Accelerating Future

Robert Freitas has a new idea for a product that could be built using molecular manufacturing — diamond trees designed to sequester carbon dioxide. The concept is fleshed out in technical detail at a paper now available at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing website. Let’s bring up that abstract!

The future technology of molecular manufacturing will enable long-term sequestration of atmospheric carbon in solid diamond products, along with sequestration of lesser masses of numerous air pollutants, yielding pristine air worldwide ~30 years after implementation. A global population of 143 x 10⁹ 20-kg “diamond trees” or tropostats, generating 28.6 TW of thermally non-polluting solar power and covering ~0.1% of the planetary surface, can create and actively maintain compositional atmospheric homeostasis as a key step toward achieving comprehensive human control of Earth’s climate.

On the topic of MNT, I also wonder what it will take for the skeptics to become convinced that the technology is plausible. Positional atomic placement has already been demonstrated, including at room temperature. Will complex rotating 3D nanosystems convince them? I doubt those are far off.

5 Responses »

Brian Wang directs our attention to one important part of Rob Freitas’ radionuclide page:

The mass of the alpha-particle is ~7000 times greater than that of an electron, so the velocity and hence the range of a-particles in matter is considerably less than for beta-particles of equal energy. Consequently the optimum radionuclide for medical nanorobots is predominantly an alpha emitter.

Among all gamma-free alpha-only emitters with t1/2 > 106 sec, the highest volumetric power density is available using Gd148 (gadolinium) which a-decays directly to Sm144 (samarium), a stable rare-earth isotope. A solid sphere of pure Gd148 (~7900 kg/m3) of radius r = 95 microns surrounded by a 5-micron thick platinum shield (total device radius R = 100 microns) and a thin polished silver coating of emissivity er = 0.02 suspended in vacuo would initially maintain a constant temperature T2 (far from a surface held at T1 = 310 K)

75-year half-life, initially generating 17 microwatts of thermal power which can be converted to 8 microwatts of mechanical power by a Stirling engine operating at ~50% efficiency. (Smaller spheres of Gd148 run cooler.) While probably too large for most individual nanorobot designs, such spheres could be an ideal long-term energy source for a swallowable or implantable “power pill” (Chapter 26) or dedicated energy organ (Section 6.4.4). A ~0.2 kg block of pure Gd148 (~1 inch3) initially yields ~120 watts, sufficient in theory to meet the complete basal power needs of an entire human body for ~1 century (given suitable nucleochemical energy conversion and load buffering mechanisms, and a sufficiently well-divided structure).

The last part is the punchline, of course. Freitas acknowledges future design challenges such as energy conversion, load buffering, and division of structure. If these challenges are overcome, a large block of Gd¹⁴⁸ (or simply gadolinite ready to be processed into pure gadolinium) could supply nutrition to millions of people for millennia. Gadolinium has a half-life of 75 years, so you’d need double as much for each 75-year period you wish to avoiding refueling for, but storing gadolinium in its stable gadolinite form seems avoid this problem. Unfortunately, gadolinite is fairly rare and gadolinium itself is only found in the Earth’s crust at a 6.2 ppm level. By comparison, the abundance of gold in the Earth’s crust is only 0.0011 ppm. According to this page, annual production of gadolinium is 200 tons.

Just to throw some numbers out there, if one cubic inch is enough per person per century, a million people would require a million cubic inches. That can fit in a cube 9 x 9 x 9 ft large. According to Freitas’ numbers, this would weigh about 200,000 kg, or 200 metric tonnes, which is on par with today’s annual production. If demand for gadolinium grew, it seems plausible that its cost would fall greatly — after all, gold is about 6,000 times rarer and our annual production is 2,800 tons. Feeding ten billion people with gadolinium, if that were possible, would require about 2,000,000 metric tonnes for the first century. At an extraction rate of 200,000 metric tonnes per year, it could be done in a decade. This would require increasing current production by a factor of 1,000. According to this book, gadolinite can contain 40% rare earth oxides, 5% of which consists of gadolinium itself. That means that gadolinium makes up about 2% of the total. (Wrong: see comments.) Processing ten million metric tonnes of the ore annually would yield the required amount. For comparison, we extract 1.2 billion tons of iron from the Earth’s crust annually.

