How would nanotech work for practical applications

[JTsyo]

Let's take for example mining an asteroid. Would it be possible to drop a few tons of nanomachines on an asteroid and have them mine it? Would each machine take some of the material and drop it in the collection area? Would they put the valuable material into one big lump? I don't see how they would be used in practical matters.

 

[Crusty]

I think one of the advantages to using nanomachines in the case of mining would be the ability to examine the materials as they are mined and have the ability to refine the materials as they are being mined instead of a kind of catch all now and refine later. It would reduce overhead, and produce a higher quality ore from the same materials.

 

[PolymerTim]

Keep in mind that what makes "nano" stuff so special is that it operates in a completely different level than we do. This gives them some fantastic abilities, but also limits them in some ways.

Asking a nanomachine to transport itself over distances of meters while mining on an asteroid is just a bad idea. The machine is nano-scale and that means it will accomplish its work on the nano-scale. If you wanted something to move rock over meters, then you need a machine on the meter scale to do it efficiently.

But there's nothing to say you can't combine devices. I think Crusty is on to something. Possibly you have a large mining device that pulls up raw material, crushes it, and then feeds it into a tank of nanomachines that then somehow refine the desired materials.

Wikipedia has an article in the topic you might want to review. I don't have time to read it right now, but skimming it, you can see that potential applications are operating on a small scale.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanorobotics

I also have to throw in that I am always wary of the "nano" term and its abuse. Nano-robotics can only get away with it by saying that they use nano-scale parts, but the devices themselves are generally on the micro-scale. In materials, true nano is often considered to be below 100 nm and is defined by a shift in apparent properties at this length scale. The exact threshold will vary depending on the property and material you are looking at, but I find it fascinating that commonly accepted properties of materials (like stiffness or viscosity) are the same on the meter scale and the micrometer scale, but can change drastically below 100 nm.

 

[KIAman]

The best aspect of nanomachines is the ability to set and forget. Once a good design has been made, you do not need to worry about power, maintenance, replacement, etc. A well designed nanomachine will find its own energy source, fix itself/each other and replicate. Imagine if we had nanomachines that broke apart cholesterol into its base parts. One shot of these nanomachines and you would be forever (theoretically) be immune to cholesterol buildup. Throw some pollution killing nanomachines in the water and convert all the oil and chemicals into base parts (or safe parts).

I don't think nanomachines will ever be practical in large scale operations like mining an asteroid. They are designed to work in small scale environments. The greatest benefit being that they will do their jobs without micromanagement while having the ability to work in microscopic spaces.

 

[DrPizza]

For what it's worth, nanotechnology has been around for decades; it's only recently that the term was coined. But, your thread seems to be about nano-scale machines?

 

[QuixoticOne]

One has to be careful to realize that there's nothing magic about nanotech. Indeed in the limiting factor nanotech
is just individual atoms and molecules interacting mechanically and chemically and that is what we call
chemistry, electronics, and mechanics.

You can't necessarily do something more efficiently with a small machine than you can do with a big machine or
big industrial plant, in fact usually the reverse. Basic atoms and molecules already can store more energy
chemically and magnetically or so on as you could hope to imbue a nanite with, after all it is just made of a
collection of ordinary atoms / molecules. There are only approximately 92 atomic elements in nature, and many
of those aren't really available / usable / interesting for engineering, so just assembling them into smaller
machines just gets you ... smaller machines.

The great benefits of nanites could be things like self-assembly / self replication, or at least easy mass production in
specialized factories. Self energization is effectively equivalent to either "eating" or photosynthesis. Photosynthesis
or quantum photovoltaics is a great nanotechnology because it is very efficient and uses sustainable solar energy .
"eating" for energy is great if you have the fuel in your environment, but it isn't as if they can alchemically magically
convert lead to gold or rock into gasoline. You could have them biologically or chemically do the same kinds of things
a particular life form or chemical plant could do, but you couldn't do "more" than what something like an ant, algae,
bacteria, or whatever can already do. It is hard to out-engineer 4 billion years of evolutionary development on a
planetary scale.

However nanotechnology doesn't imply self replication / self assembly, nor self recharging, nor any particular chemical
or electronic prowess that isn't already available to us in bulk form. It would be "nice" if these were available, but it is
a somewhat independent thing than nanotechnology itself in all generality.

One benefit of nanites, though, might be to be able to be more dynamic, finer grained, intelligent about the solution
to a problem. It wouldn't be impossible to have them go out and look for JUST a cancer or blood clot before they
try to take it apart in what would effectively be a conventional (but miniaturized) chemical/mechanical process.
It would be easier for a room full of leprechauns to make a swiss watch or a ship in a bottle than a room full of
basketball players / sumo westlers just because the small size does give an advantage in delicacy and finesse.

If I wanted to build the great pyramid, though, I'd expect a giant machine to work as well or better than a set of small
ones.

 

[irishScott]

Can't believe no one's mentioned medical aspects yet. Make a capsule that can fly to a tumor, latch on, inject tumor-killing medication and leave the body for re-use. The current alternative for some people is huge needles that have to go into deep muscle.

Could also be used to kill parasites, clear clogged arteries, and loads of other stuff.

 

[PolymerTim]

Originally posted by: irishScott
Can't believe no one's mentioned medical aspects yet. Make a capsule that can fly to a tumor, latch on, inject tumor-killing medication and leave the body for re-use. The current alternative for some people is huge needles that have to go into deep muscle.

Could also be used to kill parasites, clear clogged arteries, and loads of other stuff.

There are a lot of insteresting ideas like this one, but I agree with QuixoticOne that much of this technology is already around without the need of nanomachines. There's something fascinating about imagining a nanoscale miniature version of a machine performing tasks for us, but in reality, tasks on the nanoscale are often much more efficiently completed with chemistry or biology. I think the future of nanomanipulation is going towards a merger or chemistry, biology, and materials.

For instance, medicines that need to be given locally such as tumor-killing drugs will be given by targeted drug delivery. The drug, i protected form is given orally or injected systemically and then contains chemical or biological drivers that help it locate and attach to the tumor where the drug is released/unprotected. This technology already exists, although it still has a lot of work to do.


Also, KIAman, you might want to think a little more deeply about the applications you're considering for nanomachines. Cholesterol is required by the human body and we would die very quickly without it. Similarly, I'd be worried about nanites roaming around trying to break down oil if they accidentally got into an oil field. I don't think you could safely make these kinds of things (especially self-replicating) without giving them a little more intelligence about the conditions of their task. But that can be inherently difficult for things of this scale.


In general, any time you are looking at self-replication in the wild, you have a whole other set of issues to worry about. Human history is filled with our examples of introducing invasive species to new environments with sometimes disastrous effects. What makes us think we could control or direct self-replicating machines any better.?

 

[omnizzle]

My physics professor works on nanotech stuff:

http://www.physics.berkeley.ed.../zettl/highlights.html

He built the first nanotube radio receiver. Imagine putting that in some sort of nano"bot" and using it to control it (a la a remote control car)