Recently, by reading various sources online, I have been made aware of the imminent arrival of a technology to which I had previously given only passing notice: Nanotechnology. What I've read has made such an impact on my thinking that I've decided to discuss it in three separate posts on the Message Forum.

Nanotechnology is the ability to manipulate matter on the atomic level, arranging individual atoms to create machines far smaller than a human cell. The predicted result of nanotechnology is stuff straight out of science fiction: reinforcement of bodily tissue to the degree that a man could survive falling from the roof of a building; Star Trek-like replicators that can quickly create food, clothing, or anything else whose atomic structure has been described in software; the complete arrest of the aging process and cures for every known disease; building materials whose strength and durability are many times that of steel, yet whose weight is like plastic, and which cost mere pennies to manufacture; supercomputers the size of the period at the end of this sentence, whose performance is greater than all the computers in the world today, combined.

The technology that can enable all of this and more, I read, is not a century away but a decade, or possibly two. Within ten years, it is predicted, we will see the first crude nanocompilers, and in the 20 or 30 years following that, a steady stream of applications for the technology, including the first of many great culminations of human striving: physical immortality. Some of us will live long enough to commence living indefinitely.

Supposing these forecasts from the scientific community to be not more than a little optimistic, there is little time to prepare ourselves to enter an alien future. Industry cannot exist in its present form in a world where material goods are as simple to produce as mere data. Many forms of labor, too, become obsolete with the advent of nanotechnology. If nanotech succeeds, we are likely to see a tremendous global upheaval as old economic, social and political systems fall by the wayside.

Read the opening article "What is Nanotechnology?" on the web site linked to below, and some of the articles following it, and I don't doubt you will be left, as I was, sitting slack-jawed at the portrait of terrestrial paradise that proponents of nanotech research paint to whet our appetites. If ever the expression "too good to be true" applied, it is here. And I wonder whether it is perverse of me to feel that it is also "too good to be good." But that's for the second post. I wanted to keep this post more positive than not, to encourage wild speculation as to what earthly ills we might be able to overcome with nanotechnology. Such speculation is fun, in the way that it was fun for children two generations ago to speculate on when we might ever set foot on the moon. Indeed, if the potential for terraforming that nanotech promises comes to fruition, millions of people may, within the next century, set foot on the moon as their choice of residence.

So, haul out your crystal balls and have at it, y'all. What things will be possible when, twenty years from now, the average RinkWorks reader reaches middle age?

Iss "not to be confused with 'Nanoo-technology', which will enable us to communicate with Orson" achar