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Foresight Update 4

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A publication of the Foresight Institute



Manufacturing with Nanotechnology

Viewpoint by Jerry Fass

Nanotechnology-based manufacturing techniques should yield great increases in productivity and wealth. Improvements in two techniques in particular will greatly decrease resource requirements: the incorporation of voids, and wearproofing.


Whenever possible, objects can incorporate carefully shaped voids to save cost and mass. Generally, voids are more useful for large systems or those under low loads. They can range in size from arbitrarily large down to a fraction of a nanometer wide; the upper limit is set by device size, the lower by the scale of atoms. For structures under light compressive loads, voids formed in fractal patterns can yield maximum efficiency.

Today's bulk manufacturing can produce large, irregular voids at reasonable cost, as in foam rubber and insulation. Nanomachines should be able to produce uniform voids down to one atom across, thereby cutting the mass, cost, energy, and time needed for production. The biggest gains will be for objects with structural loads in pure compression or mixed compression and tension; fortunately this includes the majority of objects we use, such as furniture, doors, most walls, and appliances. The void fraction of these could be very high, perhaps 99% or more. Highly loaded objects (e.g., engine parts) will benefit less, and highly loaded tension systems (e.g., cables and pressure vessels) will benefit little.

Incorporating voids, combined with scavenging heavy pre-nanotechnology parts, will allow us to recycle old systems into multiple new ones without new material resources, reducing the need for mining and refining.

Van der Waals cylinder-and-sleeve bearing

© K. Eric Drexler


Wear limits the lives of mechanical and structural systems, which often attain a reasonable lifetime only by having worn-out parts replaced. (An annoying example is the modern automobile). Wear is cumulative and can seem exponential, as worn parts increase wear on other parts. The aim of wearproofing is to head off the wear process, with the increasingly ambitious goals of longer-lasting parts, zero-wear parts, and finally self-repair. Using nanotechnology, we can expect improvements in:

  • Tribology--the science of why and how objects wear. Nanomachines should greatly aid collection of data needed to further advance this field.
  • Hardness--surfaces of harder materials wear more slowly. Surfaces of ceramic or diamond, or perhaps the new form of carbon, "C8", reported by Soviet researchers, will last much longer. Nanomachines could apply such coatings, and powerful computers may allow us to design new ones.
  • Friction control--lubricants and bearings. All three means of lubrication--solids (Teflon, graphite), liquids (oil), and gases (air)--are improving rapidly thanks to improved data and computer analysis. Contact bearings will benefit from ever-tighter tolerances and more rugged materials. A revolutionary non-contact bearing, the electromagnetic bearing, repulsively or attractively levitates moving parts in a magnetic or electric field, with zero friction; wear can often be practically eliminated by having such a bearing gently "land" a part after it stops moving. The new high-temperature superconductors will make such bearings smaller, stronger, and more precise; since they are often computer-controlled, nanocomputers will be helpful too. And of course, Drexler's suggested atomically-precise sigma bond and van der Waals bearings will not wear in any conventional sense.

Wear on tools can be reduced even for bulk processes by forming parts using non-contact methods such as explosives, lasers, electron beams, plasma torches, water jets, and electromagnetic forming instead of drill bits, grinding wheels, and the like. There may be uses where such macro-tools forever outperform nano-tools: perhaps in well drilling, tunneling, and excavating.

Synergies between the above techniques can be expected; for example, making an object with voids but covering the surface with diamond. And besides saving energy in manufacturing, we can expect to do so in transport as well: objects will last longer and so need to be delivered less often, they will weigh less when they do need transport, and with nanoproduction systems--quiet, small, flexible, and clean--manufacturing on-site becomes a possibility.

But eventually, we can expect self-repair to solve the wear problem.

Jerry Fass is a part-time science writer based in Wisconsin. He also coordinates FI's journal monitoring project.

Foresight Update 4 - Table of Contents


How Many Bytes in Human Memory?

by Ralph Merkle

[Note: A related article on the computational limits of the human brain is available in Update 6.]


