Unbounding the Future:
the Nanotechnology Revolution
Chapter 7
The Spiral of Capability
In earlier chapters, we have stepped forward and
backward through time. The last step was a big one, leaping from
small laboratory devices to the high-capacity industrial facility
of the Desert Rose scenario. Our narrative crossed this gap in a
single leap, but the world won't. To understand how nanotechnology might
unfold, it makes sense to look at some of its easier and more
difficult applications. The result won't be a timetable, or even
a series of milestones, but it should give a better picture of
what we can expect as nanotechnology develops from simple, crude,
costly beginnings to a state of greater sophistication and lower
cost.
Improving Quality
Molecular
manufacturing will make better products possible. We're
likely to see some early applications in at least two areas:
stronger materials and faster computers. Strong materials are
simple, and will be hard to pass up. Computers are more complex,
but the payoff will be enormous.
Computers
The computer industry has been under steady
pressure to make computer chips ever smaller. As sizes have
shrunk, costs have fallen while efficiency and capabilities have
increased. The pressure to continue this process pushes in the
direction of nanotechnology; it may even be one of the major
motivations behind developing the technology.
John Walker, a founder of Autodesk, explains:
"Even technologies with enormous potential can lie dormant
unless there are significant payoffs along the way to reward
those who pioneer them. That's one of the reasons integrated
circuits developed so rapidly; each advance found an immediate
market willing to apply it and enrich the innovator that created
it.
"Does molecular engineering have this kind
of payoff? I think it does. Remembering that we may be less than
ten years away from 'hitting the wall' as far as scaling our
existing electronics goes, a great deal of research is presently
going on in the area of molecular and quantum electronics. The
payoff is easy to calculate: You can build devices one thousand
times faster, more energy-efficient, and cheaper than those we're
currently using—at least one hundred times better than
exotic materials being considered to replace silicon when it
reaches its limits."
Federico Capasso, head of the Quantum Phenomena
and Device Research Department at AT&T Bell Labs, agrees that
electronics researchers will keep pushing for smaller devices
once silicon's potential has been reached. He explains that
"at some point we will reach difficulties: some people say
at a hundred fifty nanometers, others think it's beyond that.
What will happen then? It's hard to think that the electronics
industry will say, 'Stop here. We'll stop evolving because we
can't shrink the device.' From an economic point of view, in
order to survive, an industry has to innovate continuously."
The computer industry's push toward devices of
molecular size has an air of inevitability. Today's researchers
struggle to build molecular
electronics using bulk
techniques, with no products yet in sight; with molecular manipulators,
they will finally have the tools they need for fast and accurate
experimentation. Once successful designs are developed, packaged,
and tested, the pressure will be on to learn to make them in
quantity at low cost. The competitive pressures will be fierce,
because advanced molecular electronics will be orders of
magnitude better than today's integrated circuits, ultimately
enabling the construction of computers with trillionfold greater
capability.
Strong, Lightweight
Structures
At the opposite extreme from molecular
electronics—complex and at first worth billions of dollars
per gram—are structural materials: worth only dollars per
kilogram in most applications, but much simpler in structure.
Once molecular manufacturing becomes inexpensive, structural
materials will be important products.
These materials play a central role in almost
everything around us, from cars and aircraft to furniture and
houses. All of these objects get their size, shape, and strength
from a structural skeleton of some sort. This makes structural
materials a natural place to begin in understanding how
nanotechnology can improve products.
Cars today are mostly made of steel, aircraft of
aluminum, and buildings and furniture largely of steel and wood.
These materials have a certain "strength-to-weight
ratio" (more properly, a strength-to-density ratio). To make
cars stronger, they'd have to be heavier; to make them lighter,
they'd have to be weaker. Clever design can change this
relationship a little, but to change it a lot requires a change
of materials.
Making something heavy is easy: just leave a
hollow space, then fill it with water, sand, or lead shot. Making
something light and strong is harder, but often important.
Automakers try to make cars lightweight, aircraft manufacturers
try harder, and with spacecraft manufacturers it is an obsession.
Reducing mass saves materials and energy.
The strongest materials in use today are mostly
made of carbon. Kevlar, used in racing sails and bulletproof
vests, is made of carbon-rich molecular fibers. Expensive
graphite composites, used in tennis rackets and jet aircraft, are
made using pure-carbon fibers. Perfect fibers of carbon—both
graphite and diamond—would be even better, but can't be made
with today's technology. Once molecular manufacturing gets
rolling, though, such materials will be commonplace and
inexpensive.