Update: all of the above is wrong for one reason or another, as pointed out in the comments, but at least I had fun. I was confusing chemical stability with nuclear stability and made the mistake that I thought gadolinium-148 would be nuclear-stable in its gadolinite form, which is wrong. The atomic number of gadolinium is 64 meaning that gadolinium-148 contains 20 extra neutrons above neutron-proton parity. It seems to me that we’d eventually have to find a less safe and cheaper isotope to make this work on a large level if it’s suitable in practice and we ever want to.

3 Responses »

I recently wrote to Rob Freitas about his radioisotope-powered food nanorobot idea that, if it works, could allow people to eat at severely reduced levels for as long as a century or more. As far as I can tell, food would still be needed due to cell loss from shedding skin cells and the like, but this would likely be relatively little. As Roko pointed out, the gadolinium-powered nanobots could reconstitute ATP from waste products like urea. The gadolinium would just provide the energy for running the chemical reactions needed to produce fresh ATP.

Here is the email I wrote to Rob Freitas:

Hi Robert, I saw an idea of yours posted at the World Future Society, and blogged it. Me and my readers weren’t clear on some of the details, and a few google searches turned up nothing. All of us would appreciate if you would weigh in on the thread and answer our burning questions.

Thanks, and I’m always impressed by all the ideas you come up with.

Best,
Michael

Here is the response (posted with permission):

Hi, Michael.

The 148Gd power source proposal was described in NMI (1999) at http://www.nanomedicine.com/NMI/6.3.7.1.htm. The semiconductor shell structure crudely illustrated in Fig. 6.7 is intended to be an atomically precise structure. The radioactive 148Gd is kept permanently encapsulated while inside the body. The minimum radius for this powerplant is on the order of ~11 microns, so it is clearly intended for fixed-site multi-nodal (not bloodborne) use.

I haven’t yet published any detailed scaling studies specifically describing dietary-related nanorobotic systems. These proposals now exist only in rough form in my long (across 2 decades!) accumulated notes for Chapter 26 in Vol. III of my Nanomedicine book series. I hope to find time to publish NMIII sometime in this decade.

Best wishes,
Rob Freitas

I read the page that Freitas linked. Here’s one of the core specs:

A (1 micron)³ cube of Gd¹⁴⁸ produces ~5 a-particles/sec, yielding an output current of ~1 picoampere at ~3 volts (e.g., ~3 pW).

Interesting! The page also points out that the cost of Gd¹⁴⁸ must be brought down significantly before it becomes a feasible power source, because in 1998 it cost about a dollar per two cubic microns(!) This is expensive stuff. The number of nanobots that might be used would need to be on the order of a hundred trillion (not a billion, as I wrote previously), each with a cubic micron-sized power core, though 11 microns across due to shielding. Given the 1998 cost of Gd¹⁴⁸, a full system would cost about $50 trillion for the fuel alone! Near the top of the page it says, “Selection of an optimum radioactive fuel is guided primarily by safety criteria”.

An interesting idea, and food for nanotechnological thought.

8 Responses »

Wow, this surprised me. This is the sort of thing that I would write off as nonsense on first glance if it weren’t from Robert Freitas, who is legendary for the rigor of his calculations. Here’s the bit, from a World Future Society update:

The Issue: Hunger

The number of people on the brink of starvation will likely reach 1.02 billion — or one-sixth of the global population — in 2009, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In the United States, 36.2 million adults and children struggled with hunger at some point during 2007.

