Welcome To The Apocalypse
by Robin Learning
In the Fall of 1992 Professor K. Eric Drexler was summoned to a private meeting with Admiral David E. Jeremiah, Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"Jeremiah was appalled," observed journalist Ed Regis.
Not without reason. Professor Drexler had informed him that a new form of technology was on the verge of development. Nanotechnology.
Nanotechnology had the capacity to take apart any physical object, any amount of physical objects, atom by atom.
In the course of doing so, it could record the structure of any physical object atom by atom, and then, unlike all the King's horses and all the King's men, put it all back together again, atom by atom.
Nanotechnolgy could even put it back together as some other physical object it had thus mapped. In other words it could put together any physically possible object you could imagine.
Nanotechnology would render all of America's defenses completely useless.
Indeed it could not only render them useless, but could transform them all, overnight, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and every ship, plane, rocket, tank, weapon, and soldier in them, into thin air.
It could turn the entire 3,787,319 square miles of the United States and everything and everyone in it into thin air.
Or pure diamond.
Or Kentucky Fried Chicken, or paper clips, or spermatazoa.
It really could.
The nation that developed nanotechnological weapons capability first would by definition be the strongest military power in history of mankind. Assuming mankind had any history left after they developed it.
Japan's MITI wasn't waiting. Their Ministry of International Trade and Industry had already put $200 million into it, fiscal crisis or no fiscal crisis.
The Admiral got the point. He approached a group of senior naval officers ASAP.
"I stressed the need to invest in nanotechnology," he said. And "not one person there knew what it was."
Was Drexler kidding? The President's Office of Science and Technology Policy didn't think so.
"We take it very, very seriously," said OSTP member Karl Erb. Professor Drexler had given them a briefing on June 26,1992. It had been sobering.
Nanotechnology could do more than just take soldiers apart. It could put them together. You could make people with it. You could make anything with it, in virtually endless amounts. At zero cost. With no special raw materials. With no need for power. Hell, the molecular transformations involved would produce power, not use it.
Nanotechnology could allow anyone in the world to make - well, anything they liked. Andas much of it as they liked. All the food, drink, clothes, drugs, booze, guns, bombs, PC's, microwaves, stereo systems, Rolls Royces, Playboy bunnies and suitcase nukes they could ever want.
Work would vanish.
Then business would vanish.
Then the economy would vanish.
Then taxes would vanish.
Then the government would vanish.
The human race could sit back in their easy chairs and have a potato chip, while a million trillion invisible tiny robots would make dinner, clean the carpet, grow dollar bills on trees and Volkwagens in the garden -- and, oh yes, raise the dead. Some of them, anyway.
As soon-to-be-Vice-President Al Gore had observed to Drexler earlier in the day, some of the implications of nanotechnology were "really quite startling."
Drexler had been called in to testify before the Senate Committee of Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space, and then-Senator Gore strove mightily to plumb the depths of Drexler's elaboration.
Senator Gore: "When you use the word nanotechnology, just so I'm clear in my own mind about this, the first part of that word, nano-, is really a measurement word that connotes something that' s real small, right?"
Dr. Drexler: "Yes."
Oh yes. Real real small. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. That is teeny indeed.
But a physics of the near-infinitesimal was not really new. At least not in theory. Richard Feynmann, who had won the Nobel Prize for Physics and was widely considered the greatest scientist since Einstein gave a talk on the subject as far back as 1959.
It took place at the Huntington-Sheraton Hotel in downtown Pasadena, and the talk was called, "There's Plenty Of Room At The Bottom."
Feynmann started off in the grand manner. "I am not afraid to consider the great question at to whether -- in the great future -- we can arrange atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down!"
That had a lot of implications. For instance, if you could reduce the alphabet to dots and dashes, you could convey information by arranging atoms in the appropriate patterns. And if you could that, you could physically put all the information in all the books in the world onto a cube of material one-one-hundredth of an inch wide -- smaller than a grain of sand.
"The principle of physics, so far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is something, in principle that can be done."
Noted a listener at the time, "The audience wasn't taking this seriously."
For one thing there were quantum effects to consider. Since Schrodinger it was generally felt that atoms were not really there. They were kind of sort of there, but not quite, and occasionally someplace else too at the same time (or earlier and later or all three, every now and then).