Several approximations to this number have already appeared in the literature based on 'hardware' considerations (though in the case of the human brain perhaps the term 'wetware' is more appropriate). One estimate of 1020 bits is actually an early estimate (by Von Neumann in The Computer and the Brain) of all the neural impulses conducted in the brain during a lifetime. This number is almost certainly larger than the true answer. Another method is to estimate the total number of synapses, and then presume that each synapse can hold a few bits. Estimates of the number of synapses have been made in the range from 1013 to 1015, with corresponding estimates of memory capacity.


Landauer works at Bell Communications Research--closely affiliated with Bell Labs where the modern study of information theory was begun by C. E. Shannon to analyze the information carrying capacity of telephone lines (a subject of great interest to a telephone company). Landauer naturally used these tools by viewing human memory as a novel 'telephone line' that carries information from the past to the future. The capacity of this 'telephone line' can be determined by measuring the information that goes in and the information that comes out, and then applying the great power of modern information theory.





This article is also available on Dr. Merkle's Web site.

Dr. Merkle's interests range from neurophysiology to computer security. He recently spoke on nanotechnology and biostasis at the Life Against Death Conference in San Francisco.

Foresight Update 4 - Table of Contents


The Road to Nanomachine Design

by Thomas Donaldson

One of the contributions by K. Eric Drexler to nanotechnology was his success with estimating the behavior of nanomachines by using simple mechanical calculations. Ultimately, however, these exploratory engineering calculations remain approximations only. Serious nanomachine design will require much more. Almost certainly it needs very powerful computers able to carry out dynamic calculations on large molecules. These calculations need lots of computer power. Specialized chemical workstations with prices in the range of $200,000 already exist.

To speed nanotechnology along what we really want is lower price computers, ideally costing no more than a Mac II. There is a wide open road to just such a computer. Technology for chemical design workstations costing about $40,000 exists right now, for the trouble of assembling a system from standard boards (unfortunately not done yet). The same parts will cost far less in a few years (so Popular NanoMechanics may start publication soon).

The technology depends on the Transputer, a chip specially designed for parallel processing. Computer System Architects sells IBM PC boards with 16 Transputer chips and 16 megabytes of memory for $28,000.

Chemical Design Ltd, a British company, already sells a chemical design workstation, the MITIE 1000, which can contain as many as 36 independent Transputers. The smallest MITIE 1000 sells for $170,000. The MITIE calculates as much as 72 times faster than a VAX 8600, analyzing the conformation and dynamics of large molecules at supercomputer speeds.

The MITIE contains a microVAX as a host machine; the remaining modules run on the VAX. Chemical Design has about 250 customers around the world, including Glaxo, Rhone-Poulenc, Fisons, Dupont, American Cyanamid, Merck, and Hoffmann-LaRoche. The program ChemX contains specific modules for building and displaying the molecule (ChemCore), modelling molecules (fitting, analyzing the conformation: ChemModel), designing proteins (ChemProtein), and carrying out calculations to find minimum energy states (ChemQM). There are also library modules to maintain a large database (ChemLib: the recommended size of hard disk for a single-user system is 70 Megabytes).

Any molecular machine we design must be chemically stable in the environment for which we design it. We must therefore make sure not just that the molecule would be stable if isolated from all other chemicals but also that the system will withstand likely chemical attack. Molecules will try to attain minimum energy states, and their excited states are also of interest. To resolve all of these issues will require very fast chemical design software. Ultimately software for nanomachine design will do much more, but even existing chemical design software running on an affordable workstation puts us far ahead.

What about the software? Unfortunately, porting software to a parallel computer usually requires a total rewrite of any modules in which you expect to use parallelism. Porting should be a cooperative effort between someone versed in parallel computing and someone versed in chemical design software. When someone will get a chemical design show on the road, porting software to a MAC II-transputer system, isn't clear to me. My own expertise lies in parallel computing. Anyone interested can reach me through Foresight Update.

Dr. Thomas Donaldson currently writes software for a transputer machine for the FEM market. He pioneered the idea of artificial enzyme systems as an approach to cell repair.

Note: One example of recent use of parallel computers for complex molecular dynamics calculations can be found on the web at:


From Foresight Update 4, originally published 15 October 1988.


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