The Future: The earth’s population is projected to increase by 2.5 billion people in the next four decades, most of these people will be born in the countries that are least able to grow food. Research indicates that these trends could be offset by improved global education among the world’s developing populations. Population declines sharply in countries where almost all women can read and where GDP is high. As many as 2/3 of the earth’s inhabitants will live in water-stressed area by 2030 and decreasing water supplies will have a direct effect on hunger. Nearly 200 million Africans are facing serious water shortages. That number will climb to 230 million by 2025, according to the United Nations Environment Program. Finding fresh water in Africa is often a huge task, requiring people (mostly women and children) to trek miles to public wells. While the average human requires only about 4 liters of drinking water a day, as much as 5,000 liters of water is needed to produce a person’s daily food requirements.

Futurist Fixes

1. The Food Pill. In the future, we may see a type of pill for replacing food, but experts say it likely would not be a simple compound of chemicals. A pill-sized food replacement system would have to be extremely complex because of the sheer difficulty of the task it was being asked to perform, more complex than any simple chemical reaction could be. The most viable solution, according to many futurists, would be a nanorobot food replacement system.

Dr. Robert Freitas, author of the Nanomedicine series and senior research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing spoke with FUTURIST magazine senior editor Patrick Tucker about it.

In his books and various writings, Freitas has described several potential food replacement technologies that are somewhat pill-like. The key difference, however, is that instead of containing drug compounds, the capsules would contain thousands of microscopic robots called nanorobots. These would be in the range of a billionth of a meter in size so they could easily fit into a large capsule, though a capsule would not necessarily be the best way to administer them to the body. Also, while these microscopic entities would be called “robots,” they would not necessarily be composed of metal or possess circuitry. They would be robotic in that they would be programmed to carry out complex and specific functions in three-dimensional space.

One food replacement Dr. Freitas has described is nuclear powered nanorobots. Here’s how these would work: the only reason people eat is to replace the energy they expend walking around, breathing, living life, etc. Like all creatures, we take energy stored in plant or animal matter. Freitas points out that the isotope gadolinium-148 could provide much of the fuel the body needs. But a person can’t just eat a radioactive chemical and hope to be healthy, instead he or she would ingest the gadolinium in the form of nanorobots. The gadolinium-powered robots would make sure that the person’s body was absorbing the energy safely and consistently. Freitas says the person might still have to take some vitamin or protein supplements but because gadolinium has a half life of 75 years, the person might be able to go for a century or longer without a square meal.

For people who really like eating but don’t like what a food-indulgent lifestyle does to their body, Freitas has two other nanobot solutions.

“Nutribots” floating through the bloodstream would allow people to eat virtually anything, a big fatty steak for instance, and experience very limited weight or cholesterol gain. The nutribots would take the fat, excess iron, and anything else that the eater in question did not want absorbed into his or her body and hold onto it. The body would pass the nurtibots, and the excess fat, normally out of the body in the restroom.

A nanobot Dr. Freitas calls a “lipovore” would act like a microscopic cosmetic surgeon, sucking fat cells out of your body and giving off heat, which the body could convert to energy to eat a bit less.

Where can you read more about Robert Freitas’s ideas? In the January-February 2010 issue of THE FUTURIST magazine, Freitas lays out his ideas for improving human health through nanotechnology.

Yes, there are many other technologies that could help out better with hunger right now. The most important are the three initiatives singled out by Giving What We Can as being high-leverage intervention points: schistosomiasis control, stopping tuberculosis, and the regular delivery of micronutrient packages. Another is the iodization of salt. How can these stop hunger? Well, the diseases and ill health caused by the absence of these measures is so great that alleviating them will increase the total amount of time that people have available to engage in farming, which in the short term will alleviate hunger more effectively than any direct measure. Delivering food in the form of aid fosters dependence.

Anyway, the summary of Freitas’ food bot ideas above seems very limited. I’m sure that Freitas has worked out the design in greater detail. For instance, are the nanobots he is talking about is powered through a radioisotope rather than a nuclear fission plant, and the text doesn’t make that clear enough, in my opinion. I wonder — how is it that gadolinium can be broken down into all the nutrients the body needs? Wouldn’t a large amount be required, because fueling the chemical reactions of the body requires bulk and mass no matter how you slice it? I am seeing a lot of technical questions and holes in the idea, as it is brusquely presented above. I will email Freitas and ask him to point us to the proper writings.

