Visions Toward Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology or molecular engineering (precision manufacturing at the atomic level) will enable us to produce dirt-cheap supercomputers, ubiquitous 100% pure water, highly cost-efficient solar energy collectors, and myriads of other world-changing technologies that we probably have not even imagined.

Most of us are not aware of advances in miniaturization technology that suggest we’re not so far away from being able to produce automated nanoscale factories. Yet futurists such as Ray Kurzweil expect a nanotechnology revolution within a couple decades of the present.

Here are some images of our nanoscale world. They were taken by British scientists using scanning probe microscopes that can infer the positions of individual atoms.