The Future of Life

I, Nanorobot

For some reason, the above article really made me excited. Like, the sort of excited I used to feel about theoretical physics before I decided that I didn't want to learn about squarks and sleptons. The sort of excited I feel about meditation and mysticism and philosophy. And I'd thought that science couldn't do that for me anymore. I'm glad to find that I was mistaken.

This article discusses the nascent field of nanobiotechnology. For the past 40 years or so, biotechnology was the up and coming field in the physical sciences. Then 20 years ago came along nanotechnology. Now the two have crossed paths and spawned the Atomic Race of our generation, nanobiotechnology. This is the stuff that's really going to change how we live our lives in the coming years. This is the new computer, the new car, the new sliced bread of our generation, and we get to be involved in developing it. Score!

In a podcast I was listening to from Integral Naked, Stuart Davis discussed how he thought in the coming years, the human/technology barrier will become blurrier and blurrier to the point that technology will all but disappear. That means no more cellphones, no more computers, no more calculators. Not that we won't have the capabilities of those machines, but rather that they'll be integrated into us by nanotechnology. It's good to see that scientists agree with this analysis (Stuart Davis is a musician, after all).

This is all exciting shit. Of course, unfortunately, all these rosey scenarios are tempered with the dystopian possibilities of human nature. Ug. Yin yang, indeed. As always, this area allows us to either succeed and reach a whole new level of possibilites, or to fail and royally screw everything up. Let's succeed, shall we?

Post Script - I've found out that nanobiotechnology (NBT) is more or less the common name for biomimetics. This is very exciting, since NBT seems to be much further along than biomimetics. I'm left with a conundrum though: I can't triple major in biology, physics, and chemistry. I'll have to settle for a double major in physics and chemistry, and then some specialization into NBT in grad school.

But then there's always the chance that I won't take that path at all. :)