NANO TECHNOLOGY

This Nanotechnology Center was being built in the spring of 1990, as Eric Drexler was midway through a hectic eight-day trip, giving talks on nanotechnology to researchers and seeing dozens of university and consortium research laboratories. A Japanese research society had sponsored the trip, and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry MITI) had organized a symposium around the visit—a symposium on molecular machines and nanotechnology. Japanese research was forging ahead, aiming to develop "new modes of science and technology in harmony with nature and human society," a new technology for the twenty-first century

There is a view of the future that doesn't fit with the view in the newspapers. Think of it as an alternative, a turn in the road of future history that leads to a different world. In that world, cancer follows polio, petroleum follows whale oil, and industrial technology follows chipped flint—all healed or replaced. Old problems vanish, new problems appear: down the road are many alternative worlds, some fit to live in, some not. We aim to survey this road and the alternatives, because to arrive at a world fit to live in, we will all need a better view of the open paths.

A Sketch of Technologies

Molecular nanotechnology: Thorough, inexpensive control of the structure of matter based on molecule-by-molecule control of products and byproducts; the products and processes of molecular manufacturing.

Technology-as-we-know-it is a product of industry, of manufacturing and chemical engineering. Industry-as-we-know-it takes things from nature—ore from mountains, trees from forests—and coerces them into forms that someone considers useful. Trees become lumber, then houses. Mountains become rubble, then molten iron, then steel, then cars. Sand becomes a purified gas, then silicon, then chips. And so it goes. Each process is crude, based on cutting, stirring, baking, spraying, etching, grinding, and the like.

Trees, though, are not crude: To make wood and leaves, they neither cut, grind, stir, bake, spray, etch, nor grind. Instead, they gather solar energy using molecular electronic devices, the photosynthetic reaction centers of chloroplasts. They use that energy to drive molecular machines—active devices with moving parts of precise, molecular structure—which process carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and molecular building blocks. They use other molecular machines to join these molecular building blocks to form roots, trunks, branches, twigs, solar collectors, and more molecular machinery. Every tree makes leaves, and each leaf is more sophisticated than a spacecraft, more finely patterned than the latest chip from Silicon Valley. They do all this without noise, heat, toxic fumes, or human labor, and they consume pollutants as they go. Viewed this way, trees are high technology. Chips and rockets aren't.

Trees give a hint of what molecular nanotechnology will be like, but nanotechnology won't be biotechnology because it won't rely on altering life. Biotechnology is a further stage in the domestication of living things. Like selective breeding, it reshapes the genetic heritage of a species to produce varieties more useful to people. Unlike selective breeding, it inserts new genes. Like biotechnology—or ordinary trees—molecular nanotechnology will use molecular machinery, but unlike biotechnology, it will not rely on genetic meddling. It will be not an extension of biotechnology, but an alternative or a replacement.

A Sketch of Consequences

Here are a few of today's common assumptions, some so familiar that they are seldom stated:
• Industrial development is the only alternative to poverty.
• Many people must work in factories.
• Greater wealth means greater resource consumption.
• Logging, mining, and fossil-fuel burning must continue.
• Manufacturing means polluting.
• Third World development would doom the environment