What is the roadmap, as far as we can see it, to the kind of nanotech envisioned in J. Storrs Hall’s books (Where Is My Flying Car? and earlier Nanofuture)? What are the big unsolved problems? What are the most promising approaches or near-term goals?
I think the problem is that we don’t have a clear roadmap—if we did it would be much easier to execute on it. In the limit, what Hall (and Drexler before him) describes is physically possible but transients matter and nobody has done a great job describing the intermediate technologies.
Throat clearing aside, here are some of my personal hunches (I don’t think there are any clear consensuses):
Use a combination of our existing tools for manipulating matter with nanoscale precision to start building multi-component and approach nanoscale systems that we can interface with from the macroscale: lithography, DNA origami, proteins, molecular machines. [Dropping a placeholder to include a link to Drexlers paper from the 90s combining proteins and AFM tips, and Tuberfelds work on DNA origami 3D printers]
Use these systems to at first start modifying macroscale objects: maybe making extremely precise edges to turbine blades, or something that can’t be done any other way
Eventually expand to making things full cloth with them, with increasing scope and precision.
There are so many big unsolved problems! Frankly I think the biggest ones are some combination of experiments taking a long time to do and then measure what happened and then trust those measurements, the difficulty of simulating what will happen in lieu of experiments, both of which lead to extreme difficulty building any sort of intuition for the affordances of nanoscale systems, which makes it hard for people to build systems. That’s a rather abstract answer, but beyond “creating covalent bonds exactly where we want them” I’m not even sure we know what the right concrete unsolved problems are.
Two approaches I’m personally excited about:
Using something like DNA origami to template nanoscale building blocks (that could be proteins or other things) -- you can get atomic precision on very small “pieces” and then if you can put those pieces together in a deterministic way, you could get larger pieces with the same precision. If you could then functionalize those pieces, you could very ambitiously have a nanoscale “factory” that does several steps of a reaction or something similar. (I am talking my own book to some extent here: we’re running a program to tackle this approach at Spectech)
Interfacing silicon and proteins. Photolithography is great at going from 100 m to 10−8 m and proteins are a great way of going from 10−10 to 10−8 m. By bridging the two we could potentially have something that enables you to directly interface with single atoms via a keyboard at scale.
I think the actual approach is going to involve jumping up and down between many length scales
What is the roadmap, as far as we can see it, to the kind of nanotech envisioned in J. Storrs Hall’s books (Where Is My Flying Car? and earlier Nanofuture)? What are the big unsolved problems? What are the most promising approaches or near-term goals?
I think the problem is that we don’t have a clear roadmap—if we did it would be much easier to execute on it. In the limit, what Hall (and Drexler before him) describes is physically possible but transients matter and nobody has done a great job describing the intermediate technologies.
Throat clearing aside, here are some of my personal hunches (I don’t think there are any clear consensuses):
Use a combination of our existing tools for manipulating matter with nanoscale precision to start building multi-component and approach nanoscale systems that we can interface with from the macroscale: lithography, DNA origami, proteins, molecular machines. [Dropping a placeholder to include a link to Drexlers paper from the 90s combining proteins and AFM tips, and Tuberfelds work on DNA origami 3D printers]
Use these systems to at first start modifying macroscale objects: maybe making extremely precise edges to turbine blades, or something that can’t be done any other way
Eventually expand to making things full cloth with them, with increasing scope and precision.
There are so many big unsolved problems! Frankly I think the biggest ones are some combination of experiments taking a long time to do and then measure what happened and then trust those measurements, the difficulty of simulating what will happen in lieu of experiments, both of which lead to extreme difficulty building any sort of intuition for the affordances of nanoscale systems, which makes it hard for people to build systems. That’s a rather abstract answer, but beyond “creating covalent bonds exactly where we want them” I’m not even sure we know what the right concrete unsolved problems are.
Two approaches I’m personally excited about:
Using something like DNA origami to template nanoscale building blocks (that could be proteins or other things) -- you can get atomic precision on very small “pieces” and then if you can put those pieces together in a deterministic way, you could get larger pieces with the same precision. If you could then functionalize those pieces, you could very ambitiously have a nanoscale “factory” that does several steps of a reaction or something similar. (I am talking my own book to some extent here: we’re running a program to tackle this approach at Spectech)
Interfacing silicon and proteins. Photolithography is great at going from 100 m to 10−8 m and proteins are a great way of going from 10−10 to 10−8 m. By bridging the two we could potentially have something that enables you to directly interface with single atoms via a keyboard at scale.