12 Responses »

2009 saw a lot of mainstreaming of “transhumanist” ideas, foci, and emphases. As I recently pointed out, Foreign Policy magazine gave this phenomenon a nod by including two transhumanists on their list of 100 global thinkers.

I am particularly interested in any possible mainstreaming of AGI and Friendly AI ideas, for obvious reasons. These ideas are not mainstreaming as fast as “wow-tech” like life-extension or cybernetics, so watching for it is even more challenging and interesting. That’s why this ad on the ScienceBlogs network caught my eye:

It links to Collective Imagination, a relatively new blog on the ScienceBlogs network with an about page that doesn’t mention AI at all. But, click the ad and you go to their front page, which currently is all about AI. On November 19th, their head blogger, Greg Laden, bought into the IBM “cat brain” deliberately deceptive news item, but then did a double-take a week later. What is interesting about his double-take is that he takes the time to point out some ignorant phrasing by IEEE Spectrum blogger Sally Adee in her coverage of the controversy. She said “There are as many theories of mind as there are researchers working on it, and in some cases there is a real grudge match between the theorists.” Greg Laden commented:

I would like to point out that the term “Theory of Mind” is used incorrectly in the above quote. To me, this misuse of the term indicates a degree in pop psychology, as one might be exposed to the phrase but not know what it is, as has apparently happened here.

This is a little embarrassing. It would be like a psychologist writing about computer programming and noting that a “hash table” is a good place to put your chopped up corned beef.

It is embarrassing. Kudos to Greg for catching that. Watch out for those Igon Values.

Another, unrelated place where I read about IEEE in the last few days concerned an IEEE blogger having trouble understanding why the molecular nanotechnology community laughs in derision at the word “nanotechnology” being applied to stain-resistant pants. Josh Hall explained why. The same blogger, Dexter Johnson, also recently relayed that the American Chemical Society “touts nanobots as nanotechnology’s big impact” in a new promotional video, which is another way of saying that they’ve been won over by the arguments for the feasibility of MNT. He writes:

The video is fascinating because it manages to move from nanobots and nanofactories to discussions of nanomaterials and buckyballs so seamlessly you would almost think there was no distinction between the two.

From what I gather this Bytesize Science is supposed to be targeting the future chemists of the world by making science fun. I am not sure that incomprehensible goop is really the way to do it, but I’ve never tried to teach children about nanotechnology.

In the post about nanopants, he writes:

I will not argue here (or likely anywhere else) about the feasibility of nanofactories in the visions of the MNT community.

Why not? Maybe because the idea of nanofactories is sometimes considered unscientific?

5 Responses »

Various futurist and transhumanists are abuzz about the world’s smallest snowman. Just like IBM’s recent deliberately misleading “cat brain” announcement, I consider this non-news. As far as I can tell, this doesn’t represent any sort of interesting technological advance. Microscale tin beads are not new. Focused ion beams are not new. Ion beam deposited metals are not new. This is just a gimmick.

I am not a nanoscientist. I am just a guy who reads news feeds like Nanowerk/CRN/Foresight and skims papers once in a while. But the way that the transhumanist and futurist community is reacting to this at all makes me roll my eyes. The majority of futurists lack scientific knowledge of any depth because they are too busy flying around, attending meetings, giving interviews, and running scenario sessions. Paying someone to sit around and read papers is not a common practice outside of academia.

Some portions of the press release are especially banal:

The snowman is mounted on a silicon cantilever from an atomic force microscope whose sharp tip ‘feels’ surfaces creating topographic surveys at almost atomic scales.

