tron for "disassembly." As long as the DRM isn't offline, cooking and cleanup are forever consigned to antiquity. Now, that's progress.
This is the future world of nanotechnology, the study of the really, really, teeny-tiny - there are a billion nanometers in a meter. That infinitesimal scale is where the real action of the universe is. It's where atoms dance with other atoms to form molecules of everything, from wood to Kevlar to Pop-Tarts.
Playing games in the nanoworld holds the Promethean promise of giving the society any material it wants at virtually no cost - 500-story skyscrapers made from diamond rather than steel, fabulously powerful microprocessors, spaceships that have the strength of titanium but the weight of plastic, paint that changes color, "smart" fog that hovers invisibly in our homes, materializing into furniture or a bathrobe when we say so. Armadas of medical robots will patrol the bloodstream, killing cancers and viruses or scraping out arterial blockages or excess fat. In this future, we'll all die only of boredom.
It's real and its going to happen! Check out my roommates (Steve), research stuff on making the wires of these little nanobots!
The implications are greater than even mile-high skyscrapers. Coin currency would disappear because it wouldn't be worth anything if anyone could make it. Hunger would disappear, the vegetarians would be eating meat because the food wouldn't be coming from the death of an animal, landfills could be recycled, pollution would disappear, the earth would be cleaned up, and materialism would disappear. Why would anyone fight or be proud of objects anymore when anything you see on TV could be grabbed by the press of a button!
So what would be valuable in this brave new world? Certainly not objects, information would. The maps to each object would be valuable, but if everything continues going on the internet, even information would be free. I think finally the one thing that would hold value would be human beings and the arts. Maybe finally our civilization will get a clue.
with help from,
Adam Rogers and Dave Kaplan
I tried to stretch my mind as far as I could to imagine other wild nano-inventions, if you think of any, please e-mail me.