Nanotechnology Quotes

‎By 2100, our destiny is to become like the gods we once worshipped and feared. But our tools will not be magic wands and potions but the science of computers, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and most of all, the quantum theory.

I asked a professor of nanotechnology what they use to measure the unthinkable small distances of nanospace? He said it was the nanometre. This didn't help me very much. A nanometre is a billionth of a metre. I understood the idea but couldn't visualise what it meant. I said, "What is it roughly?" He thought for a moment and said, "A nanometre is roughly the distance that a man's beard grows in one second". I had never thought about what beards do in a second but they must do something. It takes them all day to grow about a milllimetre. They don't leap out of your face at eight o'clock in the morning. Beards are slow, languid things and our language reflects this. We do not say "as quick as a beard" or "as fast as a bristle". We now have a way of grasping of how slow they are - about a nanometre a second.

Most Muggles lived in a world defined by the limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle physics explicitly permitted possibilities like molecular nanotechnology or the Penrose process for extracting energy from black holes, most people filed that away in the same section of their brain that stored fairy tales and history books, well away from their personal realities: Long ago and far away, ever so long ago.

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they once served the fitness of our genes. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event.

Incurable diseases will eventually force mankind to justify disruptive nanotech and genetic engineering.

Nope. Kline hasn’t gone public—you can’t buy Kline’s stocks. But back when it was founded, it needed money to develop…ravioli? Is that what you guys do?” “Food nanotechnology.

It is a disturbing sign of the times when the two most transformative science technologies affecting the globe—biotechnology and nanotechnology—are governed by no external ethical or legal frameworks to protect public safety and other public interests, despite the fact that both industries have benefited from heavy taxpayer-funded government support.

The fourth industrial revolution, however, is not only about smart and connected machines and systems. Its scope is much wider. Occurring simultaneously are waves of further breakthroughs in areas ranging from gene sequencing to nanotechnology, from renewables to quantum computing. It is the fusion of these technologies and their interaction across the physical, digital and biological domains that make the fourth industrial revolution fundamentally different from previous revolutions. In

Apollo has something to teach us as we enter a new century of genetic modification, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology. It's a cautionary tale about that most fundamentally human of human tragedies .. wanting something so badly that you end up destroying it.

So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society.

nanotechnology has the potential to enhance human performance, to bring sustainable development for materials, water, energy, and food, to protect against unknown bacteria and viruses, and even to diminish the reasons for breaking the peace [by creating universal abundance].

Let’s just say it’s magic.” “Let’s just say that I need a little more explanation than that if I’m going to go along with this.” John sighed. “Okay, have you heard of nanotechnology?” “Yeah. Microscopic robots, right?” “Right, and imagine they can make millions of these robots and embed them in a liquid, so that you now have a liquid infused with the power of all these machines. Got it?” “All right.” “Now imagine if, instead of tiny robots, it’s magic.

The bombs disrupted molecular structures. The cocktails included the distribution of nanotechnology to help to speed up the recovery of the earth - nanotechnology that promotes the self-assembly of molecules. The nanotechnology, speed up by DNA, which is an informational material but also excellent at the self-assembly of cells, made our fusing stronger. And the nanotechnology that hit the humans trapped in rubble or scorched land helped them to regenerate.

The ground for preferring superintelligence to come before other potentially dangerous technologies, such as nanotechnology, is that superintelligence would reduce the existential risks from nanotechnology but not vice versa.4 Hence, if we create superintelligence first, we will face only those existential risks that are associated with superintelligence; whereas if we create nanotechnology first, we will face the risks of nanotechnology and then, additionally, the risks of superintelligence.

Standard engineering delivers artifacts; exploratory engineering delivers knowledge.

A radically unconventional future cannot be accommodated within the framework of plans made for a different world.

Unable to construct genuine nanoassemblers, Xymos was using bacteria to crank out their molecules. This was genetic engineering, not nanotechnology.

To do this, we will have to exploit the fourth wave of science, which consists of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.

We trust nanotechnology, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence to revolutionise production yet again,

(Atomic machines are actually found in nature. Cells can swim freely in water because they can wiggle tiny hairs. But when one analyzes the joint between the hair and the cell, one sees that it is actually an atomic machine that allows the hair to move in all directions. So one key to developing nanotechnology is to copy nature, which mastered the art of atomic machines billions of years ago.)

Nanotechnology will enable the design of nanobots: robots designed at the molecular level, measured in microns (millionths of a meter), such as “respirocytes” (mechanical red-blood cells).33 Nanobots will have myriad roles within the human body, including reversing human aging (to the extent that this task will not already have been completed through biotechnology, such as genetic engineering).

Writing is a public act, but is there ever a more private one? Could there ever be a more delicious sensation than the intimacy with the page, a better partner in any sin or crime than the white expanses, the undiscovered country, the unspoiled future where we can pretend for a moment that there are no Redundants, no Immortals, no echoes from the past, poetic, genetic, nanotechnological or otherwise? But the moment we lift the pen, the moment we use language, laden as it is with the past, with the victors of conquests and the blood of the vanquished, all the ghosts come flooding back, and we drown.

By definition, posthumanism (I call it ‘cyberhumanism’) is to replace transhumanism at the center stage circa 2035. By then, mind uploading could become a reality with gradual neuronal replacement, rapid advancements in Strong AI, massively parallel computing, and nanotechnology allowing us to directly connect our brains to the Cloud-based infrastructure of the Global Brain. Via interaction with our AI assistants, the GB will know us better than we know ourselves in all respects, so mind transfer, or rather 'mind migration,' for billions of enhanced humans would be seamless, sometime by mid-century.

As we look twenty years to the future, we can confidently expect to produce and consume far more than we do today. We’ll have to trust nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence to revolutionize production

With the possible exception of nanotechnology being released upon the world there is nothing in the whole catalogue of disasters that is comparable to AGI. —Eliezer Yudkowsky, Research Fellow, Machine Intelligence Research Institute

Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, which would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes.

A patent is simply and purely a grant of monopoly. Why would a supposedly enlightened government, which has laws against monopolies in other forms, grant them? The original idea was the opposite: you wanted the inventor to publish a description of the invention instead of keeping it secret. To induce him to, you offered, legally, some of the protection that he would have gotten by keeping the secret, enough to get a good head start on the competition. It's not a bad idea, if it were done right...

We cannot rely on trial-and-error approaches to deal with existential risks… We need to vastly increase our investment in developing specific defensive technologies… We are at the critical stage today for biotechnology, and we will reach the stage where we need to directly implement defensive technologies for nanotechnology during the late teen years of this century… A self-replicating pathogen, whether biological or nanotechnology based, could destroy our civilization in a matter of days or weeks.

Hitler and his ilk planned to create superhumans by means of selective breeding and ethnic cleansing, twenty-first-century techno-humanism hopes to reach that goal far more peacefully, with the help of genetic engineering, nanotechnology and brain–computer interfaces

Another error that prognosticators make is to consider the transformations that will result from a single trend in today’s world as if nothing else will change. A good example is the concern that radical life extension will result in overpopulation and the exhaustion of limited material resources to sustain human life, which ignores comparably radical wealth creation from nanotechnology and strong AI. For example, nanotechnology-based manufacturing devices in the 2020s will be capable of creating almost any physical product from inexpensive raw materials and information.

What will happen to the job market once artificial intelligence outperforms humans in most cognitive tasks? What will be the political impact of a massive new class of economically useless people? What will happen to relationships, families and pension funds when nanotechnology and regenerative medicine turn eighty into the new fifty?

