Comment Nanites and the Future? (Score 1) 178
The way I see it nanotechnology is the future, and it is only a question of when it will be implemented not if. To me it seems it will be a long time to we see nanotechnology implemented on a large scale.
First their are a number of practical problems in the way. The biggest one I see is computational and storage power. If each one of these little nanites is going to be self replicating, then it is going to need to contain, within itself, instructions to build a complete replica of itself with the materials it can find. This in itself is no small task, as the nanities will be neccessarly very complex machines. Also necessar are instructions to do all the various tasks that the machine will be designed to caryout. Human cells are increadibly complex living machines. The idea that a nanoscale machine will be able to contain directions for repairing all of the millions of types of cells in the human body to me seems to be a vary long way off, if not impossible altogether.
Going along with the necessity of storage space is the necessity of processing power. Nanities will not be opperating in the ideal enviroment. They will have to make on the fly desions about what to do in various situations. Now while the level of sophistication here is not as great as elsware. It will still need to have a decent amount of realtime processing power.
Also associated with the previous two issues are the ramifications of bugs in the system. If my computer crashes, it is a bad thing, but not necessarly life threatening. But if I have 1000s of nanites crawling around in my body, and things go wrong with their code, I could be in vary real danger.
These are just some of the problemes that must be overcome for nanotechnology to succed on a large scale. There are many, many, more. From power generation, to nano to macro level interface. It is a truly monumental task to be acheived.
On the other hand, once nanotechnology is perfected, the world will be transformed into a very, very diffrent place. The rammifications boggel my mind. We would see a world completely transformed. No longer would "things" have value. Why should they when a couple of nanities could build it out of some dirt in your lawn. The only things of value would be ideas and certain raw materials. The effect this would have upon our society would be truly incrediable. For a possible future I suggest you read the book Slant.
