abstract
Nanotechnology is a hybrid science combining engineering and chemistry. Atoms and molecules stick together because they have complementary shapes that lock together, or charges that attract. Just like with magnets, a positively charged atom will stick to a negatively charged atom. As millions of these atoms are pieced together by nanomachines, a specific product will begin to take shape. The goal of nanotechnology is to manipulate atoms individually and place them in a pattern to produce a desired structure. There are three steps to achieving nanotechnology-produced goods:
Scientists must be able to manipulate individual atoms. This means that they will have to develop a technique to grab single atoms and move them to desired positions.
The next step will be to develop nanoscopic machines, called assemblers, that can be programmed to manipulate atoms and molecules at will. It would take thousands of years for a single assembler to produce any kind of material one atom at a time.
In order to create enough assemblers to build consumer goods, some nanomachines, called replicators, will be programmed to build more assemblers.
Trillions of assemblers and replicators will fill an area smaller than a cubic millimeter, and will still be too small for us to see with the naked eye. Assemblers and replicators will work together like hands to automatically construct products, and will eventually replace all traditional labor methods. This will vastly decrease manufacturing costs, thereby making consumer goods plentiful, cheaper and stronger
INTRODUCTION
NANOTECHNOLOGY IS THE TECHNOLGY WHERE SCIENCE FICTION MEETS REALITY.
Every living thing is made of cells that are chock-full of nano-machines-proteins, DNA, RNA, etc.-each jiggling around in the water of the cell, rubbing up against molecules, going about the business of life. Each one is perfect right down to the last atom. The workings are so exquisite that changing the location or identity of any atom would cause damage. Over the past century, scientists have learned about the workings of these biological nano-machines to an incredible level of detail, and the benefits of this knowledge are beginning to be felt in medicine. In coming decades, we will learn to modify and adapt this machinery to extend the quality and length of life. Bio-technology was the first nanotechnology, and it has a long way yet to go.
Twenty years ago, without even this crude chemotherapy any cancer patient would already be dead. But twenty years from now nano-technology will have given us specially engineered drugs which are nanoscale cancer-seeking missiles, a molecular technology that specifically targets just the mutant cancer cells in the human body, and leaves everything else blissfully alone. To do this, these drug molecules will have to be big enough-thousands of atoms-so that we can code the information into them of where they should go and what they should kill. They will be examples of an exquisite, human-made nanotechnology of the future.
Nanotechnology is ability to do things-measure, see, predict and make-on the scale of atoms and molecules. Nanotechnology will have profound effect on all major aspects of life including: medicine creation and delivery, smaller more powerful computers, cleaner supplies of energy, more efficient automobiles, stronger buildings, and smart clothes to name a few. In future, nanotech, bio-tech and infotech will coverage and will re-invigorate discoveries and innovations in many areas of economy. While the quest for ever-smaller dimensions in electronics has been going for 30-some years, mainly due to the enabling laws of physics, discoveries in chemistry have been increasing at a proportional rate. This relation between the world of the small in physics and the world of newly discovered processes in chemistry has led some researchers to speculate that the two sciences will cross in the next millennium to produce an entire set of new materials and devices.
EFFECTS OF NANOTECHNOLOGY:-
Nanotechnology is anywhere from five to 15 years in the future, and we won't see dramatic changes in our world right away. But let's take a look at the potential effects of nanotechnology:
The first products made from nanomachines will be stronger fibers. Eventually, we will be able to replicate anything, including , water and food. Famine could be eradicated by machines that fabricate foods to feed the hungry.
In the computer industry, the ability to shrink the size of will soon reach its limits. Nanotechnology will be needed to create a new generation of computer components.
Nanotechnology may have its biggest impact on the medical industry. Patients will drink fluids containing nanorobots programmed to attack and reconstruct the molecular structure of to make them harmless.
Nanotechnology has the potential to have a positive effect on the environment.
Nano gears
Nanogears no more than a nanometer wide could be used to construct a matter compiler, which could be fed raw material to arrange atoms and build a macro-scale structure.
How will nanotechnology improve our lives?
One of the first obvious benefits is the improvement in manufacturing techniques. We are taking familiar manufacturing systems and expanding them to develop precision on the atomic scale. This will give us greater understanding of the building of things, and greater flexibility in the types and quantity of things we may build. We will be able to expand our control of systems from the macro to the micro and beyond, while simultaneously reducing the cost associated with manufacturing products.
