Isaac Whatever

"I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes
punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. I heard them
talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about
illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of
the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are
to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built
your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through
which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in
your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of
provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the
tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great
problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You
are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself
questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the
shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were
shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the
sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited
you in the beginning."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars

What do you think of when somebody says nanotechnology? Do you think
of little whirring insectoid machines clouding the air? Floating
robo-germs collecting on a piece of metal and eating it before your
eyes?

Wrong.

It’s more like being able to tell algae what to do. “Stop producing
that chemical. Instead take this nitrate and this oxygen and make
TNT.”

Big flooded flats in Kansas like rice paddies bask in the sun. Funny
fractally-square duckweed covers the surface. Some paddies are
draining gently, slowly revealing a crystalline structure of an exotic
composite ceramic. A combine will trundle through later and collect a
single crystal forty feet long and six inches wide and strong enough
to support an entire city.

A hobbyist in his back yard will dab a DNA marker around the edge of
a broken washing machine door. He drops the door into a temporary vat
made by laying a tarp over some boards and filling it up with his
hose. He drops in some sugar, a shredded old bike tire, and then
carefully opens a packet and drops in some special yeast. In three
days he comes back to find a new rubber seal attached around the edge
of the washing machine door. He trims it to size and takes it inside.

Eventually we’ll work up genetic blueprints for specialized little
robots. The instructions will include starting soup conditions. They
will be a lot like recipes. DNA is the tip of the iceberg for a very
information dense process. The whole thing will have to be taken into
account, but we’ll move beyond raw materials and fab out whole complex
constructions, including cars, planes, robots, etc. They’ll have a
level of detail comparable with a human body or better, staying in
their fabs soaking up raw materials and sunlight for months or years.

Or they’ll be powered more directly, by sugar or corn syrup or
something. That would probably result in faster fab times. It would
also be rare for things to be fabbed completely from scratch.
Unnecessary complexity. It would be simpler to make components and
stitch them together later. Still, it would be possible to fab entire
mechanisms, and might be the only feasable approach for some things.

Things like tiny robotic flying drones, networked together, with chips
grown inside their tiny bodies like brains.

Maybe nanotech would give us the whirring swarms after all.

I slip the rope through my fingers, toss it as if into the air, but
before it quite escapes, I have it again, looped peculiarly. I drop
the end, knowing how it will swing. I twist the loop, only as quickly
as necessary for my hand to turn and catch the end as it returns. I
touch the rope as little as possible. I know the fulcrums of the limp,
twisty seesaw. I move as slowly as possible, dictated by the constant
of gravity on the long loops. Flip flip flip, the flying end misses my
nose by inches. I feel the wind as it passes. My life hangs in the
balance of this dance. Literally. If I should fall, I will hang by the
knot I am constructing out of artistry and dance. I can’t help it,
can’t take it seriously. Moving like this is pure joy expressed and
echoed.