Then, oh shit, nanotech tentacles.

The miracle of yeast is awesome enough to strain credulity. It’s a fungus, a naturally occurring nanotechnological machine that converts sugar to the alcohol we drink. It breeds pretty much everywhere and is one of the organisms on which scientists have built much of our knowledge of how life works . . . and, postscript, it also makes possible the baking of bread.

As Natalie stood there holding the book, I tried to think of any reason why three zombies would be so desperate to get a copy of Little Women. “Ever read it?” she asked me. “Of course,” I answered. “Haven’t you?” She shook her head. “Never interested me.” “Really? Not even in fifth grade?” She laughed. “In fifth grade my favorite book was Emerging Principles of Nanotechnology.

The patenting of genes and other human tissue has already begun to turn human nature into property. The misuse of genetic information will enable insurers and employers to exercise the ultimate form of discrimination.

in 2010, foreign students received more than 50 percent of all Ph.D.’s awarded in every subject in the United States. In the sciences, that figure is closer to 75 percent. Half of all Silicon Valley start-ups have one founder who is an immigrant or first-generation American. America’s potential new burst of productivity, its edge in nanotechnology, biotechnology, its ability to invent the future—all rest on its immigration policies.

In general, the internal structures implanted inside the metamaterial must be smaller than the wavelength of the radiation. For example, microwaves can have a wavelength of about 3 centimeters, so for a metamaterial to bend the path of microwaves, it must have tiny implants embedded inside it that are smaller than 3 centimeters. But to make an object invisible to green light, with a wavelength of 500 nanometers (nm), the metamaterial must have structures embedded within it that are only about 50 nanometers long-and nanometers are atomic-length scales requiring nanotechnology. (One nanometer is a billionth of a meter in length. Approximately five atoms can fit within a single nanometer.) This is perhaps the key problem we face in our attempts to create a true invisibility cloak. The individual atoms inside a metamaterial would have to be modified to bend like a snake.

Nanotubes are lightweight, incredibly strong, and structures made of these extremely fine fibers can be superfast and efficient at conducting electricity and heat. It’s believed and feared that molecular nanotechnology is the future of everything, including war. “Imagine making a small powerful bomb out of nanothermite or super-thermite?” Ernie is saying. “Or how about mini-nukes? Or God forbid bioterrorism delivered in the nano range? Scary shit.

If the next generation of nanotechnology could be used in medicine to repair organs and tissue from inside the human body, then it could just as easily be programmed to destroy them, making it the ultimate weapon of assassination. Imagine clouds of these things flying to their targets to either be breathed in like a virus or ingested with food or drink, and then creating fatal haemorrhages or lesions that lead to death from apparently natural causes.

The bombs disrupted molecular structures. The cocktails included the distribution of nanotechnology to help to speed up the recovery of the earth—nanotechnology that promotes the self-assembly of molecules. The nanotechnology, speeded up by DNA, which is an informational material but also excellent at the self-assembly of cells, made our fusing stronger. And the nanotechnology that hit the humans trapped in rubble or scorched land helped them to regenerate.

If she comes back to us, the next phase in her development would be the incorporation of genetic engineering, advanced robotics, biotechnologies, and emerging nanotechnologies.” “You’re saying she’s a weapon of the Fourth Industrial Revolution?” “In essence, yes.” “And when you say genetics, robotics, and bio- and nanotechnologies, you mean the next step is turning her into a person?” “They call it humanoid robotics and it’s coming whether we like it or not.

Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.

but religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day forfeit their ability even to understand the questions being asked. What will happen to the job market once artificial intelligence outperforms humans in most cognitive tasks? What will be the political impact of a massive new class of economically useless people? What will happen to relationships, families and pension funds when nanotechnology and regenerative medicine turn eighty into the new fifty?

We cannot turn back the hands of time. Our 24/7 world is not going to change. Life will only get more intense. New communication tools, nanotechnology, and human engineering will increase the number of tasks an individual can do simultaneously. We will look back with nostalgia at the 24/7 world once these “advances” make 48/7 a reality. If we wish to have a weekly day of rest, it will no longer happen as a societal default. It will happen only as a result of a conscious choice.

Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes.13 A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely).

As the daughter of Perses and Asteria, Hecate (Hekate) was the only of the Titans to remain free under Zeus. She was the mother of the wizard Circe and of the witch Medea, and was considered to be the underworld sorceress of all that is demonic.

Allocate millions more to brain research, and every airport could be equipped with ultra-sophisticated FMRI scanners that could immediately recognise angry and hateful thoughts in people’s brains. Will it really work? Who knows. Is it wise to develop bionic flies and thought-reading scanners? Not necessarily. Be that as it may, as you read these lines, the US Department of Defense is transferring millions of dollars to nanotechnology and brain laboratories for work on these and other such ideas.

In this ultimate identity crisis, we would “no longer have the characteristics that give us human dignity” because, for one thing, “people dehumanized à la Brave New World¼don’t know that they are dehumanized, and, what is worse, would not care if they knew.

lead to nonhuman “persons” and “nonperson” humans, unhinging the existing argument behind intrinsic sanctity of human life and paving the way for such things as harvesting organs from people like Terry Schiavo whenever the loss of cognitive ability equals the dispossession of “personhood.

How long will the Gilgamesh Project – the quest for immortality – take to complete? A hundred years? Five hundred years? A thousand years? When we recall how little we knew about the human body in 1900, and how much knowledge we have gained in a single century, there is cause for optimism. Genetic engineers have recently managed to double the average life expectancy of Caenorhabditis elegans worms.12 Could they do the same for Homo sapiens? Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes.13 A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely). Whether or not Project Gilgamesh succeeds, from a historical perspective it is fascinating to see that most late-modern religions and ideologies have already taken death and the afterlife out of the equation. Until the eighteenth century, religions considered death and its aftermath central to the meaning of life. Beginning in the eighteenth century, religions and ideologies such as liberalism, socialism and feminism lost all interest in the afterlife. What, exactly, happens to a Communist after he or she dies? What happens to a capitalist? What happens to a feminist? It is pointless to look for the answer in the writings of Marx, Adam Smith or Simone de Beauvoir. The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will for ever live in its collective memory. Yet this promise is so fuzzy that even most nationalists do not really know what to make of it. The

wants transgenic chimps and great apes uplifted genetically so that they achieve “personhood.” The underlying goal behind this theory would be to establish that basic cognitive aptitude should equal “personhood” and that this “cognitive standard” and not “human-ness” should be the key to constitutional protections and privileges.

Parsons (born Marvel Whiteside Parsons on October 2, 1914 – died June 17, 1952) was an American rocket propulsion researcher at the California Institute of Technology. He was one of the principal founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet Corp. As an enthusiastic occultist and Thelemite he was one of the first Americans to

Everybody is terrified that the current economic crisis may stop the growth of the economy. So they are creating trillions of dollars, euros and yen out of thin air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, before the bubble bursts. Everything depends on the people in the labs. New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008. If the labs do not fulfil these expectations before the bubble bursts, we are heading towards very rough times. Columbus

The human race will possess the technology to create God. Why not build this being? Emerging technologies such as nanotechnological molecular manufacturers will likely be so powerful and potentially destructive that it will take God to master them. God may turn out to be inevitable simply in order for the human race to save itself. If virtue as excellence is ultimately identical with evolutionary perfection, then virtue is ultimately identical to whatever leads evolution towards a higher state of perfection. Virtue as excellence is thus ultimately inseparable from evolutionary ethics. Evolutionary ethics ties or morality with whatever is conductive to evolutionary progress. If politics is control over evolution, then is virtue the values that best steer political control over evolution?

