Visions Toward Nanotechnology
Lincoln Cannon
17 February 2008 (updated 11 October 2024)
Nanotechnology or molecular engineering is precision manufacturing at the atomic level. It may 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.
International scientists recently competed to produce the best images of our nanoscale world. To accomplish this, they used scanning probe microscopes that can infer the positions of individual atoms. Check them out.
