http://crnano.tribe.net/thread/579b0e87-0352-4acb-82bd-1299b93361d2?format=rss Tribe.net. Local Connections http://CRNano.tribe.net/thread/579b0e87-0352-4acb-82bd-1299b93361d2#35428339-f58b-4c87-9208-64015a9ce463 To read this on the Web, with nice formatting and hyperlinks, go to http://crnano.org/archive05.htm#31 CONTENTS - NanoWorld Weapons Warning - Citizen Conferences on Technology - CRN Policy Debate - Nanofuture: What's Next for Nanotechnology - CRN goes to Baltimore - Russian Translation Coming Soon - Reminder about Symposium on Nanotechnology - Feature Essay: Sudden Development of Molecular Manufacturing - FUNDRAISING ALERT! ========== Even more than usual, things are happening fast at CRN. We’ll recap some of the highlights here—but to keep up with the latest developments, be sure to check our Responsible Nanotechnology weblog at http://CRNano.typepad.com/ NOTE: In the items below, links are indicated with [brackets], and shown at the end of the paragraph. NanoWorld Weapons Warning "Nano could lead to new WMDs" Does that sound like one of CRN's warnings? Not this time. It's the headline on a recent UPI article by [Charles Choi], in which he interviews scientists from the University of Mexico and the University of California. The scary thing is that [they aren't focusing] on advanced nanotechnology -- destructive new devices produced in mass quantity with molecular manufacturing -- because they don't have to. They make a convincing point just talking about improved (is that the right word?) chemical and biological weapons. Already we're hearing sabers rattle and drums beat with the proposed [weaponization of space]. From there, it's a short step to [military use] of molecular machine systems with exponential manufacturing potential -- and at that point we're right on the edge of a very steep cliff. http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2005/05/world_war_when.html http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20050520-114429-1570r.htm http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2005/05/space_weapons_r.html http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm#arms Citizen Conferences on Technology An [innovative way] to “stimulate broad and intelligent social debate on technological issues,” pioneered in the 1980s by the Danish Board of Technology, is now getting underway [in the UK], with a focus on nanotechnology. We think this is a good sign. [Public involvement] in determining safe development and responsible use of advanced nanotechnology will be vital. [CRN research] suggests that these issues are likely to arise sooner than many expect. The surest way to avoid the worst dangers is to understand them in advance and take assertive action to prevent them. http://www.loka.org/pubs/techrev.htm http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2005/06/policy_recommen.html http://www.rachel.org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=518 http://www.crnano.org/overview.htm CRN Policy Debate After reading Executive Director Mike Treder’s essay on "War, Interdependence, and Nanotechnology," C-R-Network member Steve Burgess engaged Mike in a friendly email “debate” on nanotechnology policy. The discussion revolved around instituting fair distribution of nanotech-produced abundance as a way of preventing an uncontrollable arms race. Issues covered were: 1) How can such distribution be imposed with a minimum of force and conflict? 2) Is it even ethical to attempt to impose a global system of abundance, superseding national sovereignties? 3) Even if the basis for a society based on lack of scarcity exists in the future, will evolved human psychology be able to make the transition without widespread fighting? We posted the back and forth responses [on our blog]. http://www.futurebrief.com/miketrederwar002.asp http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2005/05/policy_debate.html Nanofuture: What's Next for Nanotechnology Flying cars, space travel for everyone, the elimination of poverty and hunger, and powerful new tools to combat disease, and even aging. These are some of the amazing predicted developments of nanotechnology, the coming science of designing and building machines at the molecular and atomic levels. Will this new scientific revolution be for better or worse? That’s from the publisher’s description of [Nanofuture: What's Next for Nanotechnology], a new book by Dr. J. Storrs (Josh) Hall. We haven't read it yet, but based on the description and the [rave reviews], this looks like a must-read. We wish Josh great success with his book. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1591022878/002-8677950-1437662?v=glance http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2005/06/nanofuture_what.html CRN goes to Baltimore About 50 engineers and other interested people attended an [Emerging Technologies Forum] titled “The Next Industrial Revolution: Molecular Nanotechnology and Manufacturing” in Baltimore last week. CRN Executive Director Mike Treder was asked to moderate the event, which was sponsored by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME). Speakers included Scott Mize, president of the [Foresight Institute], Dr. Joseph Jacobson from the [Center for Bits and Atoms] at MIT, Kevin Lyons of the [National Science Foundation], Dr. Dennis Swyt of the [NIST], and Dr. Richard Colton from the [U.S. Naval Research Laboratory]. This forum was the second in a series intended to educate the manufacturing sector about what they can expect from advanced nanotechnology. CRN’s Chris Phoenix spoke at the [first event], which was last month in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We applaud SME for being forward-looking and helping to prepare their members for the next industrial revolution. http://www.sme.org/cgi-bin/get-evdoc.pl?