And there were other neural implants being developed back then, including retinal implants, chips that enable a stroke patient to control his computer from his brain, an artificial hippocampus for boosting short-term memory, and many others. If you apply the approximately 30 million–fold increase in capability and over 100,000-fold shrinking in size that has occurred in the past quarter century, we now have much more capable devices that are the size of blood cells. Reader: Still, it’s hard to imagine building something the size of a blood cell that can perform a useful function. Terry2034: Actually, there was a first generation of blood cell–size devices back in your day. One scientist cured type 1 diabetes in rats with a blood cell–size device. It was an excellent example of nanotechnology from

The Pyrenean ibex, an extinct form of wild mountain goat, was brought back to life in 2009 through cloning of dna taken from skin samples. This was followed in June of 2010 by researchers at Jeju National University in Korea cloning a bull that had been dead for two years. Cloning methods are also being studied for use in bringing back Tasmanian tigers, woolly mammoths, and other extinct creatures, and in the March/April 2010 edition of the respected Archaeology magazine, a feature article by Zah Zorich (“Should We Clone Neanderthals?”) called for the resurrection via cloning of what some consider to be man’s closest extinct relative, the Neanderthals. National Geographic confirmed this possibility in its May 2009 special report, “Recipe for a Resurrection,” quoting Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University, an authority on ancient dna who served as a scientific consultant for the movie Jurassic Park, saying: “I laughed when Steven Spielberg said that cloning extinct animals was inevitable. But I’m not laughing anymore.… This is going to happen.

It will change everything. We won't need governments and corporations. The very concepts our economic and social systems are based on: money, wealth, privilege, will be meaningless. What use is money when everyone can build everything they need?'... 'These are people who've spent their whole lives fighting their way to the top and you're just going to tell them that there is no top anymore?... it's you that doesn't understand: they only care about material things as status symbols, to show that they're better than everyone else, that they've beaten everyone else, that's what drives them. They'll never give that up.

Repurposing the world’s molecules using nanotechnology has been dubbed “ecophagy,” which means eating the environment. The first replicator would make one copy of itself, and then there’d be two replicators making the third and fourth copies. The next generation would make eight replicators total, the next sixteen, and so on. If each replication took a minute and a half to make, at the end of ten hours there’d be more than 68 billion replicators; and near the end of two days they would outweigh the earth. But before that stage the replicators would stop copying themselves, and start making material useful to the ASI that controlled them—programmable matter. The waste heat produced by the process would burn up the biosphere, so those of us some 6.9 billion humans who were not killed outright by the nano assemblers would burn to death or asphyxiate. Every other living thing on earth would share our fate. Through it all, the ASI would bear no ill will toward humans nor love. It wouldn’t feel nostalgia as our molecules were painfully repurposed. What would our screams sound like to the ASI anyway, as microscopic nano assemblers mowed over our bodies like a bloody rash, disassembling us on the subcellular level? Or would the roar of millions and millions of nano factories running at full bore drown out our voices?

Future visitors from outer space, who mount archaeological digs of our planet, will surely find ways to distinguish designed machines such as planes and microphones, from evolved machines such as bat wings and ears. It is an interesting exercise to think about how they will make the distinction. They may face some tricky judgements in the messy overlap between natural evolution and human design. If the alien scientists can study living specimens, not just archaeological relics, what will they make of fragile, highly strung racehorses and greyhounds, or snuffling bulldogs who can scarcely breathe and can't be born without Caesarian assistance, of blear-eyed Pekinese baby surrogates, of walking udders such as Friesian cows, walking rashers such as Landrace pigs, or walking woolly jumpers such as Merino sheep? Molecular machines - nanotechnology - crafted for human benefit on the same scale as the bacterial flagellar motor, may pose the alien scientists even harder problems... Given that the illusion of design conjured by Darwinian natural selection is so breathtakingly powerful, how do we, in practice, distinguish its products from deliberately designed artefacts?... [Graham] Cairns-Smith was writing in a different context, but his point works here too. An arch is irreducible in the sense that if you remove part of it, the whole collapses. Yet it is possible to build it gradually by means of scaffolding[, which after] the subsequent removal of the scaffolding... no longer appears in the visible picture...

Thoughts for the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review If you had been a security policy-maker in the world’s greatest power in 1900, you would have been a Brit, looking warily at your age-old enemy, France. By 1910, you would be allied with France and your enemy would be Germany. By 1920, World War I would have been fought and won, and you’d be engaged in a naval arms race with your erstwhile allies, the U.S. and Japan. By 1930, naval arms limitation treaties were in effect, the Great Depression was underway, and the defense planning standard said ‘no war for ten years.’ Nine years later World War II had begun. By 1950, Britain no longer was the world’s greatest power, the Atomic Age had dawned, and a ‘police action’ was underway in Korea. Ten years later the political focus was on the ‘missile gap,’ the strategic paradigm was shifting from massive retaliation to flexible response, and few people had heard of Vietnam. By 1970, the peak of our involvement in Vietnam had come and gone, we were beginning détente with the Soviets, and we were anointing the Shah as our protégé in the Gulf region. By 1980, the Soviets were in Afghanistan, Iran was in the throes of revolution, there was talk of our ‘hollow forces’ and a ‘window of vulnerability,’ and the U.S. was the greatest creditor nation the world had ever seen. By 1990, the Soviet Union was within a year of dissolution, American forces in the Desert were on the verge of showing they were anything but hollow, the U.S. had become the greatest debtor nation the world had ever known, and almost no one had heard of the internet. Ten years later, Warsaw was the capital of a NATO nation, asymmetric threats transcended geography, and the parallel revolutions of information, biotechnology, robotics, nanotechnology, and high density energy sources foreshadowed changes almost beyond forecasting. All of which is to say that I’m not sure what 2010 will look like, but I’m sure that it will be very little like we expect, so we should plan accordingly. Lin Wells

the military-industrial-scientific complex, because today’s wars are scientific productions. The world’s military forces initiate, fund and steer a large part of humanity’s scientific research and technological development. When World War One bogged down into interminable trench warfare, both sides called in the scientists to break the deadlock and save the nation. The men in white answered the call, and out of the laboratories rolled a constant stream of new wonder-weapons: combat aircraft, poison gas, tanks, submarines and ever more efficient machine guns, artillery pieces, rifles and bombs. 33. German V-2 rocket ready to launch. It didn’t defeat the Allies, but it kept the Germans hoping for a technological miracle until the very last days of the war. {© Ria Novosti/Science Photo Library.} Science played an even larger role in World War Two. By late 1944 Germany was losing the war and defeat was imminent. A year earlier, the Germans’ allies, the Italians, had toppled Mussolini and surrendered to the Allies. But Germany kept fighting on, even though the British, American and Soviet armies were closing in. One reason German soldiers and civilians thought not all was lost was that they believed German scientists were about to turn the tide with so-called miracle weapons such as the V-2 rocket and jet-powered aircraft. While the Germans were working on rockets and jets, the American Manhattan Project successfully developed atomic bombs. By the time the bomb was ready, in early August 1945, Germany had already surrendered, but Japan was fighting on. American forces were poised to invade its home islands. The Japanese vowed to resist the invasion and fight to the death, and there was every reason to believe that it was no idle threat. American generals told President Harry S. Truman that an invasion of Japan would cost the lives of a million American soldiers and would extend the war well into 1946. Truman decided to use the new bomb. Two weeks and two atom bombs later, Japan surrendered unconditionally and the war was over. But science is not just about offensive weapons. It plays a major role in our defences as well. Today many Americans believe that the solution to terrorism is technological rather than political. Just give millions more to the nanotechnology industry, they believe, and the United States could send bionic spy-flies into every Afghan cave, Yemenite redoubt and North African encampment. Once that’s done, Osama Bin Laden’s heirs will not be able to make a cup of coffee without a CIA spy-fly passing this vital information back to headquarters in Langley.

