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Health & Wellness

2006-03-01 13:04:00

How can something so small...?

QUESTION: How can something as small as the molecules in nanotechnology be such a big deal? 

ANSWER: (Part 1)I believe that with the development of nanotechnology, we are seeing the beginning of the biggest change in how we will live that has ever occurred since man first appeared on this planet.  I realize that sounds like a totally outrageous statement, and it’s going to take more room than I have here to fully explain what I mean.  That’s why I am calling this answer “Part 1.”  My answer will continue in the next issue of Q&A Times.The history of mankind thus far has been marked by a continual evolution of technology.  We have gone from making stone tools to making metal tools.  We learned to make bronze, then iron, and later steel.  We have gone from walking to riding horses, then to coaches, ships, trains, cars and airplanes.  We have gone from simple hand work to great mechanized factories with assembly lines and products with interchangeable parts.  With each new technology, lives were changed in irreversible ways.  As we found newer and better ways to do things, the old ways were no longer acceptable, and many of the great discoveries of the past became irrelevant.  There is no better example of this that the changes that have occurred over the past 30 years as we have gone from typewriters and adding machines to word processors and calculators, then to incredibly powerful personal computers and now to miniature personal electronic devices would have been impossible to imagine just a few years ago.  Again, our world has been irreversibly changed.Still, all of the technological advances that have happened thus far in the history of the world have one thing in common.  It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about a cave man’s stone axe, a space station orbiting the earth, or a teenager’s latest combination cell phone, camera, internet connection and digital music system.  They are all are made from plant, animal or mineral based materials that have been modified in a manufacturing or chemical process to create the components of the final product. Technology as we know it is a product of industry - of manufacturing and chemical engineering.  Materials are taken from nature – ore from mountains, trees from forests – and they are changed into forms that someone considers useful.  Trees become lumber, then houses.  Mountains become rubble, then molten iron, then steel, then automobiles.  Sand becomes purified gas, then silicon, then computer chips.  And so it goes.  Each process is crude, based on cutting, stirring, baking, spraying, etching, grinding, etc.Trees, though, are not crude.  To make wood and leaves, trees do not cut, stir, bake, spray, etch, nor grind.  Instead, their leaves gather solar energy using molecular electronic systems that create the reaction of photosynthesis.  They use that energy to drive precise molecular machines that process carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and molecular building blocks.  Trees grow by using other molecular machines to join these molecular building blocks forming roots, trunks, branches, twigs, solar collectors (leaves), and more molecular machines.  Each leaf is more sophisticated than a spacecraft and more finely patterned than the latest computer chip.   They do this without noise, heat, toxic fumes or human labor, and they consume pollutants in the process.  Viewed in this way, trees are very high technology, while computer chips and rockets are not.This view of trees as an example of high technology gives us a hint of how industrial processes may function in the future.  Today’s technologies will be replaced by clean, efficient, self replicating, environmentally friendly processes that do not consume resources but rather leave the environment better than it was before.   In the future, the fields of chemistry and mechanical engineering, as we know them, will disappear as they blend with the molecular sciences and use nanotechnology to create new molecular machines operating in accord with the equations forming the basis of natural law.  As manufacturing becomes increasingly based on the interaction of molecular machines, the high technology found in the functions of nature, with trees as a good example, may ultimately become the model for how our industrial processes operate.I will expand on this more next month and begin to develop examples of how nanotechnology-based processes will change our lives dramatically.