Scientists Create Robots Smaller Than a Grain of Sand: WSJ
Just 3 months after I mentioned that potential.
Ample, reliable, nuclear power and unfettered engineering development can create rapid progress. Micro-robots don’t need much power, but the supporting infrastructure benefits from energy technology. As I wrote in October, with cheap electricity and advanced electro-tech we can
Extract metals from seawater or old mine tailings instead of new mines
Refine trash mountains into useful materials
Make net-zero-CO2 synfuels from air and seawater
Purify school and office air with germicidal far-ultraviolet energy to end epidemics of flu and measles
Develop quantum computers to supercharge artificial intelligence
Replace agency bureaucracies with AI-inspired enterprise information systems
Destroy incoming missiles with hundred kilowatt lasers using $2 of electricity
Desalinate seawater and purify river water to save millions from deadly typhoid fever
Advance power electronics and actuators making drones useful or deadly
Today’s Wall Street Journal article, Scientists Create Robots Smaller Than a Grain of Sand, surprised me.
Ian McKay’s future is made of energy, writing “over time our world is getting to be made more out of energy, and relatively less out of matter“. He foresees nanometer size machinery. J. Storrs Hall conceives ground-up nanotechnology with protein size molecules creating nanometer size pumps and motors, with possible biological production enabled by instructions written in DNA, making manufacturing mimic programming. Richard Feynman envisioned using today’s automated factories to build 1/4th size tools, machinery, then factories, then iterating the process until achieving nanotechnology. Jason Crawford foresees a future with multi-path “mastery over” biology, information, space, energy, materials, and environment.
Industry already makes integrated circuits on chips with 3 nanometer conductors that are 1/100th the size of what can be seen with visible light. A $20 billion semiconductor fab uses 200 MW of reliable electricity. The semiconductor industry uses as much electricity as some countries.Nations that have and use ample, lowest cost energy will dominate.
Please read two articles:
Hargraves: Why can’t the US dominate nuclear power?
MdKay: The future is made of energy