What undreamed of new technology will soon be a ubiquitous part of everyone’s lives, we can only guess. With quantum computing, nanotechnology, advanced robotics and artificial intelligence emerging on the horizon, the future has never looked brighter – or bleaker, as the potential for self-destruction and ecological disaster is also accelerating at breakneck speeds. Never before in human history has there been so much cause for both hope and alarm. We are living in a world of increasing uncertainty, and each day brings new reason for both celebration and concern. The brighter the light grows, the darker the shadows become.

The bottom line: Most raw materials needed for APM products are common and inexpensive, costing less than one dollar per kilogram. With an adjustment for reductions in mass, this gives a cost equivalent to about ten cents per kilogram, a cost per “effective kilogram.

The bottom line: By comparison to current industrial systems, the land area required for APM-based production is negligible

The bottom line: The labor required for APM is external to the production process, with no labor cost incurred by the process itself.

The bottom line: Advanced production systems need not produce noxious emissions, greenhouse gases, or toxic wastes, and could meet zero-tolerance emission regulations at little cost.

The bottom line: APM-based production systems would naturally tend to be safer than current industrial plants, and stringent safety regulations could be easily met.

The bottom line: In physical terms, the cost of production equipment adds an almost negligible increment to product cost. Indeed, the physical cost of capital per unit output would remain affordable even for equipment used at 1 percent of capacity, like a home washing machine used for just a few hours a week.

Adding Up Costs Summing the two major costs above—raw materials and energy—while absorbing the smaller costs into the large rounding error yields a typical, estimated, physical cost of about twenty cents per effective, structural mass–adjusted kilogram.

Besides carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, these useful abundant elements include silicon and aluminum, both common in the Earth’s crust.

ASKING THREE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS “What can be made?” “What can it do?” “How much will it cost to produce?

Advances since the takeoff of industrial society (which took hold in Britain around 1800) have multiplied the developed world’s productive capacity by a factor of one hundred or more, if one can compare products as different as wagons and aircraft, or books and computers.

The Industrial Revolution had its most profound effect on human life by enabling food production to outpace population growth.

The Agricultural Revolution dates from prehistory, while the Industrial Revolution began to gain steam not long before yesterday. A single lifetime, however, is enough to span the whole of the Information Revolution, from its barest beginnings with racks of vacuum tubes to its role in today’s unfathomable acceleration of global change.

one finds that those familiar products are made with the aid of machines built by means of machines that were built by means of yet other machines—tools used to build tools in an unbroken chain that leads first to distant factories, and then deep into time.

Risk scholar Nick Bostrom is particularly concerned about the future impact of molecular nanotechnology

Aren’t fears of disappearing jobs something that people claim periodically, like with both the agricultural and industrial revolution, and it’s always wrong?” It’s true that agriculture went from 40 percent of the workforce in 1900 to 2 percent in 2017 and we nonetheless managed to both grow more food and create many wondrous new jobs during that time. It’s also true that service-sector jobs multiplied in many unforeseen ways and absorbed most of the workforce after the Industrial Revolution. People sounded the alarm of automation destroying jobs in the 19th century—the Luddites destroying textile mills in England being the most famous—as well as in the 1920s and the 1960s, and they’ve always been wildly off the mark. Betting against new jobs has been completely ill-founded at every point in the past. So why is this time different? Essentially, the technology in question is more diverse and being implemented more broadly over a larger number of economic sectors at a faster pace than during any previous time. The advent of big farms, tractors, factories, assembly lines, and personal computers, while each a very big deal for the labor market, were orders of magnitude less revolutionary than advancements like artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving vehicles, advanced robotics, smartphones, drones, 3D printing, virtual and augmented reality, the Internet of things, genomics, digital currencies, and nanotechnology. These changes affect a multitude of industries that each employ millions of people. The speed, breadth, impact, and nature of the changes are considerably more dramatic than anything that has come before.

Robert Freitas estimates that eliminating a specific list comprising 50 percent of medically preventable conditions would extend human life expectancy to over 150 years.39 By preventing 90 percent of medical problems, life expectancy grows to over five hundred years. At 99 percent, we’d be over one thousand years. We can expect that the full realization of the biotechnology and nanotechnology revolutions will enable us to eliminate virtually all medical causes of death. As we move toward a nonbiological existence, we will gain the means of “backing ourselves up” (storing the key patterns underlying our knowledge, skills, and personality), thereby eliminating most causes of death as we know it.

P2 - We are well on the way in a number of areas. Both billionaires and big Pharma are getting increasingly interested and money is starting to pour into research because it is clear we can see the light at the end of the tunnel which to investors equates to return on investment. Numerous factors will drive things forward and interest and awareness is increasing rapidly among both scientists, researchers and the general population as well as wealthy philanthropists. The greatest driving force of all is that the baby boomers are aging and this will place increasing demands on healthcare systems. Keep in mind that the average person costs more in medical expenditure in the last year of their life than all the other years put together. Also, the number of workers is declining in most developed countries which means that we need to keep the existing population working and productive as long as possible. Below are a list which are basically all technologies potentially leading to radical life extension with number 5 highlighted which I assume might well be possible in the second half of the century: 1. Biotechnology - e.g stem cell therapies, enhanced autophagy, pharmaceuticals, immunotherapies, etc 2. Nanotechnology - Methods of repairing the body at a cellular and molecular level such as nanobots. 3. Robotics - This could lead to the replacement of increasing numbers of body parts and tends to go hand in hand with AI and whole brain emulation. It can be argued that this is not life extension and that it is a path toward becoming a Cyborg but I don’t share that view because even today we don’t view a quadriplegic as less human if he has four bionic limbs and this will hold true as our technology progresses. 4. Gene Therapies - These could be classified under the first category but I prefer to look at it separately as it could impact the function of the body in very dramatic ways which would suppress genes that negatively impact us and enhance genes which increase our tendency toward longer and healthier lives. 5. Whole brain emulation and mindscaping - This is in effect mind transfer to a non biological host although it could equally apply to uploading the brain to a new biological brain created via tissue engineering this has the drawback that if the original brain continues to exist the second brain would have a separate existence in other words whilst you are identical at the time of upload increasing divergence over time will be inevitable but it means the consciousness could never die provided it is appropriately backed up. So what is the chance of success with any of these? My answer is that in order for us to fail to achieve radical life extension by the middle of the century requires that all of the above technologies must also fail to progress which simply won't happen and considering the current rate of development which is accelerating exponentially and then factoring in that only one or two of the above are needed to achieve life extension (although the end results would differ greatly) frankly I can’t see how we can fail to make enough progress within 10-20 years to add at least 20 to 30 years to current life expectancy from which point progress will rapidly accelerate due to increased funding turning aging at the very least into a manageable albeit a chronic incurable condition until the turn of the 22nd century. We must also factor in that there is also a possibility that we could find a faster route if a few more technologies like CRISPR were to be developed. Were that to happen things could move forward very rapidly. In the short term I'm confident that we will achieve significant positive results within a year or two in research on mice and that the knowledge acquired will then be transferred to humans within around a decade. According to ADG, a dystopian version of the post-aging world like in the film 'In Time' not plausible in the real world: "If you CAREFULLY watch just the first

In search of sixty votes, CHIPS grew more expansive. To the White House’s delight, undecided Republican senators bartered for investment in research and development in their home states. The bill began to hark back to the Cold War, when the menace of a foreign enemy provided a pretext for expanding universities and erecting research laboratories. CHIPS now poured billions into the National Science Foundation, to fund research and development in artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. It set money aside to develop a deeper pool of American scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. But

AI telah mengalahkan pikiran manusia. Itu fakta. Satu-satunya cara agar peradaban manusia tetap dapat eksis dan berkelanjutan adalah melalui asimiliasi manusia dengan AI, robotik dan nanoteknologi. Tak ada cara lain.

