How small is the smallest piece of technology you can imagine?
The size of a grain of rice?
A grain of sand?
How about the width of an individual strand of spider’s web?
A red blood cell?
Narrower than a single wavelength of visible light?
Ok now we’re talking. Welcome to the realm of Nanotechnology.
At this minuscule scale we measure things in nanometres.
To give you a rough idea of just how small those are,
in one day, your fingernails will grow by around 86,000 nanometres
about the width of a human hair.
By comparison, nanotechnology
is defined as being between 1 and 100 nanometres across -
which is just a touch more than your fingernails will have grown...
since you started watching this video.
Despite the term nanotechnology having been in common usage since the 1980s,
with some of the underlying ideas first being proposed in the 1950s,
we’ve only just started exploring the benefits of utilising such a small scale.
Even though it carries a sense of futuristic excitement,
it’s worth noting that it's already all around us.
It’s just important to realise that by ‘technology’, we don’t mean
“anything with a circuit board”, but rather the far broader definition of
“the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes”.
Let me give you an example.
When you next head out into the sunshine, take a second to think about
the nanoparticles in your sunscreen reflecting harmful UV rays,
or those which make up the scratch resistant coating on your sunglasses.
From microphones to aerogel insulators, to tennis racquets,
to LCD monitors, to cancer treatments,
nanotechnology has been a part of our everyday lives for longer than you think.
In actual fact, it’s thought that the legendarily strong steel blades
produced in Damascus around the 12th century
owed their strength to nanotechnology.
Unknown to the Syrian blacksmiths,
the repeated heating and cooling of the steel during forging caused
impurities in the metal to separate,
resulting in the creation of carbon nanotubes,
which today are one of the fundamental building blocks of nanotechnology.
Carbon nanotubes are, unsurprisingly,
tiny tubes made of rolled up sheets of carbon, a few nanometres across,
with a honeycomb-like structure.
They can be created in a bunch of cool, science-y ways:
By inciting reactions in graphite using gas,
by blasting it with lasers or plasma, or zapping it with electricity.
Tricky work, but still much easier than rolling them by hand
like some kind of microscopic sushi chef.
The cool thing about carbon nanotubes though,
is that if you roll them up just right,
so that the carbon atoms align in a certain way,
you have a tube that is a hundred times stronger than steel
but six times lighter.
And the potential construction applications
of a material like that are mind boggling.
What’s more, if you roll them in a slightly different way,
carbon nanotubes can conduct electricity,
which means that by coupling them with nanowires,
scientists are well on their way to making tiny computer chips.
Tiny computer chips equals tiny computers, equals tiny robots,
and all of this starts to paint a picture
of a future full of scientific possibilities.
Consider the idea of injecting blood cell sized nano-bots
into a patient’s bloodstream to fight infections and repair brain damage.
Or creating "nanofabricators" - 3D printer-like devices
building on an atom-by-atom basis
to produce anything from a chunk of coal to a glass of wine.
And that’s before we talk about invisibility cloaks or space elevators,
both of which are real projects utilising nanotechnology
and being worked on as we speak.
Now inevitably for such an exciting, experimental,
and potentially disruptive technology,
nanotechnology comes with some areas of concern.
Nanoparticles are classed as UFPs: Ultra Fine Particles
and we’ve only just begun research into how to regulate these
as nanotechnology evolves.
There are medical concerns:
could nanoparticles cross into your bloodstream, or into your brain?
There are security ramifications -
the idea of nano-surveillance devices is fairly terrifying.
And alongside those are moral quandaries -
if a nanofabricator gives you the ability to build anything,
what stops you from building a lethal weapon?
How could technology like that affect the manufacturing industry,
or the global economy?
These are all reasonable questions that right now, simply don’t have answers.
And while we do have some time to work them out
before they become pressing issues,
it’s something we should think about now, rather than later.
Because when the technology reaches its full potential,
it’s going to open up a universe of possibilities,
possibilities we risk squandering if we’re not prepared.