Molecular Nanotechnology and Literature :: Cause Effect Science Technology Essays

Molecular Nanotechnology and Literature Imagine a world where you could have anything you wanted. Gold? Here it is. A new car? Presto. Diamonds? Oh, here, please have some of mine, there's more in the back. Of course, this is not our world at the present, but it might be the world of the future. Molecular nanotechnology will be able to provide whatever one needs or wants, for free or for a minuscule amount of payment. However, it will not only affect commercial and material goods. It will affect medicine, war and weaponry, law enforcement, espionage, entertainment, disposal of waste and garbage, and even literature. Literature will perhaps be affected in a greater way than one may think. But before I get to that, let me explain what, exactly, molecular nanotechnology is. In l 959, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman put forth an idea. His idea was that anything could be made from the ground up, out of individual atoms or molecules. This is nanotechnology: the working or manipulation of individual atoms or molecules, one at a time, and positioning and lining them up precisely and repeatedly, until enough accumulated to form a large-scale, usable entity. Feynman didn't name it and outline the science, however. This was done by K. Eric Drexler. In the 1970's, when he was a student at MIT, Drexler came up with an idea of nanotechnology, and outlined the possible uses of it. He thought that if one had the ability or technology to work with individual atoms and molecules, then one could make a box that would transform common materials into beef. It sounds strange, but that was the idea. The idea was that you could open the door, toss in some stuff, work the controls, and two hours or so later: out rolls some fresh beef. It sounds odd because we a re taught that beef comes from cattle, not from a box of grass clippings and old sneaker insoles. But it really does make sense. Cattle use only a few materials when making beef: grass, air, water, sunlight. When they are digesting that junk, they are merely rearranging the molecules to form characteristic patterns of beef. The only real difference between the methods of beef-production of cows and Drexler's box is that cows make beef using enzymes and liquids, where reactive agents randomly collide, and Drexler's box makes beef mechanically. Drexler states that the molecules and atoms would have to be manipulated by tiny, tiny robots, commonly referred to as "assemblers.