Computers, robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, the more off the wall, the better,” she continues. “Because there’s no such thing as mad scientists anymore. I’m not sure there’s any such thing as science fiction. Come up with the most extreme invention you can imagine, and it’s probably being implemented somewhere. It’s probably old news.

During the 2030s, self-improving AI and maturing nanotechnology will unite humans and our machine creations as never before—heightening both the promise and the peril even further. If we can meet the scientific, ethical, social, and political challenges posed by these advances, by 2045 we will transform life on earth profoundly for the better. Yet if we fail, our very survival is in question.

The 2030s will usher in the third phase of life extension, which will be to use nanotechnology to overcome the limitations of our biological organs altogether. As we enter this phase, we’ll greatly extend our lives, allowing people to greatly transcend the normal human limit of 120 years.[94]

Nanotechnology is manufacturing with atoms." William Powell, lead nanotechnologist at the Goddard Flight Centre

Nanotechnology is manufacturing with atoms." William Powell, lead nanotechnologist at the Goddard Flight Centre

The first reference to nanotechnology was made by the physicist Richard Feynman (1918–1988) in his seminal 1959 lecture “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” in which he described the inevitability of creating machines at the scale of individual atoms, as well as the profound implications of doing

Physical sunscreen (also known as mineral sunscreen) sits on the skin like armor and forms a barrier between the sun and your skin to keep rays from penetrating. Titanium dioxide and zinc oxide are classic mineral sunscreen ingredients. Remember back in the day when lifeguards had that patch of white on their noses? That was mineral sunscreen, so it’s been around for a long time. The plus side of mineral-based sunscreens is that they’re gentle on the skin (and won’t irritate conditions like rosacea, which can be supersensitive to both the sun and sunscreen) and they work immediately upon application. With technological advances such as nanotechnology, many sunscreens are now formulated to be lightweight, blendable, and nongreasy, so your nose won’t look like a lifeguard’s. A chemical sunscreen (also known as synthetic sunscreen) filters the radiation by absorbing it and then transforming it into heat energy. Because it’s a chemical process, you should give it about fifteen minutes after application for it to soak in and work effectively.

Scientific inquiry faces toward the unknown, and this shapes the structure of scientific thought; although scientists apply established knowledge, the purpose of science demands that they look beyond it.

Developing the mechanisms required for advanced APM will involve translating the functional patterns of macroscale machinery into the nanoscale world.

The functions of rigid metallic structures, like the gears and shafts of an engine, can be performed by rigid, atomically precise nanoscale structures, albeit with several key differences.

In logical terms, a universal physical theory corresponds to a universally quantified statement: “For all potential physical systems . . .,” while an engineering design corresponds to an existentially quantified statement: “There exists a potential physical system. . . .” One counterexample can disprove the first, while one positive example can prove the second.

Conventional engineering aims to provide competitive products, exploratory engineering aims to provide confident knowledge, and these radically different objectives call for different methods.

NOT SO LONG AGO, if you wanted to bring the sound of a violin into your home, you would have needed a violin and a violinist to play the instrument.

Today, a small box can fill a room in your home with the sound of a violin or of a symphony orchestra—drawing on a library of sound to provide symphony and song in radical abundance, an abundance of music delivered by a very different kind of instrument.

NOT SO LONG AGO, when I was in school, research required a trip to a library stocked with bundles of printed paper—an inconvenient undertaking when the nearest good library was miles away. Today, affordable machines can deliver the content of a library’s journals to your lap in an instant—and behind this modern wonder we again find silicon chips with digital devices.

Mail that arrives in an instant, not carried by trucks or delivered by hand? Movies at home that arrive in an instant, without film or a theater? Conversations with friends thousands of miles away, without wizards or magic?

And if you wanted to bring the sound of a symphony orchestra into your home, you would have needed a palace and the wealth of a king.

Studies of Earth’s chemical and geophysical cycles indicate that temperatures and CO2 levels would remain high for centuries even if emissions were cut to zero today; thus, it seems that only atmospheric carbon capture technologies can provide a large enough drain to lower CO2 levels quickly and deeply.

We’ve seen the emergence of a gift economy in digital products such as software, text, images, and video; the natural course of events would see this pattern extend to APM product-design files, leading (aside from the cost of input materials) to a gift economy in physical objects (but within what mandated constraints?).

Today, a radical abundance of symphony and song—and words, and images, and more—has brought luxuries that once had required the wealth of a king to the ears and eyes of ordinary people in billions of households. It seems that our future holds a comparable technology-driven transformation, enabled by nanoscale devices, but this time with atoms in place of bits. The revolution that follows can bring a radical abundance beyond the dreams of any king, a post-industrial material abundance that reaches the ends of the Earth and lightens its burden.

The Human Genome Project, in effect, began with an elephant, while Apollo began with a conceptual system design. One succeeded through almost independent inquiry; the other demanded the tightest project integration that the world had ever seen.

In scientific inquiry information flows from matter to mind, but in engineering design information flows from mind to matter: •​Inquiry extracts information through instruments; design applies information through tools. •​Inquiry shapes its descriptions to fit the physical world; design shapes the physical world to fit its descriptions.

The view from the top of scientific inquiry is widely understood, in a general way. Theorists seek and test precise explanations of observations of the natural world, and successful theories are, in a sense, predetermined by nature. The view from the top of engineering design is radically different and less often discussed. When engineers architect systems, they make abstract choices constrained by natural law, yet not fully specified and in no sense predetermined by nature.

Systems-level engineering is a discipline radically different from science, though it must conform to the same physical reality.

There’s an engineering principle here, by the way: Phenomena that can’t be observed—despite the most strenuous efforts—are extremely unlikely to either impede or enable accessible technologies.

The moral of the story: When considering an engineering problem, beware of letting related unknowns distract attention from well-understood solutions.

Might predictions be wrong by as much as 10 percent, and for poorly understood reasons? The reasons may pose a difficult scientific puzzle, yet an engineer might see no problem at all. Add a 50 percent margin of safety, and move on.

Accuracy can only be judged with respect to a purpose and engineers often can choose to ask questions for which models give good-enough answers.

The first stored-program computers were built in the United Kingdom in 1948 and 1949 at the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge. These early machines used vacuum tubes to build digital systems; the first fully transistorized computer went operational in 1955, the year I was born.

In 1971, Intel (co-founded by Gordon Moore, of Moore’s Law fame) shipped the first machine that compressed all the components of a computer processor onto a single chip, the 4004, and it outperformed machines of the kind that decades before had weighed tons.

On its information side, however, the Information Revolution provides humanity’s first example of radical abundance and how it can step beyond the usual economic framework.

How much are Wikipedia’s services worth? Many billions of dollars per year, by any reasonable measure. Yet how much revenue does Wikipedia get, as an organization, and what is its dollar contribution to a nation’s GDP?