Working with atoms, early critics said, would be like working with ectoplasm with a bad attitude, not bricks Couldn't be done.
Others pointed out the problem of kinetic energy. Atoms might not actually be there, but those that seemed to be there anyway also seemed to bounce around a whole lot. An atomic structure wasn't something stable, like a room. It was more like buckshot ricocheting around inside the room.
Plus there was the question of time. If you wanted to warm your hands by the fire and needed to toss in a bit of coal, it might be theoretically possible to pull oxygen atoms out of the air, take them apart, and put them back together in the form of a kilogram of carbon. Maybe.
But there's a lot of atoms in a kilogram of carbon. A whole lot. Even at the speed of a million manipulations a second, it would take you sixteen trillion years to pull the oxygen apart into enough separate atoms for raw material. And then another sixteen trillion to put them back together in carbon form.
A number of scientists considering the question observed that pulling on wooly mittens instead might be quicker.
And speaking of mittens, what about the crushing Fat Fingers' argument? This school of thought averred that Mankind Could Never move objects as tiny as individual atoms because, like the unfortunate girl in the before segment of a before-and-after hand lotion commercial, mankind had fat fingers, which made it very hard to pick them teeny atoms up.
Paul Schlichta, a Caltech grad student at the time, recalled the talk. "There was lots of laughter as there would have to be," He said. "They thought it was a big put-on joke."
Sure. After all, Feynmann was a genius, and everyone knows geniuses are wacky guys. Everyone had a good chuckle over their Bacardi. And then they all went home and forgot about it. Feynmann too.
Until 1976,. When a undergrad making sudsy frappes at the student snack bar at MIT began thinking along the same lines.
His name was Kirn Eric Drexler, the son of a divorced Naval Air officer and a speech pathologist.
He was like many another MIT student -- bright, soft-spoken, "something of a social outcast," polite. His face was a pleasant mixture of Beaver Cleaver and Richard M. Nixon. He'd liked science fiction so much as a young boy that he'd come to like science itself as a young man.
He wasn't really sure what field he wanted to go into, though. So he decided to shop around and was taking a bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary science.
Drexler'd entered college during the age of disco but young Eric was not into "Funkytown" by Lipps Inc. Most nights he'd be at the Hayden Memorial Library at MIT browsing through different science journals, still trying to figure out what in the sciences was hot enough to be worth going into.
He hadn't heard ofFeynmann's talk, of course. Who had? But he had heard of genetic engineering. Now that was hot. Guys were attempting to fiddle with an organism's genes so that it would produce -- well, another sort of organism entirely.
Genes were contained in a single molecule — the DNA molecule. And the really significant thing about the DNA molecule was that, though it wasn't a living thing itself, it seemed to be able to assemble living things. Even non- living things.
DNA was like a computer program: it contained the information that made a cell chomp up other molecules around it and turn them into cells and more cells and then finally into a butterfly or a whale or an ankle bone or a rose.
And what was really neat about it was the fact that if you could change the sequence of atoms that made up a DNA molecule, you could come up with, as Monty Python would say, "something completely different."
And by the early 70's scientists had done just that.
They'd found that by using two families of enzymes you could not only cut up a DNA molecule wherever you wanted, you could also splice in a chunk of another DNA molecule, and make a brand new DNA molecule!
And that would give you a new sort of 'program' whicch would produce a new and different sort of thingie.
It really wasn't terribly hard at all. Viruses did it all the time. They lacked the metabolic equipment to reproduce themselves. So what they did was slip into a host cell and inject their own DNA into it. That way the cell would produce more copies of the virus instead of itself.
And that was about what genetic engineers were trying to doing — trying to get bacteria to chum out vaccines and insulin and human growth hormone and the like instead of more bacteria.
And as K. Eric read about this, he found himself wondering whether you could get DNA to produce other cool stuff besides insulin.
Like maybe... say... a computer.
Why a computer? "People were spending zillions of dollars trying to make small computers so it's apparently a good idea to make small computers," he later explained. "All things being equal, smaller computers are faster and more efficient."
Sounded reasonable.
But tweaking a sperm cell and having a woman give birth to a Macintosh Power PC complete with keyboard, mouse, and Windows 98?
That seemed a trifle over-ambitious.
And it was. And as he thought about just how ambitious it was, K. Eric Drexler had a great insight.