An atomic force microscopic that ‘feels’ surfaces at “almost atomic scales”..? Wow! This would be interesting if AFMs hadn’t been around since, oh, 1986. However, public knowledge of nanotechnology is so laughably abysmal that this can be passed off as news. I would understand the Dawkins/Digg/Reddit crowd saying “wow” to this, but I would hope that transhumanists, who presumably have spent some time investigating nanotechnology, would understand that this is just a publicity demonstration with no scientific value. Do they?

2 Responses »

My latest article (#3) in the Singularity series on Good.is is up, a piece that describes exponential manufacturing titled Building “The Everything Machine”. Meanwhile, Roko’s article on “Why the Fuss About Intelligence?” is the 2nd most discussed article on the site in the last week. I will repost my article here for further discussion, but I also encourage you to register on the site and comment there. Here it is:

Building the “Everything Machine”

Nanotechnology and exponential manufacturing could help us make whatever humanity needs, atom by atom.

Part three in a GOOD miniseries on the singularity by Michael Anissimov and Roko Mijic. New posts every Monday from November 16 to January 23.

Last week, Roko Mijic talked about how human intelligence made civilization possible, and how genuinely smarter-than-human intelligence—what some call “superintelligence”—would change everything, by magnifying nearly all of our capabilities. 

It is important to note that organizations or countries are not smarter-than-human intelligences any more than a tribe of chimps is a smarter-than-chimp intelligence. We are talking about thinkers with fundamentally improved cognitive architectures, either through brain-computer interfacing or the creation of creative, flexible, brilliant artificial intelligence. Engineered intelligences with greater memory, creativity, pattern-matching capabilities, decision-making skills, self-transparency, and self-modification abilities.

This category of enhanced intelligences may not be as far away as you think. MIT scientists are already working on optically-triggered brain-computer interfaces that could link up many thousands of neurons to computers in the near future. Ed Boyden, who works at the MIT Media Lab, has called for the creation of an “exocortex” that assists our natural brains with an external, artificial cognitive assistant, also called a “co-processor.” We may even discover drugs or gene therapies that qualitatively improve intelligence by increasing the speed at which neurons can communicate, as was recently done with a rat, Hobbie-J.

When discussions of superintelligence crop up, a common question that is asked is, “okay, these entities are smarter-than-human, but wouldn’t they still be very limited by their environment and the intelligence of humans they have to work with?” Couldn’t we just pull the plug on a very clever artificial intelligence? Wouldn’t an enhanced human intelligence be limited by the slower people around it?

Not necessarily. One way superintelligent entities could leapfrog human industrial infrastructure and communication time lag would be by creating self-replicating manufacturing units, which might be based on synthetic biology or just sophisticated robotics. There already exists a self-replicating manufacturing unit today: RepRap (short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper), developed by a team at the University of Bath in Britain. It just requires human assistance for assembly—from there, the machine can print out practically all of its own parts, except for a few standard parts like computer chips. Completely autonomous self-replication is on the horizon.

The ultimate self-replicating manufacturing unit would be based on nanoscale fabrication—the rapid manipulation of individual atoms to build large products from raw materials. In 1959, the legendary physicist Richard Feynman gave a talk to the American Physical Society called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” During the talk, he said “The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom.” Since Feynman’s talk, we have made leaps and bounds towards the goal of bottom-up manufacturing, building tiny robotic arms that can manipulate single atoms, molecular switches, gears, “nanocars,” even a nanoscale walking biped.

If we could design and fabricate the appropriate nanoscale machines and put them into a system capable of building all its own parts, we’d have something called a nanofactory, or to put it another way, an “everything machine.” The earliest nanofactories might only build products out of a couple types of atoms, say carbon and hydrogen, but they would have a tremendous impact because they would be automated by necessity, could self-replicate, and would be capable of building almost any chemically stable structure (as long as it used atoms the machine could handle) with atomic precision. Powered by the Sun and using purified natural gas for feedstock molecules, these nanofactories could quickly and easily build huge numbers of residences, greenhouses, appliances, medical equipment, water purification equipment, and much more, at a cost thousands of times lower than the manufacturing technology of today.

