Atomically Precise Manufacturing aka Nanotechnology

If you are an expert on A.P.M., you will read these pages through a very different lens than most of my audience. Like superconductors, nanotechnology is a magic buzzword without concrete meaning for most people. In fact, the word "nanotechnology" has been coopted and reused to describe thin sheets of material, small grained materials, all kinds of bulk chemistry/material researches that have little to do with Eric Drexler's original definition involving nanoscale structures made from precisely and intentionally positioned atoms. In some people's brains, nanotechnology has oxidized and gone rancid, and I refuse to treat Eric's great ideas that way, even inadvertently through my own misunderstandings of Atomically Precise Manufacturing ( his newer and hopefully less corruptable neologism ).

Superconductors have been a magic buzzword for a century, and most people still don't understand them. Engineers and physicists who ought to know better still assume that they are a magic technology sauce that can make a rancid idea palatable. The possibilities of superconductivity were clear to its discoverer Onnes in 1911, but were not realized because pure elemental (Type 1) superconductors aren't robust. Practical applications awaited the work of Meissner and Ochsenfeld (1933), the Londons (1935), Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer (1957), and advanced alloys of Niobium (1954). The first major application, superconducting magnets, were not widely deployed until the late 1980s, 75 years after Onnes' pioneering discovery.

A.P.M. is making great progress, and will certainly show widely deployed results sooner than 2061, the 75th anniversary of Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation". However, in 2012, we cannot accurately predict the course of progress of A.P.M., or what server-sky-relevant manufacturing processes it will impact first. Will it be computation? Solar cells? Radiation resistance? The problem is not the relevance of molecular scale manufacturing, but in which directions it will expand the "possibility space" first, or more accurately, which directions will be hindered by stumbling blocks and lack of application-specific robustness. While Eric has a much better idea about near-term directions, and may write about it here someday, I am not competent to make such predictions.

In the long term, Server Sky will be entirely transformed by A.P.M., and we should leave "hooks in the design" for rapid insertion of these technologies (or any others). But we can't wait for A.P.M. to appear - Server Sky can be deployed now, and modified later. We must keep the possibility of "hostile goo" in mind - early thinsat designs may be vulnerable to molecular scale modification or destruction. We should budget for on-orbit security upgrades that protect thinsats from such modification, and develop and deploy them well in advance of need.

Take the musings on this site as an approximation, and if you are an expert on A.P.M., re-vector my musings in the directions your expertise may take them. If you know little about nanotechnology, assume that the possibility space around Server Sky is huge and undefined. The spot I describe here is in that possibility space, but the paths actually taken will be more feasible, cost effective, and environmentally benign. Take the optimism and enormous benefits described here and multiply them, perhaps beyond my understanding or yours.

Atomically Precise Manufacturing is by no means the only potential technology that will change the description of Server Sky and space energy. Advances in laser efficiency and steerability could replace radio transmission with light. Economic improvements in rural China, India, or Africa could radically alter applications and provide millions of developers. And war could change everything. If you have expertise in any of these areas, and can describe their effects in quantifiable design-applicable ways, please write about them.