Both are zero, or nearly enough. Likewise for all the free content found on the Web and the entire world of open source data and software.

If the use of free products reduces GDP per capita, then so much the worse for the idea that GDP measures value.

Imagine yourself in pre-industrial times and consider how implausible each of these recent advances would have seemed. To an artisan skilled in the crafting of violins, an iPod would seem frankly preposterous. To a worker in a print shop in the seventeenth century, the power and outward simplicity of a desktop printer would be beyond imagining

Thus, in scientific inquiry, knowledge flows from bottom to top: •​Through observation and study, physical systems shape concrete descriptions. •​By suggesting ideas and then testing them, concrete descriptions shape scientific theories.

Scientists seek unique, correct theories, and if several theories seem plausible, all but one must be wrong, while engineers seek options for working designs, and if several options will work, success is assured. •​Scientists seek theories that apply across the widest possible range (the Standard Model applies to everything), while engineers seek concepts well-suited to particular domains (liquid-cooled nozzles for engines in liquid-fueled rockets). •​Scientists seek theories that make precise, hence brittle predictions (like Newton’s), while engineers seek designs that provide a robust margin of safety. •​In science a single failed prediction can disprove a theory, no matter how many previous tests it has passed, while in engineering one successful design can validate a concept, no matter how many previous versions have failed.

SCIENCE ASKS, “How can we discover new knowledge?” Engineering asks, “How can we deliver new products?

Exploratory engineering, however, asks a different, less familiar question: “How can we apply existing knowledge to explore the scope of potential products that cannot yet be delivered?

Exploratory engineering is the art of applying scientific knowledge and engineering methods to explore the potential of future technologies. Three rules describe its essential methods: • Rule 1: Explore systems of kinds that current tools can’t build. • Rule 2: Ask only questions that current science can answer. • Rule 3: Think like an engineer.

The essence of science is inquiry; the essence of engineering is design. Scientific inquiry expands the scope of human perception and understanding; engineering design expands the scope of human plans and results.

The agricultural way of life eroded both leisure and health. Stature decreased and teeth decayed as human beings’ previously eclectic diet became reliant on the few crops they could produce in bulk.

This isn’t some backwards planet,” he interrupted. “We have all the latest reconstructive nanotechnology available. If you turned out to be a really nice person, we could fix all of your physical flaws.

The fourth industrial revolution, however, is not only about smart and connected machines and systems. Its scope is much wider. Occurring simultaneously are waves of further breakthroughs in areas ranging from gene sequencing to nanotechnology, from renewables to quantum computing. It is the fusion of these technologies and their interaction across the physical, digital and biological domains that make the fourth industrial revolution fundamentally different from previous revolutions. In this revolution, emerging technologies and broad-based innovation are diffusing much faster and more widely than in previous ones, which continue to unfold in some parts of the world. This second industrial revolution has yet to be fully experienced by 17% of world, as nearly 1.3 billion people still lack access to electricity. This is also true for the third industrial revolution, with more than half of the world’s population, 4 billion people, most of whom live in the developing world, lacking internet access. The spindle (the hallmark of the first industrial revolution) took almost 120 years to spread outside of Europe. By contrast, the internet permeated across the globe in less than a decade.

So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society. This way the students, teachers, and parents might see the larger point in education and become more enthusiastic and motivated about it. We should also work hard on making education a goal in itself, and stop confusing the number of hours students spend in school with the quality of the education they get. Kids can get excited about many things (baseball, for example), and it is our challenge as a society to make them want to know as much about Nobel laureates as they now know about baseball players. I am not suggesting that igniting a social passion for education is simple; but if we succeed in doing so, the value could be immense.

we proposed eighteen great ideas of science that we felt framed virtually all discoveries of the natural world and all advances in technology. We could not have foreseen many of the remarkable developments of the past two decades—nanotechnology archaea, LEDs, cloning, dark energy, ancient microbial fossils and deep microbial life, evidence for oceans of water on Mars and lakes of methane on Titan, ribozymes, carbon nanotubes, extrasolar planets, and so much more. But all of these unanticipated findings fit into the existing framework of science. The core concepts of science have not changed, and we are unable to point to any fundamentally new scientific principle that has emerged during the 1990s or 2000s. Accordingly, while every chapter has been significantly updated, we have added only a single new chapter on the explosion of advances in biotechnology. We conclude that the experience of the past two decades underscores the value of the great ideas approach to achieving scientific literacy.

Capitalism began as a theory about how the economy functions. It was both descriptive and prescriptive – it offered an account of how money worked and promoted the idea that reinvesting profits in production leads to fast economic growth. But capitalism gradually became far more than just an economic doctrine. It now encompasses an ethic – a set of teachings about how people should behave, educate their children and even think. Its principal tenet is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for the supreme good, because justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth. Ask a capitalist how to bring justice and political freedom to a place like Zimbabwe or Afghanistan, and you are likely to get a lecture on how economic affluence and a thriving middle class are essential for stable democratic institutions, and about the need therefore to inculcate Afghan tribesmen in the values of free enterprise, thrift and self-reliance. This new religion has had a decisive influence on the development of modern science, too. Scientific research is usually funded by either governments or private businesses. When capitalist governments and businesses consider investing in a particular scientific project, the first questions are usually ‘Will this project enable us to increase production and profits? Will it produce economic growth?’ A project that can’t clear these hurdles has little chance of finding a sponsor. No history of modern science can leave capitalism out of the picture. Conversely, the history of capitalism is unintelligible without taking science into account. Capitalism’s belief in perpetual economic growth flies in the face of almost everything we know about the universe. A society of wolves would be extremely foolish to believe that the supply of sheep would keep on growing indefinitely. The human economy has nevertheless managed to keep on growing throughout the modern era, thanks only to the fact that scientists come up with another discovery or gadget every few years – such as the continent of America, the internal combustion engine, or genetically engineered sheep. Banks and governments print money, but ultimately, it is the scientists who foot the bill. Over the last few years, banks and governments have been frenziedly printing money. Everybody is terrified that the current economic crisis may stop the growth of the economy. So they are creating trillions of dollars, euros and yen out of thin air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, before the bubble bursts. Everything depends on the people in the labs. New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008. If the labs do not fulfil these expectations before the bubble bursts, we are heading towards very rough times.

National Science Foundation report on the subject pointed out, “nanotechnology has the potential to enhance human performance, to bring sustainable development for materials, water, energy, and food, to protect against unknown bacteria and viruses, and even to diminish the reasons for breaking the peace [by creating universal abundance].

Hackworth took a bite of his sandwich, correctly anticipating that the meat would be gristly and that he would have plenty of time to think about his situation while his molars subdued it. He did have plenty of time, as it turned out; but as frequently happened to him in these situations, he could not bring his mind to bear on the subject at hand. All he could think about was the taste of the sauce. If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, singlemalt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain deaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.

eight exponentially growing fields were chosen as the core of SU’s curriculum: biotechnology and bioinformatics; computational systems; networks and sensors; artificial intelligence; robotics; digital manufacturing; medicine; and nanomaterials and nanotechnology. Each of these has the potential to affect billions of people, solve grand challenges, and reinvent industries.

We did those things when we were acting of fear from the cold war. After 9/11 we learned a new kind of fear. A whole generation of brilliant minds started imagining all of the scary things that bad people could do to using genetic engineering, computer viruses, nanotechnology and a thousand other technologies.’ ‘Once you start thinking

the screen and keyboard account for much of computers' weight. The intelligent part of a computer is a thousand times smaller than a Gucci buckle.

