Nanotech for Dummies

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Nanotechnology is the word for microscopic robots that can manipulate matter at the atomic level. Having a squad of properly programmed nanites injected (or, hell, just spread on your skin) would mean effective immortality and perfect health. No cancer. No AIDS. A few thousand years added to your life without noticable aging.

"Sounds fun."

Well, after this stuff gets introduced, expect a serious drop in the value of gems when someone hacks out a program to assemble them. Yes, you read right. Assemble. Gems are crystalline conglomerations of atoms, and if someone could place the atoms the right way, they'd get an emerald or diamond, or pretty much anything once they get the right blueprints.

Take those replicators in Star Trek, for example. Something like that would be possible with nanotech. No more starvation. AIDS is a virus, from what I remember. You can program nanites to eliminate any virus that enters your system. No more AIDS.

You can change the very structure of your DNA. No more cancer, hereditary diseases, or the like. Hell, you could change the color of your eyes if you wanted.

Extra small supercomputers, anyone? With nanotech, you could have a computer more powerful than everything out today all hooked into one huge Beowulf cluster on a chip that would fit on the head of a pin. I'm not kidding.

If you took a pin and used it's material to make a nanocomputer or storage device for said computer, then you'd get something along the lines of 100 petabytes of storage, or several dozen gigahertz for processing power.

Yes, I know it's hard to believe, but it will be possible. How soon? I don't know. Maybe in the next 30 years, maybe the next 300. We'll never know until it happens. Until then, you tech-heads can depend on the one nanocomputer you already have.

Your brain.

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