Daily Archives: May 20, 2008

The Law of Exponential Nanotech Development

Since our FastForward Radio show Sunday night, I’ve been thinking over part of the conversation we had with our Nanotech panel.

On a couple of occasions Christine Peterson stated that some problems might not be worth the cost of developing nanotech solutions.

I’d be foolish to disagree. She is, afterall, the president of the Foresight Nanotech Institute, and she’s been in the nanotech industry since its infancy. But it seems to me that her answer is likely addressed to the present and near future.

[Editor: Phil has pointed out, correctly, that it was Dr. Pearl Chin, not Christine Peterson who argued that expensive nanotech solutions might not be economically feasible for some simple tasks.]

It’s not likely, for example, that anyone will spend billions to market a mouthwash manufactured to molecular precision anytime soon. Expensive solutions will be applied to important – which another way of saying well-funded – problems. Curing halitosis (and improving dental health) might seem pretty important before a hot date, but it won’t draw the same research dollars as curing cancer.

But long-term, this situation might change. And we have a good model to base this on – the development of computers.

The first microchip computer was designed by MIT in 1964. Here’s the specs:

ROM: 12K,
RAM: 1K,
Clock: 1.024 MHz,
Computing: 11 instructions, 16 bit word Logic: ~5000 ICs (3-input NOR gates, RTL logic)

Puny huh? Well, this was the Apollo Guidance Computer. It took us to the Moon and back. Back then we went to huge expense to create a very simple computer to accomplish great things.

Now we go to little expense to create complex computers to accomplish trivial things. A computer as powerful as the AGC is practically disposable now. We find them in Happy Meal toys or in singing birthday cards.

MCDONALD-ESPN.jpg

The year after MIT designed the Apollo Guidance Computer, Gordon Moore made his famous prediction about the development of integrated circuits. Even at that early date Moore was able to see that integrated circuits were being improved exponentially. The computer is an intelligence tool. Each step aids the development of the next step.

I suspect that nanotech will develop the same way. We’ll develop a simple set of nanotech-buiding tools that will help us develop better second generation tools and on and on – exponentially. Can we call this the “More Gordon Law?” No? Well… it was worth a shot.

President Kennedy was right about the Moon:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills…

Organizing “the best of our energies and skills” produced the world’s first microchip computer. Perhaps a similarly great and challenging undertaking will usher in the Nanotech Industrial Revolution.

And 20 years after that I’ll be gargling nanobots.

Really Big Building or Self-Contained City?

Architect Eugene Tsui is walking the line between the two with his two-mile-high Ultima Tower concept.

ultlimatower.jpg

Blogger Mahesh Basantani comments:

We’ve seen a whole slew of gigantic, volcano shaped, city-in-a-building towers, each promising to be the largest building in the world. First it was the wacky X-Seed design for Tokyo, and then even Norman Foster got into the game with his proposal for the massive ‘Crystal Island’ development in Moscow. Well now, architect Eugene Tsui is taking the gigantic volcano tower concept to a whole new eco level, by taking design inspiration from the natural world. His new design for the Ultima Tower – a 2-mile high Mt Doom-esque structure – borrows design principles from trees and other living ystem to reduce its energy footprint. We are always intrigued by architecture that uses biomimicry – the borrowing of principles from nature’s designs – and Tsui’s concept for this towering, ultra-dense urban development has certainly captured our attention with its thought-provoking design.

The base of the tower is 7000 feet in diameter. Solar panels on the outside would provide a good deal of the the required energy for operation. Additional power would come from wind turbines. Plus, Tsui describes a method of generating energy based on temperature differential between the bottom and the top of the tower. (I’me familiar with the idea of generating power using the temperature differentialin water; I suppose air would work the same. But if there’s that much difference in temperature between the top and the bottom of this thing, either the top or the bottom — I’m guessing the top — would be pretty uncomfortable.) The 144 elevators would be powered by compressed air.

In addition to trees, one of the inspirations from the natural world for this design was an African termite mound:

termitemound.jpg

Tsui’s design calls for the tower to be surrounded by lakes on all side, which got me wondering — why not ocean? Could something like this be constructed out at sea, attached to a huge platform bolted to the sea floor? It would be like the ultimate oil rig. If so, I think a design like this would be a good endgame for the Seastedders — folks who want to, in their own words, “create permanent dwellings on the ocean – homesteading the high seas.”

Their concept photo looks a lot less ambitious than the Ultima Tower:

seasted.jpg

On the other hand, it looks like it’s designed for — among other things — agriculture. That would probably be an important consideration when building a self-contained habitat out at sea. Ultima Tower would be a huge undertaking even on land. But I love the idea of having it sit out somewhere in the middle of the Pacific — an independent city-state. There’s something very appealing about that.