He realized that complicated molecular-scale manipulation was not just theoretically possible (which Feynmann already knew), but that it was actually happening right now.
Constantly.
All around us.
OK, maybe woman weren't giving birth to Macintoshes. But hell -- biIIions of women gave birth to computional devices all the time! It's just that we called them 'children'. One lone single DNA molecule would go out and gobble up other molecules and cut, paste, shift, build, rebuild, ingest, grow, and shape them until -- voila! -- you had a human brain. A biocomputer.
Which not only had a computing capacity exceeding all the then-Macintoshes put together, but was wet, sticky, and could run on cheeseburgers and fries instead of batteries. Now how over-ambitious was that when you sat down and thought about it?
And nature had even done it without government funding!
Taking molecules apart and putting them together again in diferent forms wasn't theory. It was fact. It was everywhere.
"Proof of self-replicating systems of molecular machinery exists in the form of bacteria " said Drexler. "I can t see how to construct an argument against these ideas that does not also deny things we know exist."
Nature did it all the time. And if nature could do it -- why couldn't we?
In fact, why couldn't we do it better? After all, nature had put together the brain over billions of years of trial and error. There were all sorts of inefficiencies and superfluities. Did we really need a computer with a pompadour on top? And the mainframe supporting it. Did we really need the pituitary gland? It just sat there doing nothing -- .
Surely we could slap together an upgraded version.
And as Drexler thought about it it began to dawn on him that we could probably get such molecular manipulators to put together other things too.
After all. If you could take molecules apart and stick them back in new patterns, why restrict yourself to bacteria or brains or even really teeny computers
Why couldn't you take molecules apart and put them together any way you wanted?
"That rapidly began to look like something very big and important," Dresler recalled. "Because if you have this general ability to stack up atoms in complex patterns, well, then you can make anything that's physically possible."
Of course Drexler considered that there might well be a problem with all this somewhere. After all, he hadn't even gotten his bachelor's degree yet. He was probably forgetting to subdivide something by a sub-factor of one or somethmg dumb like that.
He asked around and brought his idea to various friends and people at MIT.
The surprise consensus seemed to be that, no, Feynmann was right. It didn't seem to violate any laws of a nature or fundamental physical rules. Yes, it was possible.
But that didn't mean it was easy.
After all, there were a lot of atoms out there to shove around. A single DNA molecule was made up of a hundred billion of them. By the time you shoved all of them into place you'd be too old to care.
Yesm but Eric had been boning up on his math books and he thought he had a answer to that one.
Say you put together a very tiny machine, atom by atom -- Eric even drew up a detailed schematic and called it a 'nanoassembler' or 'assembler'. Such a machine could assemble (or disassemble) objects by grabbing, positioning, adding, or removing individual atoms or molecules
Well, nature already had such assemblers. Take the ribosome. A ribosome assembled enzymes from instructions coded in the ribonucleic acid it processed. Heck, you could even take a nbosome completely apart and it would put itself back together again. And guess what -- it certainly didn't take a ribosome a billion freakin' years to do its job.
It tooks minutes.
Why?
Because things moved fast on the atomic level. Very fast. Weight, friction, distance, all that stuff just didn't exert as much of a brake on an atom as it did on Godzilla. Nature, again, offered undeniable physical proof of rapid atom-scale construction.
A bacterium, for instance, was made up of billions upon billions of atoms. Yet it could replicate itself entirely in just over fifteen minutes.
If a bacterium could do make a copy of itself, Drexler s assembler could too.
"Working at one million atoms per second," he said of his little assembler, "the system will copy itself in one thousand seconds, or a bit over fifteen minutes -about the time a bacterium takes to replicate under good conditions."
So what?
So this: what if that assembler made not one copy of itself but two? That would lead to an exponential doubling.
In fifteen minutes one assembler would make only one other copies. But in another fifteen minutes, those two would make four. And in another fifteen those four would make eight. And "At the end of ten hours," as Drexler observed, "there are not thirty-six new replicators, but over sixty-eight billion."
Sixty-eight billion assemblers working at the speed of a million operations a second.
That many assemblers working that fast could finish the job very quickly indeed. And you could make as many helpers as you wanted. One assembler would just mosey up to any surrounding object and take it apart, atom by atom, and them put the atoms back together in the form of another assembler.
