In sci.nanotech, David M. Stoner writes:
>
> Others have written of the incredible abundance of everything which
> nanotechnology promises, and it sounds wonderful, but I keep thinking I have
> heard it somewhere before. .... Sooner or later, in every case, limits
> are encountered.
I fully agree. And I think what most people mean by "abundance of everything" is not an infinite amount of everything. Within reason, we should have virtually no limits for a very long time. The early settlers in North America were right that they had virtually unlimited resources (for a limited time), and North America grew very quickly to fill those resources. The same thing is bound to happen with NT, but I think we will hit the limits quite a bit later than we did with North America. And hopefully, we will have a better way of dealing with the limits by then.
One way to look at it is that there are five things that an expanding technological civilization needs to continue prospering:
1. Energy 2. Materials 3. Manufacturing methods 4. Space 5. Intelligence (biologically based, and/or machine based)
NT addresses number 3 directly, and the other four points slightly less directly. 1, 2, and 4 get addressed further by having NT open the High Frontier, facilitating our expansion into the solar system and ultimately to the stars. The first limit I see is the speed of light limiting our rate of expansion. First, assume that "virtually unlimited prospering" translates into needing an exponential supply of materials, energy, and space. Current science says that we cannot expand faster than a finite speed which is inherently a cubic process at best. An exponential will always overtake a cubic eventually.
Now before people start arguing about worm-holes, or even near-light-speed time dilation, lets try to stay within the science and technology that we can see within a reasonable timeframe. I once made some assumptions about interstellar accelerations, colony duplication times, economic growth rates, etc. and came to the figure of 1360 years before the exponential growth rate overtakes the cubic expansion rate. Even if I was optimistic by a factor of ten, 136 years is still a long way off.
Steven C. Vetter <svetter@maroon.tc.umn.edu>
Molecular Manufacturing Enterprises, Inc.
9653 Wellington Lane
Saint Paul, MN 55125 USA