sub-nano tech and your view?

Well, as well as you might known from the news, our current smallest tech is on the nano-scale, which is pretty small insize. The question is : do you think that there would be something smaller than nano tech in 10 year's time? What do you think would be the first use of this? And lastly and importantly, do you think that nano-tech really benefit us that much? or is it just scienctists racing for fame?

Thanks! XD

Not gonna happen for a long, long time. Nano-tech is not deployed in any form currently, since it's not even out of the crib yet, much beyond its infancy.

Part of the reason why nothing "better" will be made (for a long while) is that nano-tech involves direct manipulation of atoms. This means that structures created with nano-tech can have their structure defined to the very atom.

In that short a time, hard to say. It needs a major breakthrough in engineering if we want something significantly smaller than what we have. Up until now, our technologies have been evading the HUP but as we get smaller and smaller in scale, the problems become more glaring, making us unable to pin down the location of the electrons.

As for benefit to us... well, ask yourself, do you consider electromagnetism/thermodynamics/whatever really to be beneficial to us? Years ago I'm sure there had been guys asking the same question, but on electromagnetism instead of quantum technologies. Further into the past people had been doubting the benefits of thermodynamical researches, on the same grounds of it having no 'real' benefits and it's just physics nerd wanting their little eureka highs and/or fame.

I do physics, and I aspire to be a theoretical physics so people have been asking (dissing) me about the (lack of) 'benefits' of it a lot. Sorry to say but it irks me when people treat it nothing more than a geeky fun. Not to sound cocky but I think the current world is as it is largely thanks to those people and their obsessive curiosity about how the world works.

The smaller it is, the easier it is to lose.

Nanotechnology is already pretty small, being able to utilize a few atoms to make structures. Not much is stable and smaller than an atom so you won't be seeing smaller soon.

Uses of nanotechnology include drug-delivery, self-repair, useful materials, quantum computing, etc.

It's rather unsettling for me to consider that there are technologies that I cannot see with my own eyes. However, the concept of nano-robotics rather fascinates me. It could have the potential to do much good, especially in the field of Medicine.

On the other hand, any and all Artificial Intelligence programming runs the risk of potential catastrophic foul-ups. I may sound like a paranoid nerd when I say this, but I think it's a very real possibility that by creating a program with the ability to reason, or even to learn.. we may end up engineering the very things that kill us off completely.

On the whole, this is a subject that I hope.. is being handled with utmost care by people far wiser and more capable than I.

If you want to see what a successful implementation of nano-technology looks like, look in a mirror. There's a reason why nanotehc is usually divided into "dry" and "wet" categories... the later is so damn similar to biology that it *is* biology.

Apparently nature has come up with these tricks long ago, except now we're finally figuring out how it does things.

Nano tech? that's good to hear, the current science have already made the progress chip in the nano level, this means that more data can be stored in a very little space, and this is very crucial for the space technology. Why? it is because of the factor of weight. Currently the chip that were made for the space technology were very vulnerable to the sun, but if these new technology can be applied on making chip on the nano level we can prevent these problem.

Nope. Making the chips smaller will make them even more vulnerable to radiation from the solar winds. Granted if we can make the chips (storage, processing, memory, etc.) small enough than at one point it'd still be beneficial to switch as even with shielding the smaller chip may weight less.

However nowadays it's not the computing part of satellites that weighs the most. Antennas, fuel, radiators, gyroes... you need to carry a lot of shit to make a viable satellite.

True, but a nano tech can also be applied on these fuel based. On the nano level these fuel can be made to burn more efficient than the previous one, plus these antennas can be made from a mix of carbon fiber and a metal or such.

Lately there were rumors that nano tech have been used to developed a carbon fiber on a large scale to make the space elevator. Although these rumor haven't been confirm yet but these rumor were saying that a nano tech can make these dream a reality.

Once again: NOPE. Fuel "efficiency" in space doesn't work like that.

All that matters is the specific impulse of the expelled propellant, since a higher specific impulse can produce a lot more delta-v from the equivalent amount of propellant. This is a separate issue from inefficiencies in heat-engines. (The rocket, the internal combustion engine, the gas-, the steam turbine are all heat-engines).

Next, nano-tech can't really improve on the efficiency of heat-engines, since scaling things down won't change the properties of thermodynamics one bit.

As for the, antennas they *need* to be made from metal. They need to be conductive and conductive in a specific manner to function. Please familiarize yourself with the basics of radio waves before making up stuff.

...as for the space elevator: dram on. Just like contained fusion reaction, this one has been "on the horizon" for the last 20 years. It's always "just a couple of years" away. There are tons of problem associated with making one, not to mention that I've yet to hear someone tell me, how putting a spike into our atmosphere, that short-circuits the charge buildup between the ionosphere and Earth won't be a major ecological problem.

Yeah...
(BTW, you don't have to quote, you know....)

Nano-tech maybe can be used to implant data into the human brain by putting the nano chip in the first place.
If this is possible,humans don't have to go to school in the first place.Just transfer the information to the brain and you have mastered the knowledge 100 percent.This is very useful as it can save costs and resources.
In a minute, you could be as genius as Einstein.

Sigh... once again, this has nothing to do with nanotech. We already have chips small enough that you could store insane quantities of data on it and we're not using nanotech. In fact the brain operates with structures that are similar in size to existing microchip architecture. Nanotech is lot-lot smaller than that.

Going back to the original premise of the post (ignoring the gross mismatch in scale), if all we did was connect a computer to the brain that could recall data, that wouldn't be any different than having a big encyclopedia at hand at all times. This won't make one smart, skilled of knowledgeable. Wikipedia didn't turn us into Einsteins.

For that we'd need to implant actual knowledge instead mere data. The problem is that we don't (yet) know how the brain stores such information. What we do now, is that actually the human brain cheats a lot. Instead storing raw data, it tends to break things down into distinct impression, only focusing on key qualities and when you recall stuff that brain reassembles these into something (hopefully) coherent.

...however we still don't know how it does this. We haven't pinned down what areas of the brain do what tasks in this process. We finally do know, that memories aren't localized and various parts of the brain process different sorts of information.

So yeah, once again this area has nothing to do with (applied) nano-technology.

Please, stop posting about random sci-fiction wonders and saying nano-tech will make it true! Nano-technology is no silver bullet, it won't magically solve all the research and engineering problems we face... so please think before you post and doing a little research can do a lot for making informed, intelligent posts.

Nano tech? I'd say it still has 30 years to develop. Read some magazines and you'll see that for now the best we can do is to make "nano" squares, cogs etc. putting them together will be a different challenge all together. If we're talking drugs etc. then I guess we are really going in to the area of finally understanding how the human body functions on the cellular level, in enough detail to generate personalised medicine which doesn't just destroy e.g. Bacterial cells when you're infected (like antibiotics) but actually either fortifies your cells, improves your immunity or (as we will hopefully be seeing soon) actually changes the genetic coding and response systems of your cells. And for those of you who are against nano-tech, don't you think that taking vitamin supplements is basically like applying nano tech to yourself? Or smoking, or drinking (just about anything that is... Coffe etc). They are all controlled ways of altering the human condition through particles of known and predetermined size and shape.