User:Martin Coppa
From Wise Nano
Martin J. Coppa Jr. is a student decidedly dedicated to the development of MNT. He is currently majoring in chemical engineering in order to assist the development of the first assembler. Along with interests in the development of MNT, he is very concerned with the socio-political implications of such powerful technology. Born in 1985, he is currently living in San Francisco. His e-mail address is mcoppa@CRNano.org
Written by Martin J. Coppa Jr.
Our civilizations teeter between unimaginable wealth and cataclysmic apocalypse. This realization was reiterated when I attended the International Congress of Nanotechnology in San Francisco on November 10, 2004. Mike Treder, Co-founder (with Chris Phoenix) of The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN), mentioned a paper his organization has posted entitled Thirty Essential Studies, saying,
“To begin with, programmable, precisional chemistry, with the ability to fabricate nano components, can be the basis of an extremely powerful manufacturing technology. The importance of this is substantially unrecognized. Development of molecular manufacturing may be imminent, depending on whether any of several actors has begun investigating it already. We believe that a program started today, even outside of the United States, could finish in under a decade, including development of a significant product design capability. This development activity may be very difficult to detect, easy to conceal. Several considerations including economics and product sophistication point to molecular manufacturing being a transformative, disruptive, destabilizing, and potentially dangerous technology. Although the technology might be quite dangerous, avoidance and prevention are not viable options. Simple attempts to dominate or control the capability will also be unworkable. Molecular manufacturing technology will also have many productive uses, and responsible policy must account for the global scale problems it can solve as well as a probable high level of civilian demand and utilization. So policy making and preparation will be complex and difficult and will require substantial time; in other words, it’s time we got started.”
I couldn’t agree with his statement more thoroughly. Over the next ten to twenty years, technological developments will change our society with the same force as horticulture, agriculture, and industry, which changed the lives of our ancestors and affect our lives today. By way of continuous research, aimed at explaining the observable with the creation and testing of models that explain my observations as simply as possible, in order to make testable predictions about natural phenomena that would force me to revise or abandon my models if the predictions do not agree with my observations, my goal is to aid the development of the socially “transformative” potential that is nanotechnology.
So I ask myself, ‘what is molecular manufacturing and how will it be important?’ The solution-phase chemistry of today will soon be superseded by the mechanical synthesis (mechanosynthesis) of molecules at the atomic scale. With the ability to manipulate matter at the atomic level, scientists will soon devise systems capable of constructing useful nanometer-scale (one billionth of a meter – orders of magnitude smaller than the wavelength of visible light) tools and products. When these advances occur, the paradigm will be development of systems (known as molecular assemblers) able to replicate themselves as well as construct other forms, allowing exponential manufacturing at the atomic level; societies around the globe will be transformed. In a short period of time (months or less) millions of manufacturing jobs may become obsolete, the economic basis of scarcity may be eradicated, and products could be five times as strong, ten times as efficient, and millions of times more compact - or more. Nanotechnology will allow the mass production of complex diamond products at least ten times stronger than steel and one hundred times stronger than aluminum or plastics. “Programmable, precisional chemistry” will indeed be a powerful tool.
I am curious to know who will develop nanotechnology and when such powerful technology could make its debut. If a program started today could finish within ten years and allow for universal wealth and prosperity, why is there no such project already underway in the United States? Could it be that the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) of the United States is ignoring the potential benefits of molecular manufacturing? Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman’s famous talk There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, provided the foundation for another American pioneer, K. Eric Drexler, the founder of nanotechnology, upon which to expand his ideas in books such as Engines of Creation – The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, Unbounding The Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution, and highly technical material like Nanosystems – Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation. In his groundbreaking book Engines of Creation, he devotes an entire chapter – Engines of Destruction – to the possible misuses of nanotechnology. He writes,
“Throughout history, states have developed technologies to extend their military power, and states will no doubt play a dominant role in developing replicators and AI [Artificial Intelligence] systems. States could use replicating assemblers to build arsenals of advanced weapons, swiftly, easily, and in vast quantity.”
Despots therefore, have the greatest incentive to invest in the development of nanotechnology, while the NNI rejects the idea as fiction. Today, the Foresight Institute, which Drexler founded, plays absolutely no role in the NNI, which sees molecular manufacturing as an impossibility completely unworthy of research. In a worldtribune.com article on July 25, 2004, Talking nano at Stanford: Commercialization, not weaponization, Lev Navrozov states,
“In India, the largest democracy in history, to say nothing of China (the largest dictatorship in history), the word ‘nanotechnology’ includes military connotations. On July 1, 2004, President Abdul Kalam of India said that nanotechnology would ‘revolutionize total concepts of future warfare’ and called on the country's scientists ‘to make a breakthrough in this cutting edge technology.’”
Without intense, sustained, well funded, research, the humanitarian effects of nanotechnology will be delayed indefinitely in addition to giving other “states” the opportunity to get a head start, leading to the possibility of their eventual military supremacy.