What will these materials be like? To picture
them, a good place to start is wood. The structure of wood can
vary from extremely light and porous, like balsa wood, to denser
structures like oak. Wood is made by molecular machinery in
plants from carbon-rich polymers, mostly cellulose. Molecular
manufacturing will be able to make materials like these, but with
a strength-to-weight ratio about a hundred times that of mediocre
steel, and tens of times better than the best steel. Instead of
being made of cellulose, these materials will be made of carbon
in forms like diamond.
Diamond is emphasized here not because it is
shiny and expensive, but because it is strong and potentially
cheap. Diamond is just carbon with properly arranged atoms. Companies are already
learning to make it from natural gas at low pressure. Molecular
manufacturing will be able to make complex objects of the stuff,
built lighter than balsa wood but stronger than steel.
Products made of such materials could be
startling by our present standards. Objects could be made that
are identical in size and shape to those we make today, but
simultaneously stronger and 90 percent lighter. This is something
to keep in mind next time you're lugging a heavy object around.
(If something needs weight to hold it in place, it would be more
convenient to add this ballast when the thing is in its proper
location than to build in the extra weight permanently.)
Better structural materials will make aircraft
lighter, stronger, and more efficient, but will have the greatest
effect on spacecraft. Today, spacecraft can barely reach orbit
with both a safety margin and a cargo. To get there at all, they
have to drop off parts like boosters and tanks along the way,
shedding weight. With strong materials, this will change: as in
the space-travel-for-business scenario in Chapter
1, spacecraft will become more like aircraft are today. They
will be rugged and reliable, and strong enough and light enough
to reach space in one piece.
Quickening Development
In some areas of high technology—spaceflight
has been a notorious example—it takes years, even decades,
to try a new idea. This makes progress slow to a crawl. In other
areas—software has been a shining example—new ideas can
be tested in minutes or hours. Since the Space Shuttle design was
frozen, personal computer software has come into existence and
gone through several generations of commercial development, each
with many cycles of building and testing.
Fast, Inexpensive Testing
Even in the days of the first operational
molecular manipulators, experimentation is likely to be
reasonably fast. Individual chemical steps can take seconds or
less. Complex molecular objects could be built in a matter of
hours. This will let new ideas be put into practice almost as
fast as they can be designed.
Later assemblers
will be even faster. At a millionth of a second per step, they
will approach the speed of computers. And, as nanotechnology
matures, experimenters will have more and more molecular
instruments available to help them find out whether their devices
work or not. Fast construction and fast testing will encourage
fast progress.
At this point, the cost of materials and
equipment for experiments will be trivial. No one today can
afford to build Moon rockets on a hobby budget, but they can
afford to build software, and many useful programs have been the
result. There is no economic reason why nanomachines couldn't
eventually be built with a hobby-size budget, though there are
reasons—to be discussed in later chapters—for wanting
to place limits on what can be built.
Early Simplicity
Finally, established technologies are always
pushing up against some limit; the easy opportunities have
generally been exploited. In many fields, the limits are those of
the properties of the materials used and the cost and precision
of manufacturing. This is true for computers, for spacecraft, for
cars, blenders, and shoes. For software, the limits are those of
computer capacity and of sheer complexity (which is to say, of
human intelligence). After molecular manufacturing develops
certain basic abilities, a whole set of limits will fall, and a
whole range of developments will become possible. Limits set by
materials properties, and by the cost and precision of
manufacturing, will be pushed way back. Competition, easy
opportunities, and fast, low-cost experimentation should combine
to yield an explosion of new products.
| |
Space |
Computers |
Nanotechnology |
| Precursor science
and technologies |
Physics
Sounding rockets |
Mathematics
Electronics |
Theoretical chemistry
Chemical synthesis |
| Crucial advance |
Teams combine and improve
technologies |
Teams combine and improve
technologies |
Teams combine and improve
technologies |
| Threshold capability |
First satellite |
First computer |
First assembler |
| Early practical
applications |
Weather, spy and
communication satellites |
Scientific calculations
Payroll calculations |
Molecular sensors
Molecular computing |
| Breakthrough
capability |
Routine, inexpensive
spaceflight |
Powerful mass-market desktop
computers |
Powerful inexpensive
molecular manufacturing |
| Further projected
developments |
Lunar base,
Mars exploration |
Widespread electronic
publishing |
New medical abilities
New, inexpensive products |
| More advanced
developments |
Mining, development,
settlement of solar system |
Major automation of
engineering design |
Help with computer goals
Environmental cleanup |
| Yet more advanced
developments |
Interstellar flight and
settlement feasible |
Trillionfold computer power |
Help with computer goals
General tissue repair |
This does not mean immediately, and it
does not apply to all imaginable nanotechnologies. Some
technologies are imaginable and clearly feasible, yet dauntingly
complex. Still, the above considerations suggest that a wide
range of advances could happen at a brisk pace. The main
bottleneck might seem to be a shortage of knowledgeable
designers—hardly anyone knows both chemistry and mechanical
design—but improving computer simulations will help. These
simulations will let engineers tinker with molecular-machinery
designs, absorbing knowledge of chemical rules without learning
chemistry in the usual sense.