And when you'd got enough assemblers together, you could work not just on the atomic scale but on real-world objects.
You could sit down in front of your TV, and assemblers could disassemble anything in the house, spouse included, figure out and record its atomic structure in the process, and put that object back together again before the first bath oil commercial interrupted Oprah.
It could then make perfect duplicate copies of that thing. Or any thing. As many copies as you wanted. Literally out of thin air.
Of course there was one (appropriately tiny) drawback. An assembler might go postal and not stop. It might just keep gobbling up all the atoms around it, and keep making even more wacko assemblers like itself chomping away too.
That would not be good.
Ten hours might give you sixty-eight billion assemblers, but that many are still very small. You could fit sixty-eight billion into a thimble easy.
"In less than a day," however, as Drexler pointed out, "they would weigh a ton; in less than two days they would outweigh the earth; in another four hours they would exceed the mass of the sun and all the planets combined."
This became known as the 'grey goo' problem. So named by MIT student Mark Miller.
"The reason that grey goo is grey is because it could take over and eat the whole universe," he explained, "but could never become anything interesting."
Drexler had gathered a small circle of people to look into this new technology of his, and the prospect of grey god sobered the discussions.
As Christopher Fry, one of the participants, said, "We knew that if we weren't careful we could destroy the world in a really weird way."
Drexler was concerned too. But not a whole lot. After all, a nanoassembler would have to be specifically designed to do something like that, and disassembling the solar system didn't seem like a likely high-priority project on corporate or govemmental to-do lists.
It didn't seem terribly likely to occur spontaneously either. Again, Mother Nature showed the way. It produced/assemblers in seemingly infinite amounts and mutations. And yet, the earth was several billions of years old, and no grey goo problem seemed to have occurred spontaneously yet. (Though there did seem to be quite a lot of empty space in the rest of the universe... )
Far more serious, mused Drexler's Merry Men, was the 'red goo' problem.
Red goo was nanotechnology developed specifically for purposes of war or terrorism.
Obliterating the solar system just to get the Protestants out of Dublin might be a trifle excessive even for Sinn Fein. But with a little artful programming, a plucky and innovative nanoterrorist might well produce a molecular device which would, say, disassemble all the black people in the world. Or turn all the oxygen over China into plutonium. Or turn all the calcium within a 2000-mile radius of Washington DC into oxygen: all stateside American bones would vanish and pink bags of human organs would slide down over their shoes and ooze across the floor and sidlwalks in various directions. Ick.
Defense was not possible. No fence, no wall, no radar, no armed -patrol, not all the armies in the world put together, could keep out or even detect invasion by one single invading molecule. You wouldn't know what was happening till it began.
And once it began it would be over fast.
The capabilities of nanotech were such that the nation that attained it first would be (however briefly) de facto military ruler of the earth.
Some people even began to think that maybe never having nanotech it at all might be a good idea. But how could a government not develop it when another government might beat them to it?
And how could anyone resist the promise of a technology that would produce as much of anything anyone could ever want?
A nanoassember could do more than just duplicate itself, go up to anything, take it apart atom by atom, carefully noting where each atom ought to go, and then put the atoms back in places they'd been.
It could put them back in the right places even if they were in the wrong place to begin with. If you gave a nanoassembler a healthy blood cell to analyze, you could inject it into the blood of someone with sick cells, leukemia, say, and it could replicate away and fix up all the sick cells and then take itself apart and float away down the bloodstream and out through the kidneys, job well done. Goodbye, leukemia. Goodbye, cancer, AIDS, heart disease, diabetes, pneumonia. Goodbye, wrinkles, arthritis -- old age.
We could all be seventeen again. Forever.
Drexler got to work. Was it really possible? He dug into his engineering and physics and chemistry texts.
And in 1981 produced one of the odder papers ever printed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences.
It was called "Molecular Engineering: An Approach to the Development of General Capabilities for Molecular Manipulation."
It was odd because it didn't do what a scientific paper was supposed to do. Scientific papers are supposed to report what happened when scientist X did experiment Y, or else it might propose that some scientist do thing Y and see what results. Hard data was what mattered.
Drexler's paper didn't refer to any experiments or results or any hard data at all. He just pointed out that an entirely unthought-of area of technology and engineering was possibIe -- and not just theoretically possible, but technically achievable. Possible in a matter of years -- a few decades at most.
