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From: hkhenson@cup.portal.COM
Newsgroups: sci.nanotech
Subject: Re:  Megascale engineering
Message-ID: <8906130723.AA21625@athos.rutgers.edu>
Date: 12 Jun 89 02:36:39 GMT
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[The recent posting of Megascale Engineering was enthusiastically
 received but apparently was truncated.  Even my archive copy
 got truncated.  Keith very kindly resent it, and I have carved it 
 into pieces so it will all get through.  This is part 1.   --JoSH]

MegaScale Engineering and Nanotechnology -- Healthy, Wealthy,
Wise and plenty to keep us from getting bored.
 
By H. Keith Henson
 
    I have an advantage over most of you--about 5 years of thinking
about the consequences of nanotechnology.  It is only with Eric
Drexler's presentation at the last annual meeting that the
consequences of molecular scale construction have been coming to the
attention of the National Space Society. I don't know how *you* have
reacted to these revelations, but it was not a uniformly pleasant
experience for me.  I no longer believe any significant number of us
will get into space by "conventional" means.  As I am one of the
founders of the L5 Society, you can see that exposure to these ideas
has caused a wrenching readjustment of my world view.
 
    In spite of that, I still put effort into the space cause.  In the
last year I have been trying to get the National Space Society to 1)
take a stand against the Moon Treaty, 2) attempt to get the Moon
Treaty formally rejected by the US, and 3) get the '67 Outer Space
Treaty revised or rejected.  It seems clear that a government agency
is the wrong kind of organization to reduce the cost of going into
space and liability provisions of the '67 Treaty are being used by
government lawyers to stifle private companies offering launch
services.  I wanted to live out there, and keep working on these
political problems because I still want to.
 
   But conventional development leading to a breakout into space has
kept receding into an ever more remote future, probably well beyond my
unaugmented lifetime, while the nanotechnology breakthrough seems to
be looming over the horizon.  After finally adjusting to the
nanotechnology view, (it took years) the future I now see for space
development--and my role in it--is much more attractive than the old
L5/space colony paradigm.
 
   What is the "nanotechnology breakthrough," what relation does it
have to living in space, and what do either have to do with "MegaScale
Engineering"?
 
The Ultimate Tool
 
    The key to nanotechnology is the replicating assembler, a
microscopic, complex device with the capacity to build anything,
including copies of itself, that can be built out of atoms.  Its size
and speed of operation can be estimated, after all, natural
replicaters are all around us.  They seem to be about the same order
of magnitude in size, complexity and doubling time as the artificial
ones will be.  Microorganisms in ideal conditions (often the case in
industrial vats) can double in about 20 minutes.
 
    When we figure out how to make, feed, and control replicating
assemblers the base of our "industrial capital" (roughly equal to
wealth) will depend on something that replicates in 20 minutes.
Planning, design, transportation, etc.  will slow down the pace, but
even a factor of 10,000 slower would leave us with more than a
doubling per year.
 
    All of us survivors of "limits to growth" know about exponential
increase.  Human populations do it with minimum doubling times of
about 15 years, the industrial base in the developed world does it in
about 20 years.  The ratio between population and industrial growth
rates equals the increasing (or decreasing) wealth per capita.
Because of differential birth rates, rich societies really are getting
richer and, in some cases, the poor are getting poorer.
 
    With replicating assemblers, wealth per capita will rapidly
increase if we can harness even a small portion of the nanotechnology
potential (provided, of course, human populations are still limited to
slower doubling times).  A capital base doubling on a time scale of a
year or less would make us almost arbitrarily wealthy, at least until
we run into resource limits. Nanotechnology offers an opportunity for
widespread personal wealth on a scale (in terms of materials and
energy) that can only be compared to today's world gross product.  I
leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate the number of
doublings their personal worth would need to reach one GWP.
 
   The changes we should expect from wealth on this scale make the sum
of all the technological and social changes since we started chipping
flint look tame.
 
   How would even vast wealth get us into space?  Being rich won't
automatically get us into space, but the few of us who want to go
there will no longer have to get a government or a large corporation
to pay our way.  We won't have to sell our dreams to anyone, but we
will have to keep them, and that may not be an easy task!
 
    The process of reaching energy or material limits on Earth could
provide a few MacroScale Engineering SF story backgrounds. For
example, the real carbon dioxide crisis will be when there is too
little from people taking carbon (the strongest engineering material)
out of the air to build houses, roads, tunnels through the mantle,
industrial works, and spacecraft in large numbers. Some civic minded
types (the Autaban Society? Serria Club?) might burn coal fields to
bring the level back up so plant productivity wouldn't be seriously
hurt.  A small engineering project would be to leave a few percent of