Climbing Complexity
Making familiar products from improved materials
will increase their safety, performance, and usefulness. It will
also present the simplest engineering task. A greater change,
though, will result from unfamiliar products made possible by new
manufacturing methods. In talking about unfamiliar products, a
hard-to-answer question arises: What will people want?
Products are typically made because their
recipients want them. In our discussions here, if we describe
something that people won't want, then it probably won't get
built, and if it does get built, it will soon disappear. (The
exceptions—fraud, coercion, persistent mistakes—are
important, but in other contexts.) To anchor our discussion, it
makes sense to look not at totally new products, but instead at
new features for old products, or new ways to provide old
services. This approach won't cover more than a fraction of what
is possible, but will start from something sensible and provide a
springboard for the imagination.
As usual, we are describing possibilities, not
making predictions. The possibilities focused on here arise from
more complex applications of molecular
manufacturing—nanotechnological products that contain
nanomachines when they are finished. Earlier, we discussed strong
materials. Now, we discuss some smart materials.
Smart Materials
The goal of making materials and objects smart
isn't new: researchers are already struggling to build structures
that can sense internal and environmental conditions and adapt
themselves appropriately. There is even a Journal of
Intelligent Material Systems and Structures. By using
materials that can adapt their shapes, sometimes hooked up to
sensors and computers, engineers are starting to make objects
they call "smart." These are the early ancestors of the
smart materials that molecular manufacturing will make possible.
Today, we are used to having machines with a few
visible moving parts. In cars, the wheels go around, the
windshield wipers go back and forth, the antenna may go up and
down, the seat belts, mirrors, and steering wheel may be
motor-driven. Electric motors are fairly small, fairly
inexpensive, and fairly reliable, so they are fairly common. The
result is machines that are fairly smart and flexible, in a
clumsy, expensive way.
In the Desert Rose scenario, we saw
"tents" being assembled from trillions of
submicroscopically small parts, including motors, computers,
fibers, and struts. To the naked eye, materials made from these
parts could seem as smooth and uniform as a piece of plastic, or
as richly textured as wood or cloth—it is all a matter of
the arrangement and appearance of the submicroscopic parts. These
motors and other parts cost less than a trillionth of a dollar
apiece. They can be quite reliable, and good design can make
systems work smoothly even if 10 percent of a trillion motors
burn out. Likewise for motor-controlling computers and the rest.
The resulting machines can be very smart and flexible, compared
to those of today, and inexpensive, too.
When materials can be full of motors and
controllers, whole chunks of material can be made flexible and
controllable. The applications should be broad.
Scenario: Smart Paint
Surfaces surround us, and human-made
surfaces—walls, roofs, and pavement—cover huge areas
that matter to people. How can smart materials make a difference
here?
The revolution in technology has come and
gone, and you want to repaint your walls. Breathing toxic
solvents and polluting water by washing brushes have passed
into history, because paint has been replaced with smarter
stuff. The mid-twentieth century had seen considerable
progress in paints, especially the development of liquids
that weren't quite liquid—they would spread with a
brush, but didn't (stupidly) run and drip under their own
weight. This was an improvement, but the new material,
"paperpaint," is even more cooperative.
Paperpaint comes in a box with a special
trowel and pen. The paperpaint itself is a dry block that
feels a lot like a block of wood. Following the instructions,
you use the pen to draw a line around the edge of the area
you want to paint, putting an X in the middle to show where
you want the paint to go on; the line is made of nontoxic
disappearing ink, so you can slop it around without staining
anything. Using the trowel, you slice off a hunk of
paperpaint—which is easy, because it parts like soft
butter to the trowel, even though it behaves like a solid to
everything else. Very high IQ stuff, that.