&&001572&000007&019666&&SME http://www.foresight.org/about/index.html http://cba.mit.edu/about/index.html http://www.nist.gov/ http://www.nrl.navy.mil/ http://www.crnano.org/new_news.htm#30Minnesota Russian Translation Coming Soon We are excited to announce that a volunteer is translating several of CRN's web pages into the Russian language. Other volunteers from Russia’s [Nanotechnology News Network] are helping to edit and verify the translation. When this is completed, we will have CRN web pages in [Chinese], [Spanish], [Portuguese], and Russian, in addition to English. Next, we'll be looking for people to help with translations into Arabic, Bengali, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, and perhaps other languages. We want everyone to learn about responsible nanotechnology! http://www.nanobot.ru/ http://www.tainano.com/CCRN/index.htm http://www.euroresidentes.com/futuro/nanotecnologia/nanotecnologia_responsable/nanotecnologia_responsable.htm http://www.euroresidentes.com/futuro/nanotecnologia/nanotecnologia_responsavel/nanotecnologia_responsavel.htm Reminder about Symposium on Nanotechnology In connection with their hugely popular annual conference, the World Future Society has announced "an exploration series designed to provide an outline of several critical new fields with the potential for significant impact on the social, economic, and cultural fabric of modern society." For this year, they have organized a [Symposium on Nanotechnology], which CRN’s Mike Treder will assist in presenting. It’s happening in Chicago on July 29, 2005. Hope to see you there! http://www.crnano.org/SymposiumonNanotechnology_July05,Chicago_.pdf Feature Essay: Sudden Development of Molecular Manufacturing Chris Phoenix, Director of Research, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology Development of molecular manufacturing technology probably will not be gradual, and will not allow time to react to incremental improvements. It is often assumed that development must be gradual, but there are several points at which minor improvements to the technology will cause massive advances in capability. In other words, at some points, the capability of the technology can advance substantially without breakthroughs or even much R&D. These jumps in capability could happen quite close together, given the pre-design that a well-planned development program would certainly do. Advancing from laboratory demos all the way to megatons of easily designed, highly advanced products in a matter of months appears possible. Any policy that will be needed to deal with the implications of such products must be in place before the advances start. The first jump in capability is exponential manufacturing. If a manufacturing system can build an identical copy, then the number of systems, and their mass and productivity, can grow quite rapidly. However, the starting point is quite small; the first device may be one million-billionth of a gram (100 nanometers). It will take time for even exponential growth to produce a gram of manufacturing systems. If a copy can be built in a week, then it will take about a year to make the first gram. A better strategy will be to spend the next ten months in R&D to reduce the manufacturing time to one day, at which point it will take less than two months to make the first gram. And at that point, expanding from the first gram to the first ton will take only another three weeks. It's worth pointing out here that nanoscale machinery is vastly more powerful than larger machinery. When a machine shrinks, its power density and functional density improve. Motors could be a million times more powerful than today's; computers could be billions of times more compact. So a ton of nano-built stuff is a lot more powerful than a ton of conventional product. Even though the products of tiny manufacturing systems will themselves be small, they will include computers and medical devices. A single kilogram of nanoscale computers would be far more powerful than the sum of all computers in existence today. The second jump in capability is nanofactories—integrated manufacturing systems that can make large products with all the advantages of precise nanoscale machinery. It turns out that nanofactory design can be quite simple and scalable, meaning that it works the same regardless of the size. Given a manufacturing system that can make sub-micron blocks (“nanoblocks”), it doesn't take a lot of additional work to fasten those blocks together into a product. In fact, a product of any size can be assembled in a single plane, directly from blocks small enough to be built by single nanoscale manufacturing systems, because assembly