"Gene synthesis and recombinant DNA technology," wrote Drexler, "can direct the ribosomal machinery of bacteria to produce novel proteins, which can serve as components of larger molecular structures," and so on.
'Can'? This was speculation, surely. Claims, moreover, that couldn't even be refuted. Who really knew what you 'could' do at the atomic level till someone actually wnet down and did something there? And no one could. Everyone knew atoms weren't really 'there'.
Drexler, they wailed, had a ridiculous pre-quantum view of atoms being tangible and movable. He talked about "molecular scale production systems", atomic robot factories. The kid didn't even have a PhD yet, for God's sake!
And yet, however speculative, to some readers it did seem -- possible.
Consider biotechnology. Biotech worked by making atomic-scale changes to the DNA molecule. In 1978 Genentech had spliced some bacteria up and came up with a new bacteria that actually did produce insulin, automatically, night and day, with no human labor. Just like Eric Drexler's projected thingumabobs were supposed to do. It was real. It was happening.
The idea of a similar technology, one that could manufacture (at labor costs that "approach zero") not just insulin but "anything that was physically possible" -- well, it would be kind of nice to have everything you ever wanted for free, wouldn't it?
Scepics continued to groan. But not refute. And Drexler began to attract a following. But Drexler rather than hit the lecture circuit, Drexler began too to do something rather unusual among scientists. He had been thinking about the social implications of his creation. They were numbing.
It wasn't just a matter of making your computer so small it could fit into your wristwatch instead of your desk top.
"Detailed study shows that assemblers could build the equivalent of a large modem computer in about 1/1000 of the volume of a human cell," said Drexler. "A desktop machine," he added, "could have more raw power than all the computers in the world today combined."
It wasn't only that "such a machine would have the raw power of a million million brains." Or even that there could be untold hundreds of millions of them in use virtually overnight.
It was the matter of their speed.
At the atomic level,computation, like everything else, moves fast.
A brain synapse could signal another synapse in a matter of milliseconds. But the clock speed of a nanocomputer would involve "a factor of a million speedup in the switching operations," Drexler had calculated.
"In many fields that means you could get a million years of research and development done in one year."
A million years.
And it wasn't even a matter of just of speed, or or changing 'things', or of altering the physical environment around us.
It was a matter of changing us too. Radically.
If you had complete control over the structure of matter, you had complete control over living matter -- human biology.
Whatever else a person might be, he or she was a particular structural arrangement of atoms.
If a nanoassembler had checked out the arrangement of those atoms earlier it could put them back together, and keep them that way. Yes, that could mean no more sickness, no more age, no more death. You could cut a person into a thousand pieces or blow them up with a grenade — the chunks would jump up and re-arrange themselves right back into place!
But you could also improve on the arrangement.
Forrest Carter of the U.S. Naval Research Lab was one of those into nanotech, and said publicly that, "we could make a molecular computer a hundred times more dense than the human brain -- easily."
We could also make the human brain itself a hundred times more dense. A hundred times more fast.
A million times more fast.
Drexler wanted to think this through a minute. He wanted others to think it through as well.
Drexler began talking to other scientists, and gave lectures on "Coming Technological Revolutions" The content of his talks: nanotechnology was coming, and when it came, nothing absolutely nothing, would be the same.
He sat down and wrote a book for laymen on the topic "Engines of Creation," published in 1986. Then another, "Unbounding The Future."
He organized the Nanotechnology Study Group at MIT. He formed the Foresight Institute -- world nano HQ. Originally operated from atop his wife's kitchen table, it soon expanded to several hundred members as the possibilities of nano began to interest and attract dozens of the best minds in several fields.
And like all true prophets he began to alienate. "His name just automatically spawned negative feeling," noted grad student Lynda Cobb.
After all, what had he actually done but walk around preaching a loony science-fiction scenario? Where was the hard evidence? The actual atom 'pulled out of this molecule and stuck into that one? The molecule that got deliberately consciously snapped into place as advertised?
Like Rodney Dangerfield, he got no respect. Princeton University chemist referred to the Drexler gang as "evangelists of the technocratic heaven." MIT chemist Julius Rebek dismissed Drexler's admirers as "nanotheologists". Philip Barth of the Hewlett-Packard Company summed up the feelings of many when he said of Drexler, "The man is a flake."