Next, you press the hunk against the X and
start smoothing it out with the trowel. Each stroke spreads a
wide swath of paperpaint, much wider than the trowel, but
always staying within the inked line. A few swipes spreads it
precisely to the edges, whereupon it smooths out into a
uniform layer. Why doesn't it just spread itself? Experience
showed that customers didn't mind the effort of making a few
swipes and preferred the added control.
The paperpaint consists of a huge number of
nanomachines with little wheels for rolling over one another
and little sticky pads for clinging to surfaces. Each has a
simple, stupid computer on board. Each can signal its
neighbors. The whole mass of them clings together like an
ordinary solid, but they can slip and slide in a controlled
way when signaled. When you smooth the trowel over them, this
contact tells them to get moving and spread out. When they
hit the line, this tells them to stop. If they don't hit a
line, they go a few handbreadths, then stop anyway until you
trowel them again. When they encounter a line on all sides,
word gets around, and they jostle around to form a smooth,
uniform layer. Any that get scraped off are just so much
loose dust, but they stick together quite well.
This paint-stuff doesn't get anything wet,
doesn't stain, and clings to surfaces just tightly enough to
keep it from peeling off accidentally. If some experimentally
minded child starts digging with a stick, makes a tear, and
peels some off, it can be smoothed back again and will rejoin
as good as new. The child may eat a piece, but careful
regulation and testing has ensured that this is no worse than
eating plain paper, and safer than eating a colorful Sunday
newspaper page.
Many refinements are possible. Swipes and
pats of the trowel could make areas thicken or thin, or
bridge small holes (no more Spackling!). With sufficiently
smart paperpaint, and some way to indicate what it should do,
you can have your choice of textures. Any good design will be
washable, and a better design would shed dirt automatically
using microscopic brushes.
Removal, of course, is easy: either you rip
and peel (no scraping needed), or find that trowel, set the
dial on the handle to "strip," and poke the surface
a few times. Either way, you end up with a lump ready to
pitch into the recycling bin and the same old wall you
started with, bared to sight again.
Power Paint
Perhaps no product will ever be made exactly like
the smart paint just described. It would be disappointing if
something better couldn't be made by the time smart paint is
technologically possible. Still, paperpaint gives a feel for some
of the features to expect in the new smart products,
features such as increased flexibility and better control.
Without loading yet more capability into our paint (though there
is no reason why one couldn't), let's take a look at some
other smart properties one might want in a surface.
External walls, roofs, and paving surfaces are
exposed to sunlight, and sunlight carries energy. A proven
ability of molecular machinery is the conversion of sunlight to
stored energy: plants do it every day. Even now, we can make
solar cells that convert sunlight into electricity at
efficiencies of 30 percent or so. Molecular manufacturing could
not only make solar cells much cheaper, but could also make them
tiny enough to be incorporated into the mobile building blocks of
a smart paint.
To be efficient, this paint would have to be
dark—that is, would have to absorb a lot of light. Black
would be best, but even light colors could generate some power,
and efficiency isn't everything. Once the paint was applied, its
building blocks would plug together to pool their electrical
power and deliver it through some standard plug. A thicker,
tougher form of this sort of material could be used to resurface
pavement, generate power, and transmit it over large distances.
Since smart solar-cell pavement could be designed for improved
traction and a similar roofing material could be designed for
amazing leak-resistance, the stuff should be popular.
On a sunny day, an area just a few paces on a
side would generate a kilowatt of electrical power. With good
batteries (and enough repaved roads and solar-cell roofing),
present demands for electrical power could be met with no coal
burning, no oil imports, no nuclear power, no hydroelectric
dams, and no land taken over for solar power generation
plants.
Pretty Paint, Acoustic
Paint
The glow of fireflies and deep sea fish shows
that molecular devices can convert stored chemical energy into
light. All sorts of common devices show that electricity can be
converted to light. With molecular manufacturing, this conversion
can be done in thin films, with control over the brightness and
color of each microscopic spot. This could be used for diffuse
lighting—ceiling paperpaint that glows. With more elaborate
control, this would yield the marvel (horror?) of video
wallpaper.
With today's technology, we are used to displays
that glow. With molecular manufacturing, it will be equally easy
to make displays that just change color, like a printed page with
mobile ink. Chameleons and flatfish change color by moving
colored particles around, and nanomachines could do likewise. On
a more molecular level, they could use tunable dyes. Live
lobsters are a dark grayish green, but when cooked turn bright
red. Much of this change results from the "retuning" of
a dye molecule that is bound
in a protein in the live lobster but released by heat. This
basically mechanical change alters its color; the same principle
can be used in nanomachines, but reversibly.