When the stars align, Cthulhu will rise again to resume His dominion over the Earth, ushering in an age of frenzied abandon. Humankind will be “free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy.” —Transhumanist Mark Dery,

The idea that human-transforming technology that mingles the dna of natural and synthetic beings and merges man with machines could somehow be used or even inspired by evil supernaturalism to foment destruction within the material world is for some people so exotic as to be inconceivable. Yet nothing should be more fundamentally clear, as students of

Tsiolkovsky had no need for a lathe or a drill because he produced his results using the traditional tools of design engineering: pen and ink. He didn’t develop rockets; instead, he developed the rocket equation. He didn’t build liquid-fuel rocket engines; instead, he showed that liquid fuels would offer the highest performance.

The Chemical Abstracts Service of the American Chemical Society maintains a registry that includes (at the moment) descriptions of 67,883,986 “commercially available chemicals” (many are themselves used in synthesis), and 56,703,135 descriptions of synthetic procedures.

Deep in the nanoscale-size range, however, engineering encounters ultimate, atomic constraints on the size of even the simplest devices. Gears, shafts, and bearings, for example, can’t be made smaller than a few nanometers in diameter, simply because mechanical components must contain enough layers of atoms to provide suitable shapes, surfaces, and mechanical properties for the devices to function.

Within the microblock-size range, larger blocks enable faster assembly, while smaller blocks enable finer-grained customization, and there’s no reason to limit choices to a single size.

It should go without saying that proposing an unworkable approach (and then rejecting it and saying nothing more) is worse than useless when a good solution is already known.

Our ability to arrange atoms lies at the foundation of technology. We have come far in our atom arranging, from chipping flint for arrowheads to machining aluminum for spaceships. We take pride in our technology, with our lifesaving drugs and desktop computers. Yet our spacecraft are still crude, our computers are still stupid, and the molecules in our tissues still slide into disorder, first destroying health, then life itself. For all our advances in arranging atoms, we still use primitive methods. With our present technology, we are still forced to handle atoms in unruly herds. But the laws of nature leave plenty of room for progress, and the pressures of world competition are even now pushing us forward. For better or for worse, the greatest technological breakthrough in history is still to come. —ERIC DREXLER, ENGINES OF CREATION:THE COMING ERA OF NANOTECHNOLOGY, 1986

The Baker group at the University of Washington has packaged computer-aided protein fold prediction as a game, Foldit, which has been a remarkable success as measured not only by participation (many players, no scientific background required), but also by results and scientific papers. Foldit makes protein folding fun—it’s a kind of puzzle-solving problem—and proposed solutions earn scores in an international competition.

Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [ ¤ SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546]. Space Colonization Subgroup. Open discussion board. Okay, so imagine we get past the next few rough decades and finally do what we should have back in TwenCen. Say we mine asteroids for platinum, discover the secrets of true nanotechnology, and set Von Neumann "sheep" grazing on the moon to produce boundless wealth. To listen to some of the rest of you, all our problems would then be over. The next step, star travel, and colonization of the galaxy, would be trivial. But hold on! Even assuming we solve how to maintain long-lasting ecologies in space and get so wealthy the costs of star-flight aren't crippling, you've still got the problem of time. I mean, most hypothetical designs show likely starships creeping along at no more than ten percent of the speed of light, a whole lot slower than those sci-fi cruisers we see zipping on three-vee. At such speeds it may take five, ten generations to reach a good colony site. Meanwhile, passengers will have to maintain villages and farms and cranky, claustrophobic grandkids, all inside their hollowed-out, spinning worldlets. What kind of social engineering will that take? Do you know how to design a closed society that'd last so long without flying apart? Oh, I think it can be done. But don't pretend it'll be simple! Nor will be solving the dilemma of gene pool isolation. In the arks and zoos right now, a lot of rescued species are dying off even though the microecologies are right, simply because too few individuals were included in the original mix. For a healthy gene pool you need diversity, variety, heterozygosity. One thing's clear, no starship will make it carrying only one racial group. What'll be needed, frankly, are mongrels… people who've bred back and forth with just about everybody and seem to enjoy it.

The pace of innovation continues to increase, and the Information Revolution holds a hint of what may lie ahead. Taken together, the parallels between APM-based production and digital information systems suggest that change in an APM era could be swift indeed—not stretched out over millennia, like the spread of agriculture, nor over centuries, like the rise of industry, nor even over decades, like the spread of the Internet’s physical infrastructure. The prospect this time is a revolution without a manufacturing bottleneck, with production methods akin to sharing a video file. In other words, APM holds the potential for a physical revolution that, if unconstrained, could unfold at the speed of new digital media.

Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes.

Many, many rules had begun to bend at the hand of nanotechnology, gene therapy, robotics, artificial intelligence. This produced a lot of good, and a lot of bad. This trade-off has always plagued us. When you make waves, you produce peaks and troughs.

You have to disentangle the details. You have to hold up every one independently, and ask, "How do we know *this* detail?" Someone sketches out a picture of humanity's descent into nanotechnological warfare, where China refuses to abide by an international control agreement, followed by an arms race ... Wait a minute—how do you know it will be China? Is that a crystal ball in your pocket or are you just happy to be a futurist? Where are all these details coming from? Where did *that specific* detail come from?

could no longer be “saved” or go to heaven,

but by reforming the very essence of our beings: our dna.

Some believe the corruption of antediluvian dna by Watchers was an effort to cut off the birth line of the Messiah.

If human dna could be universally corrupted or “demonized,” they reasoned, no Savior would be born and mankind would be lost forever.

So they invent a material substitute that offers the benefits of faith, without the burden of sin,

may be considered a rising religion because of its numerous parallels to religious themes and values involving godlike beings, the plan for eternal life, the religious sense of awe surrounding its promises, symbolic rituals among its members, an inspirational worldview based on faith, and technology that promises to heal the wounded, restore sight to the blind, and give hearing back to the deaf.

—Starting in 2006, the U.S. government began requiring passports to include rfid chips.

—Students are being required in some schools and universities to use biometric id employing rfid for electronic monitoring.

Nanotubes are lightweight, incredibly strong, and structures made of these extremely fine fibers can be superfast and efficient at conducting electricity and heat. It’s believed and feared that molecular nanotechnology is the future of everything, including war.

The synthetic minimal cell would enable the production of materials too large or otherwise incompatible with the more elaborate functioning systems of a complex cell. It also represents our best shot at a general nanotech assembler, the dream of Eric Drexler and many nanotechnology enthusiasts since he first described it in his 1986 book Engines of Creation. We could then harness these synthetic minimal cells and put them to use in drug, vaccine, chemical, and biofuel development.

Robert E. Lee (general of the Army of Northern Virginia and famed southern preacher) once wrote of this, saying, “intercessory prayer is our mightiest weapon and the supreme call for all Christians today.”[106] Lee found this important because in 2 Chronicles 7:14, the intercessory role of God’s people is directly tied to the

Daniel prayed until he pushed a hole through walls of demonic opposition and the heavens opened with spiritual revelations. In 1 Kings 18, Elijah continued in prayer until the heavens opened and the rains fell. The disciples interceded until their prayers penetrated the heavens and the glory of Pentecost came rushing down from the throne of God. Jacob prayed and the heavens opened. Angels ascended and descended. Elisha prayed and his servant beheld the heavens opened and the angelic host standing upon the mountains

MacArthur was ordered to return home, relieved of duty. Afterward, MacArthur famously addressed the Congress, waying, “There is no substitute for victory!

