Marty's Singularity Blog
The Singularity is happening now!
July 26, 2010 at 3:53 am
filed under Flight of Fancy, Nanotechnology
Tagged Nanotechnology, Singularity
For our first flight of fancy imagine a landfill. Let’s consider the one on Interstate 75 between Fort Lauderdale and Miami. This thing is enormous. It covers what appears to be several hundred acres and towers over the highway by eighty to a hundred feet. In the flatlands of Broward County it’s the highest thing around. It’s full of trash and garbage – cans, plastic containers, decaying food, yard waste, glass, heavy metals, and who knows what else. As this stuff decays it belches methane into the atmosphere. It’s a stinking eyesore and a potential environmental disaster – who knows what happens with this thing and all its cousins in a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years. We are going to put an end to it by cleaning it up in just a few weeks time.
Let’s say the year is 2050, thirty years in the future. We will assume that strong nanotech has advanced to the point where we can build assemblers that can make virtually anything, including copies of themselves. We will further assume that our programming control over these is sufficiently strong that they can only do what we want them to do. (Note that at some point in the future we must and will discuss these assumptions. But for now we just wish to focus on our flight of fancy.)
So we come to the landfill with a number of vials of liquid. Each vial of liquid contains some billions of pre-programmed assemblers floating in water. Each assembler has its own built in processor – a computer far more powerful than those available today. It also has a full array of molecular manipulators that it can use to build or tear down things at the molecular level. Each assembler has been programmed for the task at hand, reclaiming the landfill.
We walk around the grounds of the landfill and dump the vials at preselected positions. The assemblers immediately go to work. The first objective is to build a site-wide communication network. Probably some radio protocol such as a descendant of today’s Wi-Fi will be used for this. This will allow the assemblers to communicate with each other and with the outside world so that humans can monitor and manage the project.
At the same time another site-wide network is also being built. This is a transportation network. It consists of “roadways” and “trucks” that will collect and move materials to centralized locations for later pick-up. Few of these will be visible to the naked human eye. Their dimensions will be on a much larger scale than the assemblers but still mainly on the microscopic scale. A relative few devices meant to move things from major collection points to their final destinations will be large enough to be seen, the size of insects like ants.
Once the networks are build the assemblers will go to work building copies of themselves until there are trillions and trillions of them. All this building will use the copious resources available in the landfill. The assemblers will almost certainly be carbon-based like living organisms because carbon is unique in its nearly infinite combinability. There will be plenty of carbon available, as well as almost any other element needed.
The assemblers now go to work. They tear down large molecules into smaller ones. Dangerous chemicals like plastics and poisons like dioxin and pesticides are converted molecule-by-molecule into simple harmless chemicals such as oxygen, nitrogen, water, and carbon dioxide. Nearly all of this can simply be released into the environment. Other more dangerous chemicals such as heavy metals like lead or cadmium are collected atom by atom and moved to minor collection points. The transportation system then moves them from the minor collection points to the major ones and then to their final destinations. Once they arrive at the final destinations they are shaped into bricks and covered with an impenetrable coating.
Finally the work of the assemblers begins to wind down. They tailor the land formerly occupied by a landfill into a beautiful park. Trees and plants are planted. Ponds are formed and stocked with fish and other wildlife. These final tasks will probably include human participation. The last job of the assemblers is to disassemble themselves and the transportation and communication networks, turning it all back into their constituent elements. The reclamation is complete.
Two closing notes. First, this flight of fancy is based on an idea from the book Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler. Second, I am sure that some will criticize this and any future flights of fancy as fantasy or science fiction. But note that I have clearly labeled them. They are indeed flights of fancy, explorations of something that might someday be not just possible, but plausible and probable.
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