How a surface appears depends on how it reflects
or emits light. Nanomachines and nanoelectronics will be
able to control this within wide limits. They will be able to do
likewise for sound, by controlling how a surface moves. In a
stereo system, a speaker is a movable surface, and nanomachines
are great for making things move as desired. Making a surface
emit high-quality sound will be easy. Almost as easy will be
surfaces that actively flex to absorb sound, so that the barking
dog across the street seems to fade away.
Smart Cloth
Looking further at the human environment we find
a lot of cloth and related materials, such as carpeting and
shoes. The textile industry was at the cutting edge of the first
industrial revolution, and the next industrial revolution will
have its effects on textiles.
With nanotechnology, even the finest textile
fibers could have sensors, computers, and motors in their core at
little extra cost. Fabrics could include sensors able to detect
light, heat, pressure, moisture, stress, and wear, networks of
simple computers to integrate this data, and motors and other
nanomechanisms to respond to it. Ordinary, everyday things like
fabric and padding could be made responsive to a person's
needs—changing shape, color, texture, fit, and so
forth—with the weather and a person's posture or situation.
This process could be slow, or it could be fast enough to respond
to a gesture. One result would be genuine one-size-fits-all
clothing (give or take child sizes), perfectly tailored off the
rack, warm in winter, cool and dry in summer; in short,
nanotechnology could provide what advertisers have only promised.
Even bogus advertising gives a clue to human desires.
Throughout history, the human race has pursued
the quest for comfortable shoes. With fully adjustable materials,
the seemingly impossible goal of having shoes that both look good
and feel good should finally be achieved. Shoes could keep your
feet dry, and warm except in the Arctic, cool except in the
tropics, and as comfortable as they can be with a person stepping
on them.
Smart Furniture
Adaptive structures will be useful in furniture.
Today, we have furniture that adapts to the human body, but it
does so in an awkward and incomplete manner. It adapts because
people grab cushions and move them around. Or a chair adapts
because it is a hinged contraption that grudgingly bends and
extends in a few places to suit a small range of preferred
positions. Occasionally, one sees furniture that allegedly gives
a massage, but in fact only vibrates.
These limitations are consequences of the
expense, bulkiness, clumsiness, and unreliability of such things
as moving parts, motors, sensors, and computers today. With
molecular manufacturing, it will be easy to make furniture from
smart materials that can adapt to an individual human body, and
to a person's changing position, to consistently give comfortable
support. Smart cushions could also do a better job of responding
to hints in the form of pats, tugs, and punches. As for
massage—a piece of furniture, no matter how advanced, is not
the same as a masseuse. Still, a typical massage setting on a
smart chair would not mean today's "vibrate medium
vigorously," but something closer to "five minutes of
shiatsu."
And So Forth . . .
This tour through of the potential of smart
matter has shown how we could get walls that look and sound as we
wish, clothing, shoes, and furniture of greater comfort, and
clean solar power. As one might expect, this just scratches the
surface.
If you care to think of further applications,
here are some ground rules: Components made by molecular
manufacturing can be many tens of times stronger than steel, but
materials made by plugging many components together will be
weaker. For these, strengths in the range of cotton candy to
steel seem achievable. The components will be sensitive to heat,
and at high temperatures they will break down or burn. Many
materials will be able to survive the temperature of boiling
water, but only specialized designs would be oven-safe. Color,
texture, and (usually) sound should be controllable. Surfaces can
be smooth and tightly sealed (this takes some cleverness).
Motions can be fairly fast. Power has to come from somewhere;
good sources include electricity, stored chemical energy, and
light. If nanomachines or smart materials are dunked in liquids,
chemical energy can come from dissolved molecules; if they are in
the open, energy can come from light; if they are sitting in one
place, they can be plugged into a socket; if they are moving
around in the dark, they can run on batteries for a while, then
run down and quit. Within these limits, much can be accomplished.
"Smart" is a relative term. Unless you
want to assume that people learn a lot more about intelligence
and programming, it is best to assume that these materials will
follow simple rules, like those followed by parts of drawings on
computer screens. In these drawings, a picture of a rectangle can
be commanded to sprout handles at its corners; pulling a handle
stretches or shrinks the rectangle without distorting its
right-angle corners. An object made of smart matter could do
likewise in the real world: a box could be stretched to a
different size, then made rigid again; a door in a smart-material
wall could have its position unlocked, its frame moved a
pace to the left, and then be returned to normal use.
