Re: [Sci.nanotech] Assembler in ten years?


On Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:49:56 -0000
"Progress City" <progresscity@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Turn on your television on any given day and you'll see images of
starving children and people suffering from diseases that have no cure.


Nanotechnology may be able to save these people.

You will also see many more suffering and dying of diseases that do
have cures available. As for the starving children, our current technology
is likely sufficient to feed them (or at least many of them) without
recourse to nanotechnology. Technology alone (even nanotechnology) is not
likely to cure educational problems (awareness of the causes of disease and
methods of prevention) or infrastructural problems (there is food here and
people there and no way to get one to the other) or economic problems (a
country with a small debt it cannot service is worse off than a country
with a huge debt that it can service) or ...

Nanotechnology may be able to save these people.

I don't know what can save these people, but I don't think
nanotechnology alone will do it, nor do I think it is needed in order to do
it. Nanotechnology may make it so cheap and easy to do that it happens, but
I have my doubts. After all nuclear power was once going to deliver energy
that was "too cheap to meter", automation was once going to relieve us all
of the burden of labour and ...

Don't get me wrong, I think nanotechnology will be an important
technology and enable all sorts of interesting and useful things some of
which have already been designed in outline (search archives of this group
for the "Laura S" food synthesiser for example). I just don't think it will
solve all the world's problems.

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