Albert Mohler Jr. for the Christian Post. “In short, [this] God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process.” In continuing his troubling dissertation,

Mark Gasson, from the School of Systems Engineering at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, intentionally contaminated an implanted microchip in his hand that allows him biometric entry through security doors and that also communicates with his cell phone and other external devices. In the experiment, Dr. Gasson (who agrees that the next step in human evolution is the transhuman vision of altered human biology integrated with machines) was able to show how the computer virus he infected

Lest anyone think the writers of Human Dignity in the Biotech Century are overly paranoid, consider that nbic (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science) director Mihail Roco, in the U.S. government report, Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, wrote,

material/immaterial struggle, which philosopher and theologian Francis Schaeffer once described as always at war “in the thought-world,” is difficult for some to grasp. The idea that human-transforming technology that mingles the dna of natural and synthetic beings and merges man with machines could somehow be used or even inspired by evil supernaturalism to foment destruction within

constructs but crafting arrays of microelectrodes, supercomputers, and algorithms to analyze and decipher the brain’s neural code, the complex “syntax” and communication rules that transform electrical neuron

morally accountable for their actions and future judgment. There is even a concerted effort on the part of some neuroscientists to find proof against free will to illustrate that man is little more than

other words, does the brain ostensibly decide for us? And to what extent

Now imagine a world in which every newborn baby immediately has a little capsule implanted under his armpit. Inside are monitors, tiny amounts of hormones, a wireless transmitter and receiver.¼ From birth, no moment in a person’s life will go unmonitored.

Revelation 13:16–17: “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor,

When looking into the eyes of dying children, parents, or a spouse, it would be incredibly difficult to allow oneself to die or to encourage others to do the same when a “cure” was readily available. Lastly, this scenario would mean that nobody would be allowed to “buy or sell

also sounds like we were being judgmental, correct again. In 1 Peter 4:17, we read that “judgment must begin at the house of God.” People who care about modern Christianity should consider that a time for such introspection and judgment is long overdue. We are in a battle—a spiritual war for the minds and souls of a generation—and frankly, the time has come for new Martin Luthers to nail their theses on some institution doors where echon daimonion may have become so deeply entrenched as to have literally forged the latter-day “habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit,

They’re working on a third Peptide Nucleic Acid (pna) strand—a synthetic hybrid of protein and dna—to upgrade humanity’s two existing dna strands from double helix to triple. In so doing, these scientists “dream of synthesizing life that is utterly alien to this world—both to better understand the minimum components required for life (as part of the quest to uncover the essence of life and how life originated on earth) and, frankly,

example of the possibilities this represents, a genetically modified version of mouse pox was created not long ago that immediately reached 100 percent lethality. If such

Just what (or who) are ‘mingling with the seed of men?’ Who are these non-seed? It staggers the mind to contemplate the potential significance

And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed [zera, meaning “offspring,” “descendents,” or “children”] and her seed,” an incredible tenet emerges—that Satan has seed, and that it is at enmity with Christ.

4IR is marked by emerging technological breakthroughs in a number of fields, including robotics, AI, blockchain, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing, and autonomous vehicles.

Joshua, and Caleb, we stand up to the infernal power operating just beyond the range of normal vision, it will yet be possible to illustrate the living dynamic against which the gates of hell cannot prevail.

drug “absinthe.” This unique, distinctive distilled liquid of pale green color was known in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the “green

There is no neutral ground in the universe; every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counter-claimed by Satan. —C. S. Lewis

opening. In a derisive tone, I (Tom) said to my wife, “Can you believe the lack of intelligence of some people?” I strolled casually into the store, snatched a book from the shelf, and began offering sarcastic

Dr. Anders Sandberg, in the research paper, “Quantum Gravity Treatment of the Angel Density Problem” for the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, actually derived a number for the density of angels at critical mass that could fit on the head of a pin. He arrived at 8.6766*10exp49 angels (3.8807*10exp-34 kg), thus theoretically fixing through physics how an entire legion of demons (forty-two hundred to fifty-two hundred spirits, plus auxiliaries) in the fifth chapter of the New Testament book of Mark could possess the inner space of a single man.[12]

Our genome is filled with “junk dna” that seemingly encodes for nothing. These “introns” may be the remains of the corrupted genes, and God Himself may have switched them off when fallen angels continued their program, post-Flood. If so, today’s scientists might need only to “switch them back on” to resurrect old forms such as Gibborim and Nephilim.

Recently, the New York Times picked up this meme (contagious idea) in its June 11, 2010, feature titled Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday, speaking of transhumanism and the Singularity as offering “a modern-day,

Conversely, in Judeo-Christian faith, the human body is not an ill-designed “meat sack,” as transhumans so often deride. We were made in God’s image to be temples of His Holy Spirit. The incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ and His bodily resurrection are the centerpieces of the gospel and attest to this magnificent fact. While in our fallen condition human suffering is reality,

David’s response was one of dismay at the lack of Israel’s faith. “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?

Christians are to help shape contemporary culture—particularly in a setting in which I fear the posthuman message will prove attractive, if not seductive—then they must offer an alternative and compelling vision; a counter theological discourse so to speak”?

Gene Patents Aren’t Benign and Never Will Be,” in which he claimed that people could die in the future from not being able to afford medical treatment as a result of medicines owned by patent holders of specific genes related to the genetic makeup of those persons. Former special counsel for President Richard Nixon, Charles Colson,

We are not about to turn away from this,” he says, before admitting elsewhere that this could lead to “clusters of genetically enhanced superhumans who will dominate if not enslave us.”[54] The titles

Among this group, a “who’s who” of transhumansist evangelists such as Ray Kurzweil, James Hughes, Nick Bostrom, and Gregory Stock see the dawn of a new Age of Enlightenment arriving as a result of the accelerating

improved understanding of the wellspring of human creativity.

Richard Clark, in his book, Breakpoint, predicted serious Grin rollout), the government report detailed the especially important global and economic aspects of genetically superior humans acting in superior

The twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level [as] humanity become[s] like a single, transcendent nervous system, an interconnected ‘brain’ based in new core pathways of society.

have tried to make at least a prima facie case that transhumanism promises the safest passage through twenty-first-century technologies.[61]

The integration of nanoscience and nanotechnology with CBD (cannabidiol) product design and development has had a powerful effect on patient experiences and satisfaction levels. Currently in 2020, sales of nano CBD products are dramatically increasing among all demographics, and in all 50 States as more people become aware of its existence.

The Abolition of Man. Lewis foresaw the day when transhumanist and scientific reasoning would win out, permanently undoing mankind

The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.¼ The final stage [will have] come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning,

and finally, according to the current president of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, America is no longer a Christian nation. The net result is the dawn of a generation without sacred moorings, an era in which people are sufficiently prepared

Pick just one trend that you consider unstoppable—5G, sensor technology, big data, AI, blockchain, quantum computing, nanotechnology, robotics, 3D printing, biotechnology, synthetic biology, renewable energy, augmented reality, virtual reality, satellite technology, genomics, gene editing, online education, etc.—and research how it is already impacting your industry.

(wherein Jews do not need to accept Jesus as Messiah) espoused by some surprisingly well-known modern evangelical preachers. Yet those aged voices that called out to us recently from our fading boxes of memories also reminded that while it’s easy today to get an

away through his envy of others, seeking what he can gain from—not what he can give to—believers and religion, then pretending something is wrong with those he cannot control, those who get things done like Jesus did, disparaging them while he himself accomplishes nothing but division, diversion, and destruction.