There seems little reason to make bits of smart
matter independent, self-replicating, or toxic. With care, smart
matter should be safer than what it replaces because it will be
better controlled. Spray paint gets all over things and contains
noxious solvents; the paperpaint described above doesn't. This
will be a characteristic difference, if we exercise our usual
vigilance to encourage the production of things that are safe and
environmentally sound.
Falling Costs
It may be fun to discuss wondrous new products,
but they won't make much difference in the world if they are too
expensive. Besides, many people today don't have decent food,
clothes, and a roof over their heads, to say nothing of fancy
"nanostuff."
Costs matter. There is more to life than material
goods, but without material goods life is miserable and narrow.
If goods are expensive, people strive for them; if goods are
abundant, people can turn their attention elsewhere. Some of us
like to think that we are above a concern for material goods, but
this seems more common in the wealthy countries. Lowering
manufacturing costs is a mundane concern, but so are feeding
people, housing them, and building sewage systems to keep them
from dying of cholera and hepatitis. For all these reasons,
finding ways to bring down production costs is a worthy goal.
For the poor, for the environment, and for the
freeing of human potential, costs matter deeply. Let's take a
closer look at the costs of molecular manufacturing.
Can falling costs be
realistic?
Inflation produces the illusion that costs rise,
when the real story is that the value of money is falling. In the
short term, real costs usually don't change very quickly, and
this can produce the illusion that costs are stable facts of
nature, like the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics.
In the real world, though, most costs have been
falling by a crucial measure: the amount of human labor needed to
make things. People can afford more and more, because their
labor, supplemented by machines, can produce more and more. This
change is dramatic measured on a scale of centuries, and equally
dramatic across the gulf between Third World and developed
countries. The rise from Third World to First World standards of
living has raised income (dropped the cost of labor time) by more
than a factor of ten. What can molecular manufacturing do?
Larger cost reductions have happened, most
dramatically in computers. The cost of a computer of a given
ability has fallen by roughly a factor of 10 every seven years
since the 1940s. In total, this is a factor of a million.
If automotive technologies had done likewise, a luxury car would
now cost less than one cent. (Personal computer systems still
cost hundreds of dollars both because they are far more powerful
than the giant machines of the 1940s and because the cost of
buying any useful computer system includes much more than
just the cost of a bare computer chip.)
Costs: A First Estimate
Some costs apply to a kind of product,
regardless of how many copies of it are made: these include
design costs, technology licensing costs, regulatory approval
costs, and the like. Other costs apply to each unit of a
product: these include the costs of labor, energy, raw materials,
production equipment, production sites, insurance, and waste
disposal. The per-kind costs can become very low if production
runs are large. If these costs stay high, it will be because
people prefer new products for their new benefits, despite the
cost—hardly cause for complaint.
The more basic and easier to analyze costs are
per-unit costs. A picture to keep in mind here is of Desert Rose
Industries, where molecular machinery does most of the work, and
where products are made from parts that are ultimately made from
simple chemical substances. Let's consider some cost components.
Energy: Manufacturing at the molecular
scale need not use a lot of energy. Plants build billions of tons
of highly patterned material every year using available solar
energy. Molecular manufacturing can be efficient, in the sense
that the energy needed to build a block of product should be
comparable to the energy released in burning an equivalent mass
of wood or coal. If this energy were supplied as electricity at
today's costs, the energy cost of manufacturing would be
something like a dollar per kilogram. We'll return to the cost of
energy later.
Raw Materials: Molecular manufacturing
won't need exotic materials as inputs. Plain bulk chemicals will
suffice, and this means materials no more exotic than the fuels
and feedstocks that are, for now, derived from petroleum and
biomass—gasoline, methanol, ammonia, and hydrogen. These
typically cost tens of cents per kilogram. If bizarre compounds
are used, they can be made internally. Rare elements could be
avoided, but might be useful in trace amounts. The total quantity
of raw materials consumed will be smaller than in conventional
manufacturing processes because less will be wasted.
Capital Equipment and Maintenance: As we
saw in the Desert Rose scenario, molecular manufacturing can be
used to build all of the equipment needed for molecular
manufacturing. It seems that this equipment—everything from
large vats to submicroscopic special-purpose assemblers—can
be reasonably durable, lasting for months or years before being
recycled and replaced. If the equipment were to cost dollars per
kilogram, and produce many thousands of kilograms of product in
its life, the cost of the equipment would add little to the cost
of the product.