Some of the most dramatic changes are expected in the realms of medicine. Scientists envision creating machines that will be able to travel through the circulatory system, cleaning the arteries as they go; sending out troops to track down and destroy cancer cells and tumors; or repairing injured tissue at the site of the wound, even to the point of replacing missing limbs or damaged organs. The extent of medical repair systems is expected to be quite broad, with the cumulative impact being equally large.
Nanotechnology is expected to touch almost every aspect of our lives, right down to the water we drink and the air we breathe. Once we have the ability to capture, position, and change the configuration of a molecule, we should be able to create filtration systems that will scrub the toxins from the air or remove hazardous organisms from the water we drink. We should be able to begin the long process of cleaning up our environment.
Space will also open up to us in new ways. With the current cost of transporting payloads into space being so high (~$20,000/kg), little is being done to take advantage of space. Nanotechnology will help by allowing us to deliver more machines of smaller size and greater functionality into space, paving the way for solar system expansion. Some have suggested that application of medical nanotechnology might even go so far as to allow us to adapt our bodies for survival in space or on other worlds. While this is certainly a long way off, it provides a glimpse of the thorough control that nanotechnology may provide.
Taking all of this into account, it is clear that nanotechnology should improve our lives in any area that would benefit from the development of better, faster, stronger, smaller, and cheaper systems.Nanotechnology is likely to change the way almost everything, including medicine, computers and cars, are designed and constructed.
APPLICATIONS
Nanotechnology should let us make almost every manufactured product faster, lighter, stronger, smarter, safer and cleaner. We can already see many of the possibilities as these few examples illustrate:
1. Improved Transportation
Today, most airplanes are made from metal despite the fact that diamond has a strength-to-weight ratio over 50 times that of aerospace aluminium. Diamond is expensive, we can't make it in the shapes we want, and it shatters. Nanotechnology will let us inexpensively make shatterproof diamond in exactly the shapes we want.
2. Military applications
Today, "smart" weapons are fairly big -- we have the "smart bomb" but not the "smart bullet." In the future, even weapons as small as a single bullet could pack more computer power than the largest supercomputer in existence today, allowing them to perform real time image analysis of their surroundings and communicate with weapons tracking systems to acquire and navigate to targets with greater precision and control.
3. Medical uses
It is not modern medicine that does the healing, but the cells themselves we are but onlookers. If we had surgical tools that were molecular both in their size and precision, we could develop a medical technology that for the first time would let us directly heal the injuries at the molecular and cellular level that are the root causes of disease and ill health.
4. Atom computers
Today, computer chips are made using lithography -- literally, "stone writing." If the computer hardware revolution is to continue at its current pace, in a decade or so we'll have to move beyond lithography to some new post lithographic manufacturing technology. Ultimately, each logic element will be made from just a few atoms.
CONCLUSION:
The single most frequently asked question about nanotechnology is: How long? How long before it will let us make molecular computers? How long before inexpensive solar cells let us use clean solar power instead of oil, coal, and nuclear fuel? How long before we can explore space at a reasonable cost?
The scientifically correct answer is: We don't know
From relays to vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits to Very Large Scale Integrated circuits (VLSI) we have seen steady declines in the size and cost of logic elements and steady increases in their performance.7
Extrapolation of these trends suggests we will have to develop molecular manufacturing in the 2010 to 2020 time frame if we are to keep the computer hardware revolution on schedule.
Of course, extrapolating past trends is a philosophically debatable method of technology forecasting. While no fundamental law of nature prevents us from developing nanotechnology on this schedule (or even faster), there is equally no law that says this schedule will not slip.
Much worse, though, is that such trends imply that there is some ordained schedule -- that nanotechnology will appear regardless of what we do or don't do. Nothing could be further from the truth. How long it takes to develop this technology depends very much on what we do. If we pursue it systematically, it will happen sooner. If we ignore it, or simply hope that someone will stumble over it, it will take much longer. And by using theoretical, computational and experimental approaches together, we can reach the goal more quickly and reliably than by using any single approach alone. How long will it take? A lot depends on when we start.
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