It was in some ways understandable. Drexler had not produced any experimental scientific papers. He had not shown any testable results. He had not managed to move one tiny little atom much less manipulate a bunch of them into a whole new arrangment. And he still hadn't gotten his PhD!
The bottom line was, nanotechnology didn't mean a thing until someone somewhere picked up one actual atom and stuck it someplace else. And according to the quantum mechancs people, that just plain wasn't possible. It would never happen. Ever.
Then it happened.
In 1989, at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose California, despite quantum theory, thermal vibration, and Fat Fingers, experimenters picked up thirty-five atoms of Xenon, one by one, and dragged them around on a surface, and spelled, "I - B - M".
"I think we were over Iceland when I found a report on a new type of scanning microscopy being developed," recalled Stanford professor Cal Quate. That was in 1982.
Physicists Heinrich Rohrer and Gerd Binnig at IBM Zurich had come up with device that served as a microscope by essentially feeling its way across the surface of a structure and then constructing an image based on that information.
What was unique about the Scanning Tunneling Microscope, or STM, was its sensitivity: it's needle tip could feel its way across a surface "with a precision of one or two tenths of an angstrom." Noted Binnig, "It can even resolve features that are about a hundredth the size of an atom."
Your typical atom was one angstrom in length, and here was a machine taking measurements one hundredth the size. It could measure the atom for a tux!
There was only one problem. Sometimes the needle would dive right into an atom and bring it right up out of the molecule.
And that was irritating. You'd have to pull the needle out and, like, wipe the atom off on your shoe or something. But then someone hearing about the guys doing this wondered whether, by moving atoms like this, it might meand that they were — moving atoms? Just like Drexler had said?
Well, yes. But they didn't mean to. The damned stuff just got stuck on their needles. It wasn't until 1986 at AT&T Laboratories at Murray Hill, New Jersey, that scientists deliberately picked up one single atom and put it on a surface exactly where they wanted to put it.
And it wasn't till nearly a year after that that they managed to deposit one single atom at a precise point on a surface and then remove it again. They were proud of that.
"The reverse manipulation, the removal of pinned molecules, has been demonstrated," they said. Period.
And then at Almaden researchers finally produced an actual deliberate atomic design, a new atomic pattern never before seen in nature: "IBM"
Everybody joined the party! Soon scientists were spelling out "Peace" and "E=mc 2" all over the place. Using atoms like mosaic chips, they drew pictures ngingerbread men, maps of the Western Hemisphere, graffiti of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out. It was easy!
Eventually their supervisors calmed them down. More serious work began. In 1991, IBM's Eigler and Schweizer put together the first atom switch. An on-off device - the basis of all computer construction.
J.Fraser Stoddart, the British chemist, built a molecular train set — a track made of atoms, with atom rail guards, atom stations, and even little atoms to run around the tracks as trains. Which they did, stopping at the stations in sequence three hundred times a second.
"It is possible to create an apparently complex molecular structure with remarkable ease," yawned Stoddart.
Other techies were not napping. During the winter of 1987/88, at E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company in Delaware, the world's first artificial protein was designed and built in the lab.
Project head William DeGrado cited "Drexler, 1981" and had specifically used his "inverted approach" to design single molecular structures which snapped together to form -- a nanostructure: "four identical designed helices connected by three identical, designed loops."
He felt that this technique "will allow us to think about designing molecular devices in the next five to ten years."
And in 1990, researcher Julius Rebek produced the the world's first self-replicating molecule. When it split apart, the two halves wandered off, chemically attracted new atoms, and formed two new molecules - each an exact duplicate of the original. Which they did millions of times per second, once they got going. Just like nanoassembler were said to be unable to ever do.
And soon-to-be Nobel Prize winning chemist Richard Smalley? He was actually building nano nuts and bolts with which to put together molecular machines --'nanotubes', a billionth of a meter wide, with a wall one atom thick.
And a 'nanofinger': a long slender pole of atoms. You put two of them together like chopsticks, and voila -- no more Fat Finger problem!
And then there were the Australians! According to Australasian Business Intelligence, June 5, 1997, various companies down under (with the help of covert funding by the Australian government which had kept the whole project secret) had actually built a -- well, something pretty impressive.
Reports seemed to vary. "The existence of a biosensor device," "The first functioning device in the world that successfully uses nanotechnology, in which single molecules act as moving parts in the machine's work."