Waste Disposal: Today's manufacturing
waste is dumped into the air, water, and landfills. There need be
no such waste with molecular manufacturing. Excess materials of
the kind now spewed into the environment could instead be
completely recycled internally, or could emerge from the
manufacturing process in pure form, ready for use in some other
process. In an advanced process, the only wastes would be
leftover atoms resulting from a bad mix of raw materials. Most of
these leftover atoms would be ordinary minerals and simple gases
like oxygen, the main "waste" from the molecular
machinery of plants. Molecular manufacturing produces no new
elements—if arsenic comes out, arsenic must have gone in,
and the process isn't to blame for its existence. Any
intrinsically toxic materials of this sort can at least be put in
the safest form we can devise for disposal. One option would be
to chemically bond it into a stable mineral and put it back where
it came from.
Labor: Once a plant is operating, it
should require little human labor (what people do with their time
will change, unless factories are kept running as bizarre
hobbies). Desert Rose Industries was run by two people, yet was
described as producing large quantities of varied goods. The
basic molecular-scale operations of manufacturing have to be
automated, since they are too small for people to work on. The
other operations are fairly simple and can be aided by equipment
for handling materials and information.
Space: Even a manufacturing plant based on
nanotechnology takes up room. It would, however, be more compact
than familiar manufacturing plants, and could be built in some
out-of-the-way place with inexpensive land. These costs should be
small by today's standards.
Insurance: This cost will depend on the
state of the law, but some comparisons can be made. Improved
sensors and alarms could be made integral parts of products;
these should lower fire and theft premiums. Product liability
costs should be reduced by safer, more reliable products (we'll
discuss the question of product safety further in Chapter 12). Employee injury rates will
be reduced by having less labor input. Still, the legal system in
the United States has shown a disturbing tendency to block every new
risk, however small, even when this forces people to keep
suffering old risks, which are sometimes huge. (The supply
of lifesaving vaccines has been threatened in just this way.)
When this happens, we kill anonymous people in the name of
safety. If this behavior raises insurance premiums in a perverse
way, it could discourage a shift to safer manufacturing
technologies. Since such costs can grow or shrink independent of
the real world of engineering and human welfare, they are beyond
our ability to estimate.
Sales, Distribution, Training . . .: These
costs will depend on the product: Is it as common as potatoes,
and as simple to use? Or is it rare and complex, so that
determining what you need, where to get it, and how to use it are
the main problems? These service costs are real but can be
distinguished from costs of the thing itself.
To summarize, molecular manufacturing should
eventually lead to lower costs. The initial expense of developing
the technology and specific products will be substantial, but the
cost of production can be low. Energy costs (at present prices)
and materials costs (ditto) would be significant, but not
enormous. They were quoted on a per-kilogram basis, but
nanotechnological products, being made of superior materials,
will often weigh only a fraction of what familiar products do.
(Ballast, were it needed, will be dirt-cheap.) Equipment costs,
land costs, waste-disposal costs, and labor costs can be low by
the very nature of the technology.
Costs of design, regulation, and insurance will
depend strongly on human tastes and are beyond predicting. Basic
products, like clothing and housing, can become inexpensive
unless we do something to keep them costly. As the cost of
improved safety falls, there will be less reason to accept unsafe
products. Molecular manufacturing uses processes as controlled
and efficient as the molecular processes in plants. Its products
could be as inexpensive as potatoes. This may sound to good to be
true (and there are downsides, as we'll discuss), but why
shouldn't it be true? Shouldn't we expect large changes to come
with the replacement of modern technology?
A Cycle of Falling Costs
The above estimate made a conservative assumption
about future costs: that energy and materials will cost then what
they do now, before molecular manufacturing has become available.
They won't, because lower costs lead to lower costs.
Let's say that making one kilogram of product by
molecular manufacturing requires one dollar for a kilogram of raw
materials and four dollars for a generous forty kilowatt-hours of
energy. These are typical present-day prices for materials and
electrical energy. Assume, for the moment, that other costs are
small. One of the resulting five-dollar-per-kilogram products can
be solar cell paint suitable for applying to paved roads. A layer
of paint a few millionths of a meter thick would cost about five
cents per square meter to produce, and would generate enough
energy to make another square meter of paint in less than a week,
even allowing for nighttime and moderate cloud cover. The
so-called energy payback time would thus be short.