Humans are making progress towards nanofactories today, but I’ll bet that smarter-than-human intelligences could make much more rapid progress. In fact, it’s possible that the most direct route to nanofactories is through smarter-than-human intelligence.

And if you combine a smarter-than-human intelligence with self-replication and nanoscale production, it’s difficult to put a limit on how quickly superintelligence could change the world.

Michael Anissimov is a futurist and evangelist for friendly artificial intelligence. He writes a Technorati Top 100 Science blog, Accelerating Future. Michael currently serves as Media Director for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) and is a co-organizer of the annual Singularity Summit.

5 Responses »

Audio and video of Richard Feynman’s classic “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” lecture (1959), which presented the vision of molecular nanotechnology for the first time, is available from Photosynthesis.com, an audio site. There are other archival recordings available, including complete audio and video from the 4th Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology, held in 1995. Apple Computer was a key sponsor of the conference.

Back then, it seems to me that a lot of people thought that molecular nanotech would be closer by now (I remember hearing people say “about 20 years”, so roughly 2015), but they were obviously wrong. My guess is that the innovation and economic activity in the tech sector around that time made them overoptimistic about progress in general.

2 Responses »

Here is a press release.

Also, here is a video of a computer model of the Rho transcription factor from E. coli in action:

Via Foresight via Technology Review blog.

One Response »

This is an animation of a rotor from Drexler and Merkle’s neon pump, animated using Blender. From Machine Phase, a molecular modeling blog.

As Vladimir Nesov points out in the comments, all videos like this should be taken with a grain of salt — they’re sped up to many times what the actual speed would be. This rotor, if it were really moving at that speed, would overheat due to friction in a fraction of a second. This video doesn’t even try to show thermal vibration, but if it did, the vibrations would be much faster than could be portrayed with the frame rate.

3 Responses »

Here is some news from about a month ago that I missed due to being busy with Singularity Summit… the annual Feynman Prizes, a $5,000 cash prize that the Foresight Institute gives to outstanding research that contributes to Richard Feynman’s vision of nanotechnology — “molecular manufacturing, the construction of atomically-precise products through the use of molecular machine systems.” One prize is awarded for experimental research, the other for theoretical. Here are the relevant bits from the press release:

The winner of the 2009 Feynman Prize for Experimental work is the team of Yoshiaki Sugimoto, Masayuki Abe (Osaka University), and Oscar Custance (National Institute for Materials Science, Japan), in recognition of their pioneering experimental demonstrations of mechanosynthesis, specifically the use of atomic resolution dynamic force microscopy — also known as non-contact atomic force microscopy (NC-AFM) — for vertical and lateral manipulation of single atoms on semiconductor surfaces. Their work, published in Nature, Science, and other prestigious scientific journals, has demonstrated a level of control over the ability to identify and position atoms on surfaces at room temperature which opens up new possibilities for the manufacture of atomically precise structures.

The winner of the 2009 Feynman Prize for Theory is Robert A. Freitas Jr. (Institute for Molecular Manufacturing), in recognition of his pioneering theoretical work in mechanosynthesis in which he proposed specific molecular tools and analyzed them using ab initio quantum chemistry to validate their ability to build complex molecular structures. This Prize also recognizes his previous work in systems design of molecular machines, including replicating molecular manufacturing systems, which should eventually be able to make large atomically precise products economically, and the design of medical nanodevices, which should eventually revolutionize medicine.

Nice! I am somewhat surprised that Ned Seeman didn’t win for his two-armed nanorobot, created in collaboration with researchers at Nanjing University in China.

(Update: Foresight President J. Storrs Hall emailed me to say that Ned didn’t win this year both because he was on the selection committee and because that committee does not generally award the prize to those who have won it before — Seeman won it in 1995.)

No Responses »

“Father of nanotechnology” Eric Drexler has been blogging at Metamodern for a year now, producing some good posts worthy of perusal. Check out his posts about the world’s most prolific authors in nanotechnology, on nanotechnology research in China, and a review of his first year of blogging.

No Responses »