Nanotechnology Revolution

Nanotechnology is often referred to as a general-purpose technology. That’s because in its mature form it will have significant impact on almost all industries and all areas of society. It offers better built, longer lasting, cleaner, safer, and smarter products for the home, for communications, for medicine, for transportation, for agriculture, and for industry in general. It is sometimes seen as “the next industrial revolution”. It is a revolutionary, transformative and powerful technology. Nanotechnology brings new capabilities, bringing us new ways to make things heal our bodies and care for the environment. It will also bring unwanted advances in weaponry and give us yet more ways to foul up the world on an enormous scale. It doesn’t automatically solve our problems even powerful technologies merely give us more power. As usual we have a lot more work ahead of us and a lot of hard decisions to make if we hope to harness new developments to good ends. This book is divided into two sections. First section delineates a number of alternative scenarios to develop our understanding of nanotechnology. These scenarios cannot represent what will happen, because no one knows. They can, however, show how post breakthrough capabilities could mesh with human life and Earth’s environment. The results will appear to be quaintly conservative from a future perspective, however most of it seem like science fiction today. In second section some other important components of nanotechnology namely, Molecular Nanotechnology, Fullerenes, Nanotubes, Superlattices, have been discussed.