Let's assume that this smart paint costs as much
to spread and hook up as it does to make, and that we demand that
it pay for itself in a single month, so we charge ten cents per
square meter per month. At that rate, the cost of solar energy
from resurfaced roads would be roughly $0.004 per kilowatt
hour—less than a twentieth the energy cost assumed in the
initial production-cost estimate. By itself, this makes the cost
of production fall to a fraction of what it was before. Most of
that remaining fraction consists of the cost of materials.
But the products of nanotechnology will mostly be
made of carbon (if present expectations are any guide), and
carbon dioxide is too abundant in the atmosphere these days. With
energy so cheap, the atmosphere can be used as source of carbon
(and of hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen). The price of carbon
would be a few cents per kilogram—roughly a twentieth the
original price assumed for raw materials.
But now, both energy and raw materials are a
twentieth the original price, and so the products become cheaper,
including the energy-producing products and the
raw-material—producing (atmosphere-cleaning) products....
The above scenario is simple, but it seems
realistic in its basic outlines: lower costs can lead to lower
costs. How far this process can go is hard to estimate precisely,
but it could go far indeed.
Power Too Cheap To Meter?
This argument will remind some readers of an old
claim—that nuclear energy would lead to "power too
cheap to meter." This assertion, attributed to the early
nuclear era, has passed into folklore as a warning to be
skeptical of technologists promising free goodies. Does the
warning apply here?
Anyone claiming that something is free doesn't
really understand economics. Using something always has a cost
equal to the most valuable alternative use for the thing.
Choosing one alternative sacrifices another, and that sacrifice
is the cost. As economist Phillip K. Salin says, "There's no
such thing as a free opportunity," since opportunities
always cost (at least) time and attention. Nanotechnology will
not mean free goodies.
But, one might argue, nuclear power hasn't even
been inexpensive. If technologists could be so wrong back then,
why believe a similar argument today? We are happy to report that
the arguments aren't similar: any argument for "nuclear
power too cheap to meter" had to be absurd even given the
knowledge at the time, and our argument isn't.
Nuclear reactors boil water to make steam to turn
turbines to turn generators to drive electrical power through
power lines to transformers to local power lines to houses,
factories, and so forth. The wildest optimist could never have
claimed that nuclear power was a free source of anything more
than heat, and a realist would have added in the cost of the
reactor equipment, fuel, waste disposal, hazards, and the rest.
Even our wild optimist would have had to include the cost of
building the boiler, the turbines, the generators, the power
lines, and the transformers, and the cost of maintenance on all
these. These costs were known to be a major part of the cost of
power, so free heat wouldn't have meant free power. Thus, the
claim was absurd the day it was made—not merely in
hindsight.
In the early 1960s, Alvin Weinberg, head of the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was a strong advocate of nuclear
power, and argued that it would provide "cheap energy."
He was optimistic, but did his sums. First, he assumed that
nuclear-power plants could be built a little more cheaply than
coal-fired power plants of the same size. Then he assumed that
the cost of fuel, waste disposal, operations, and maintenance for
nuclear plants would be not much more than the cost of operations
and maintenance alone for coal plants. Then he assumed that they
might last for more than thirty years. Finally, he assumed that
they would be publicly operated, tax free at low interest (which
merely moves costs elsewhere) and that after thirty years the
cost of the equipment would be written off (which is an
accounting fiction). With all of that, he derived a power cost
that "might be" as low as one half the cost of
the cheapest coal-fired plant he mentions. He was clearly an
optimist, but he didn't come close to arguing for power too cheap
to meter.
Low But Not Zero Costs
People have cried "Wolf!" before about
new technologies leading to overwhelming abundance. It was said
of nuclear power, and of steam power before it, and perhaps of
water wheels, the horse, the plough, and the chipped rock.
Molecular manufacturing is different because it is a new way to
make almost anything, including more of the equipment needed to
do the manufacturing. There has never been anything quite like
this before.
The basic argument for low cost production is
this: Molecular manufacturing will be able to make almost
anything with little labor, land, or maintenance, with high
productivity, and with modest requirements for materials and
energy. Its products will themselves be extremely productive, as
energy producers, as materials collectors, and as manufacturing
equipment. There has never been a technology with this
combination of characteristics, so historical analogies must be
used with care. Perhaps the best analogy is this: Molecular
manufacturing will do for matter processing what the computer has
done for information processing.
There will always be limiting costs, because
resources—whether energy, matter, or design
skill—always have some alternative use. Costs will not fall
to zero, but it seems that they could fall very low indeed.
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