"The Australian Membrane & Biotechnology Research Institute, has worked for over ten years under strict non-disclosure limitations to develop the world's first nanotechnology device; funding over the years has come from organisations, the Industrial Research & Development Board, and other private and government bodies; among the products now being developed that use the technology is a swipe card security system."
"A secret nine year joint venture between CSIRO, Sydney University and a subsidiary of Pacific Dunlop, has created the world's smallest machine; the project cost a total of $27 millions; the machine will be used to detect 'quickly and cheaply the minutest quantities of drugs, hormones, viruses and pesticides and identify gene sequences for diagnosing certain disorders; micromachines or nanotechnologies will use biological rather than mechanical parts.'"
And then Oak Ridge got on the bandwagon: ABIX, 1997: "Research being carried out at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee hopes to use nanotechnology to build medical robots that can travel through the blood stream repairing tissue."
And for the piece de resistance? Kim Eric Drexler finally got his PhD. The first ever given, for molecular nanotechnology.
He even stopped lecturing, and sat down and wrote a real hard-science text on the subject at last. The sort of number-drenched jargon-laden scientific paper incomprehensible to laymen that everyone had been waiting for.
He called it "Nanosystems," one equation hurtling on the heels of the next like Gadarene swine. The Association of American Publishers named it the outstanding book in computer science for 1992.
Even the establishment was impressed by now. Even researchers at IBM Watson, longtime Drexler foes, grudgingly admitted, "the calculations he's done... may turn out to be right."
All glory is fleeting, though. Kurt Mislow, a former critic newly converted to the nano-faith, thought the whole book terribly passe -- "dull," "hopelessly medieval," etc. "Why doesn't he think nano," Mislow exclaimed?
Even the Box itself -- the long-awaited Box thatcould produce anything (or/as Drexler liked to refer to it in gobbledygook, 'an exemplar manufacturing system architecture') -- there it was on page 421, all designed and ready to go, as soon as someone made the first assembler to pop in it and start replicating.
The machine that could make an endless amount of whatever you might want -- including millions of copies of itself to hand out to the world on every street comer.
No, even that was old hat. Josh Storrs Hall, founder of the net newsgroup sci.nanotech, had already worked out a 'utility fog' -- a kind of spray cologne that would spritz nanobots on the user, surrounding him or her like an invisible odorlesss aroma.
Hall's nano-scent would hover about the user like an invisibly linked shield, opening doors, catching flying objects, converting the air and sunlight/into Big Macs or Dom Perignon or squash rackets as needed, and -- pop! -- converting it back to a balmy spring breeze once done. Who needed to lug around a bulky old box? Hall's fog would turn drab old physical reality around you into whatever you wanted it to be, without even being visible at all. Now that was elegant
"I believe that in our diverse, competitive world, basic human motivations make nanotechnology effectively inevitable," Drexler had said.
Events seem to be proving him right.
By 1998 research into nanotechnology was advancing at Yale, Princeton, MIT, Comell, CalTech, Rice, Rutgers, Arizona State, Penn State, Duke, Stanford^Perdue, NYU, Berkeley, and more.
In Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, government research was and is being done by the departments of the U.S. Army and Air Force, NASA, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Commerce and Energy.
A British parliamentary report stated that some 80 billion dollars in private corporate funding alone was pouring into nanotechnology.
And in California the Zyvex Corporation formed "with one single corporate goal": the development of the first nanoassembler. Estimated Time of Arrival? Any day now.
"Our accelerating technology," said Dr. Hans Moravec, "will soon reach a kind of escape velocity that will carry us into a new and radically different world."
Different? That seems to be an adequate description.
What happens to the world when you put the entire computing power of the earth, "the raw power of a million million brains", into the head of a pin? And that pin head begins to produce two, four, eight, sixteen, trillion trillion trillion pinheads exactly like itself in less than a week?
What happens when a woman can take a pill that turns her into a man? Or a Brontosaurus? Or a thousand indistinguishable copies of herself?
What happens when there's no more need for poverty, or jobs, or work, or disease, or age, or death?
What happens when anyone can turn the physical environment around them, and their own bodies and brains, into anything they want?
And what if all of it has already begun to happen and can't be stopped?
Welcome to the Apocalypse: you're about to find out.
