I’ve been trying to think a lot about the Next Big Thing, the kind of technology that will usher in widespread change making lives better around the world. Yeah, I don’t like to think small. The technology that most people think will change the world, nanotechnology, is probably decades away; however, I’d like to propose a more important milestone we should strive for before we attempt to build physical products on an atomic scale.
In his classic lecture of December 1959, titled “There’s Plenty Of Room At The Bottom”, Richard Feynman proposed creating smaller manipulators which in turn would be used to build even smaller manipulators, eventually enabling atomic-scale manipulation . It’s a neat idea, but one that has yet to come to fruition. What I wonder is if what we really need is the capability to assemble on an atomic scale; it would seem a more practical goal to be able to disassemble materials, if not on an atomic scale, then at least a near-atomic scale.
In the case of nanotechnology, I wonder how we will be able to assemble solid materials at an atomic scale without having repulsive forces blow apart a work in progress before reaching a stable crystalline state. Historically, it’s always been easier to destroy that to create, so why not use that to our advantage? Given humanity’s appetite for throwing tons of away perfectly good resources into landfills every day, a far more useful technology would be some kind of atomic shredder. Such a device would be capable of breaking down large items, such as consumer electronics, into piles of relatively homogeneous and pure raw materials. Given the failure of recycling to reclaim significant amounts of resources due to the difficulty of easily separating constituent components, this would be a perfect solution.
If only we had such a technology we would be in the midst of a new resource Gold Rush, except this time the prospectors wouldn’t be looking for gold. They’d be looking for garbage.