Nanofactory

Nanotechnology to the common eye seems to be a little veiled in mystery, and to make it visible on a concrete level how this all could work, there is this video of a 'Nanofactory' as imagined by Eric Drexler. It seems almost incredible, but if we could ever manage to create this, it would be about the apex of the modernist dream and we will have almost completely taken control over nature. Watch it here:



I don't think it's impossible in the long term, but I tend to think that the enormous amount of resources that this will suck in building and maintaining it so it stays in tact, as well as controlling all the unforeseen errors that will happen from time to time, make us have to treat this as, and forgive my language, a kind of utopian nano-porn for the extremely wealthy.

Grey, the colour of tomorrow

A rather dramatic take on the apocalyptic gray goo scenario, where a single 'evil mind' can infiltrate a nanorobotics research facility, modify a nanobot to self-replicate catalyzed by carbon, and release it onto the world to homogenize the planet almost instantly. The first successful autonomously self-replicating nanobot could thus become the basic building block for a new kind of evolution that quite radically transcends the slow and blind biological components that life is composed of nowadays. Let's hope though that this bot will be a reflection of a less egoic but more enlightened mind, that can imbue it with empathy and a sense of connectedness without boundaries.

Credits go to director Ransom Riggs, who used motion capture for this creation.