Mechanical friends of the future.

Yesterday, I wrote about the fundamental operating principals of all mechanical devices. Those being the lever; the fulcrum; the inclined plane; and the telescopic extension. Those principles are fine for things that you can build yourself, but in this age of miniaturization we are faced with situations too small for us to even see, much less build ourselves.
I’m not just talking about hard drives the size of a silver dollar. They do exist. I have one with a capacity of 80 GB in my Ipod Classic. This is microscopic technology that many of us own, but I couldn’t even take it apart without destroying it. Inside our phones are many microscopic parts that were assembled by robots and were never meant to be disassembled at all. How small does technology get? Pretty damn small.
The Nano Bypass
Do you know any who has had Bypass surgery? This is where years of high cholesterol diet and little or no exercise culminate in blocked arteries around your heart. People die from it all the time. I even knew a couple. There are a couple solutions. One is to install a stint. This is like a tubular reinforcement to keep your artery from collapsing. Another is to cut the clogged artery out and replace it with a chunk of artery that they take from your leg.
That’s today’s solution. Tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow you will be injected with thousands of nano-machines that will be programmed to seek out the plaque that clogs your arteries and, molecule by molecule, trap it and carry to your intestines for elimination through your body’s own waste disposal system. Or the nano-machine may transform itself once it captures its full load of plaque to look like a known predator and your body’s immune system will destroy it.
Did someone say cancer?
Cancer cells are easily identified. Cell by cell, nano-machines will one day trap cancer and safely remove it from your body without invasive surgery or radiation.
Many ailments of today could be cured if we only had a way to pick off unwanted cells one by one. Nano-machines are the tool that will make that possible…but how? This is a very complex issue and we only have the most rudimentary handle on how to control it, but there are a lot of very smart people working on it. One of the control strategies is that you flood an area these machines and they move around until they come into contact with a certain compound. Something unique to that with which they are designed to interact. Plaque in your arteries or cancer cells for instance. The moment one of these machines comes into contact with plaque or cancer, an interaction occurs and it traps a few molecules of the stuff and its outer shell changes to look like salmonella or something. Then it gets carried away by your body’s immune system. That’s the idea anyway.

This is a molecule trap that exists today. The concept was invented over 100 years ago.

It seems far-fetched doesn’t it? It may seem so, but we are advancing technology faster than ever and it’s going to get even faster in the future. When I was a kid, I had a walkie talkie that was almost as big as a quart of milk and it would barely reach from one end of my yard to the other. Now I have a Bluetooth headset that will reach that same distance with crystal clarity and it is literally the size of a sugar cube. My first hard drive was as big as a breadbox and only held 10 MB. Now I can get one for my laptop that holds 3 TB and is smaller than a deck of cards. Things are getting smaller.
What else is there?
When I was a kid, the City had a landfill operation running at the corner of 29th & C Sts. At the time it was the largest hole in the ground I had ever seen. You can see what’s left of it today. If you are travelling on Business-80 from Cal Expo toward Downtown Sacramento, there’s a giant hill to your right after you cross the river. That’s what’s left of that giant hole in the ground. We filled it up with trash in just 40 years.
Did you ever wonder what’s in old landfills like that? I can tell you. Old TVs, Radios, refrigerators, air conditioners, aluminum foil and anything else you can think of.
All of these things contain metals like gold, silver, lead, copper and aluminum. What we call e-waste today. In other words, pollution. Nano-machines will be our pollution savior too. One day we’ll have nano-machines we can turn loose on these landfills and they will dig down and rip everything to shreds, molecule by molecule, and categorize it. Let them go to work on it and return in five years to dig up a giant ball of gold; a giant ball of lead; a giant ball of copper and a giant ball of aluminum. All sorted by the nano-machines.
The only real issue we’re going to have is keeping our mechanical friends of the future from scavenging all the stuff we’re still using.