Societies around the globe have incentive to develop this technology, but who has the means? Obviously the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Russia are all sufficiently wealthy nations, but Brazil, India, and China are all accelerating their capabilities. China in particular has the potential to develop this technology. Education in China is primarily oriented around science and technology. March 7, 2000, at the the Third Session of the Ninth National People's Congress, Premier Zhu Rongji said,
“The strategy of developing China through science and education and the strategy of sustainable growth should be vigorously followed”,
leading to a highly technological future. World leaders may allocate funds to whatever project will grant them additional power; if nanotechnology will make China the most powerful nation the world has ever known, President Jintao has ample funds and brilliant scientists to grant him this power. China appears to have the necessary elements to fund research, while the US encompasses these elements but lacks the foresight necessary to begin a project similar to the Manhattan Project, which developed the nuclear bomb during WWII.
On August 8, 2004, in an article on worldtribune.com entitled, How do ‘nano weapons’ work, and why does U.S. trail China in molecular nanotechnology, Lev Navrozov writes,
“In 1941 “Pravda” carried Kapitsa's speech describing a weapon able to destroy a city, while an ordinary bomb or shell can destroy only a building. That was all. Stalin, Roosevelt, and Hitler knew no more, since none of them had studied in school nuclear physics, which was introduced into the school curriculum after 1945. Without nuclear physics at least at the school level, it is impossible to understand anything about nuclear weapons except that one nuclear bomb or missile can destroy a city. Hitler and Stalin could not develop nuclear weapons during the conventional war, which consumed all their resources, but they understood their geostrategic importance very well: Thus, Hitler said that the advent of nuclear weapons would be equivalent to the advent of firearms in the epoch of spears and bows. Even today those who studied nuclear physics at school can rarely go, in their understanding of nuclear weapons, beyond the sketchy rudiments of the atomic structure and desultory terms like “chain reaction.” Yet this has not prevented them from understanding the military importance of nuclear weapons in the past sixty-five years or so. In contrast to nuclear physics, (molecular) nanotechnology is not in the school curriculum of any country (except China). But this does not prevent the understanding that molecular nano weapons will be superior in their destructive power to nuclear weapons just as the latter were superior to conventional firearms. Molecular nano weapons are expected to be able to destroy enemy means of nuclear retaliation, needed for Mutual Assured Destruction—submarines with nuclear missiles aboard, bombers with nuclear bombs high in the air, and nuclear missiles deep underground. In other words, the side that falls far behind in the molecular nano-weapons race faces annihilation or unconditional surrender, as did Japan in 1945 due to the U.S. nuclear weapons, which Japan did not have.”
I see the possibility of nano-annihilation as an extremely unsatisfactory fate. Through continuous education, research, and vigilant effort, I hope to aid the development of an entirely new means of manufacturing and production, which will, in turn, require an entirely new social structure. I see our current society deteriorating all around me; we destroy the biosphere with dangerous chemicals; we plunder Earth for oil that will eventually be depleted; we clear-cut oxygen producing, carbon dioxide removing, trees at incredible rates. From The Great Law of The Iroquois Confederacy,
“In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” Our society would do well to learn from this wisdom.
Nanotechnology presents many risks, some of which are existential risks, that is, they may threaten our continued existence. CRN’s paper Dangers of Molecular Manufacturing includes the section Disruption of the basis of economy is a strong possibility, in which they state,
“The purchaser of a manufactured product today is paying for its design, raw materials, the labor and capital of manufacturing, transportation, storage, and sales. Additional money—usually a fairly low percentage—goes to the owners of all these businesses. If nanofactories can produce a wide variety of products when and where they are wanted, most of this effort will become unnecessary. This raises several questions about the nature of a post-nanotech economy. Will products become cheaper? Will capitalism disappear? Will most people retire—or be unemployed? The flexibility of nanofactory manufacturing, and the radical improvement of its products, imply that non-nanotech products will not be able to compete in many areas. If nanofactory technology is exclusively owned or controlled, will this create the world's biggest monopoly, with extreme potential for abusive anti-competitive practices? If it is not controlled, will the availability of cheap copies mean that even the designers and brand marketers don't get paid? Much further study is required, but it seems clear that molecular manufacturing could severely disrupt the present economic structure, greatly reducing the value of many material and human resources, including much of our current infrastructure. Despite utopian post-capitalist hopes, it is unclear whether a workable replacement system could appear in time to prevent the human consequences of massive job displacement.”
Thankfully, CRN acts to raise awareness of the issues presented by nanotechnology: the benefits and dangers, and the possibilities for responsible use; the task must be accomplished and I am grateful to the people who work so nobly to find solutions to such problems.
While organizations of researchers are working on the social policies needed for our survival, I wish to aid the development of the technology that will sever our dependence on mined resources. So much of our nation’s fossil fuel is consumed by agriculture that when we exhaust this fuel source, I fear for our food supply. We dump toxic chemicals into our environment, exterminating millions of plants and animals annually, driving many into extinction. I wish to develop nanotechnology for those who lack a voice, to ease the lives of those who suffer for lack of food or monetary resources, for the creatures of the earth that we continuously pollute with callous disregard, and for those seven generations yet to be born, that they might live in a world of unbounded possibilities. The only barrier to my cause being my education, I must establish a strong foundation in Chemistry so that I may focus my constructive efforts upon the design and production of molecular assemblers for use as engines of creation.
