You surely all have heard about nanobots. Most of those you have heard are surely sci-fi, like having mini bots inside your blood stream that will be used to control you, or live for ever etc.
Well forget about all sci fi. Nanobots will not be mini robots because the machine mechanics break down at nanometer scales due to casimir effect that creates friction. (see more about casimir effect at wikipedia here).
Nanorobotics will be molecular robotics which will be based in molecular mechanics of hybrid organic and inorganic material that will be inserted in the body and complete specific tasks, most likely through swarm techniques (the robots will be acting complementary like bird swarms) and provide functionality beyond the basic of normal body functions.
Let your imagination free. Imagine a molecular robot capable of producing ATP in your cells (the body’s fuel) and also cleave enzymically lactic acid. This will give you marathon abilities…
Imagine a molecular nanobot probing your circulating cells to see if any of them is cancerous allowing very early detection and later on destruction of cancerous cells. Isn’t it great?
Future is near and possibilities are endless! It seems most likely that the evolution of our species in the future will be a hybrid between current darwinism and custom tailored molecular abilities…This is not contradicted ethically but it should be used wisely. It is an important step for humanity and we are on the verge of this technologically disrupting event.
For now we are just experimenting with ways of assembling these nanobots. We are far away from the in vivo implementation of them (at least a decade, taking into consideration the exponential accelerating law of technology).
Take for example a current state of the art molecular Spider nanorobot made of DNA following specific molecular landscape tracks. A great work from Caltech University. As we said before nanobots will not be minute copies of robots of the macroscale. They will be based on molecular mechanics as the DNA nanobot.
For now let’s just watch the elegant design in the caltech news site below or the Nature journal published paper at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7295
or if you do not have access to nature journal see a press release of this creation at
http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13345
We are very lucky to live in the most exciting scientific period of humanity. There are no borders on what we can create and the only border that exists is our imagination. So let your imagination free and think of hybrid organic-inorganic objects. Take proteins with specific properties in your “gedanken experiments” and fuse them with inorganic materials with other properties. See for example a carbon nanotube semiconductor that is being activated with ATP which is the fuel of our bodies below:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18891-nanotube-transistor-will-help-us-bond-with-machines.html
Send me your ideas in the comments below. Who knows? I will maybe design one of your ideas and see it come true very soon…..
L.A>
Pingback: Tweets that mention Nanobots or the Molecular Mechanics Revolution -- Topsy.com