speed increases as block size decreases. Essentially, a nanofactory is just a thin sheet of manufacturing systems fastened side by side. That sheet can be as large as desired without needing a re-design, and the low overhead means that a nanofactory can build its own mass almost as fast as a single manufacturing system. Once the smallest nanofactory has been built, kilogram-scale and ton-scale nanofactories can follow in a few weeks. The third jump in capability is product design. If it required a triple Ph.D. in chemistry, physics, and engineering to design a nanofactory product, then the effects of nanofactories would be slow to develop. But if it required a triple Ph.D. in semiconductor physics, digital logic, and operating systems to write a computer program, the software industry would not exist. Computer programming is relatively easy because most of the complexity is hidden—encapsulated and abstracted within simple, elegant high-level commands. A computer programmer can invoke billions of operations with a single line of text. In the case of nanofactory product design, a good place to hide complexity is within the nanoblocks that are fastened together to make the product. A nanoblock designer might indeed need a triple Ph.D. However, a nanoblock can contain many millions of features—enough for motors, a CPU, programmable networking and connections, sensors, mechanical systems, and other high-level components. Fastening a few types of nanoblocks together in various combinations could make a huge range of products. The product designer would not need to know how the nanoblocks worked—only what they did. A nanoblock is quite a bit smaller than a single human cell, and a planar-assembly nanofactory would impose few limits on how they were fastened together. Design of a product could be as simple as working with a CAD program to specify volumes to be filled and areas to be covered with different types of nanoblocks. Because the internal design of nanoblocks would be hidden from the product designer, nanoblock designs could be changed or improved without requiring product designers to be retrained. Nanoblocks could be designed at a functional level even before the first nanofactory could be built, allowing product designers to be trained in advance. Similarly, a nanofactory could be designed in advance at the nanoblock level. Although simple design strategies will cost performance, [scaling laws] indicate that molecular-manufactured machinery will have performance to burn. Products that are revolutionary by today's standards, including the nanofactory itself, could be significantly less complex than either the software or the hardware that makes up a computer—even a 1970's-era computer. http://www.crnano.org/essays04.htm#Scaling The design of an exponential molecular manufacturing system will include many of the components of a nanofactory. The design of a nanofactory likewise will include components of a wide range of products. A project to achieve exponential molecular manufacturing would not need much additional effort to prepare for rapid creation of nanofactories and their highly advanced products. Sudden availability of advanced products of all sizes in large quantity could be highly disruptive. It would confer a large military advantage on whoever got it first, even if only a few months ahead of the competition. This implies that molecular manufacturing technology could be the focus of a high-stakes arms race. Rapid design and production of products would upset traditional manufacturing and distribution. Nanofactories would be simple enough to be completely automated—and with components small enough that this would be necessary. Complete automation implies that they will be self-contained and easy to use. Nanofactory-built products, including nanofactories themselves, could be as hard to regulate as Internet file-sharing. These and other problems imply that wise policy, likely including some global-scale policy, will be needed to deal with molecular manufacturing. But if it takes only months to advance from 100-nanometer manufacturing systems to self-contained nanofactories and easily-designed revolutionary products, there will not be time to make wise policy once exponential manufacturing is achieved. We will have to start ahead of time. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * FUNDRAISING ALERT! Recent developments in efforts to roadmap the technological steps towards molecular manufacturing make the work of CRN even more important. It is critical that we examine the global implications of this rapidly emerging technology, and CRN continues to be in the forefront of this discussion. But we need to grow, and rapidly, to meet the expanding need. Your donation to CRN will help us to achieve that growth. We rely largely on individual donations and small grants for our survival. To make a contribution online, CLICK THIS LINK -- https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=5594 This is important work and we welcome your participation. Thanks! * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Mon, 13 Jun 2005 01:09:34 GMT http://CRNano.tribe.net/thread/579b0e87-0352-4acb-82bd-1299b93361d2#35428339-f58b-4c87-9208-64015a9ce463 Mike 2005-06-13T01:09:34Z