Forecasting The Future of an Emerging Technology

Nanotechnology has been hyped and buzzed about every since the term was coined. But what is it really, when will it happen, and how will it change the world?

Making predictions about the future can be tricky. So many unforeseeable things can and do happen all the time. So how exactly can we make any predictions about the future? There are three basic methods to predicting the future that I outlined in my research on predicting the future of nanotechnology:

Looking at The Present: How Small is Nano?

Understanding the size of the nano realm is the first challenge to understanding this technology. For an interactive tour of the nano realm to grasp the scale, see my Prezi "Plenty of Room at The Bottom". Let's take a look at some present nanotechnologies and discuss their size.

A good reference is a human hair. The width of a human hair is about 100 micrometers.

The length of an E. Coli bacteria is about 2 micrometers. E. coli itself is a very interesting bacteria. It is used more than any other bacteria to produce proteins for medicine. Bacteria and yeast can be thought of as protein factories.

Current protein engineering methods could be thought of as zeroth generation biological nanotechnology. Cells are still necessary to utilize their ribosomes for protein engineering, instead of directly engineering in vitro ribosomes to function as protein printers.

Most viruses range in size between 5nm and 300nm. Unlike yeast and bacteria, they cannot self-replicate. The HIV virus is roughly 120nm wide. Carrying a minimal set of genes that turn living cells into virus producing factories, they are the ideal candidates to manipulate cells on a massive scale, while still targeting only specific cell types. The use of viruses as delivery systems and molecular manipulation machines has promising applications in gene therapy. Several new therapies have been recently developed to fight cancer such as the company Juno's research. This can also be thought of as zeroth generation bio nanotechnology.

Zeroth generation bio-nanotech has its highest potential in medicine. It will lead to new types of custom medicine tailored to individuals to fight disease and could even hold the key to treatments to improve general quantity and quality of life.

The integrated circuit was invented in 1959, but really hit the mainstream in 1971 when Intel brought its first microprocessor onto the market. Since then they have been the foundation of nearly all modern technology. They started hitting a node length measured in nanometers in 1989 at 800nm. Current processors are around 14nm with 10nm coming out very soon. The interesting thing about this technology is Moore's law makes semiconductor technology very predictable for some properties.

Silicon integrated circuits do have both physical and economical limits on Moore's law. Within the next few years, they will reach a feature size where they cannot be made any smaller.

Carbon nanotubes can be single walled (SWCNT), multi-walled (MWCNT), metallic or semiconductor, and can come in a variety of symmetries. The properties of carbon nanotubes depend on their structure and number of walls. Carbon nanotubes have two incredible properties which makes them stand out as a material which are tensile strength and their conductivity. They are one of the strongest man made materials ever created. They are also the best semiconductors ever made. These two properties make them a very exciting prospect for use in current and future products.

Looking at The Past of Nanotechnology: Carbon Nanotubes

The concept of nanotechnology goes back as far as Richard Feynman's 1959 lecture "There's Plenty of Room at The Bottom", where he outlined the idea of tiny machines being able to manipulate atoms. The term nanotechnology was originally coined by Norio Taniguchi in 1974 to describe the precise molecular manufacturing of materials. The idea of molecular nanotechnology entered the popular science realm by 1986 in large part due to Eric Drexler's book "Engines of Creation", where he discussed the possibilities of such technology.

A good way to see the evolution of this technology is to use the development of carbon nanotubes as a case study on the evolution of this technology. For a full interactive history take a look at my Prezi, "Carbon Nanotubes Timeline". Carbon nanotubes were first discovered in 1991 but had been discovered to some degree as far back as 1952.

Often times proper understanding and wide discovery of a new technology is a slow process of evolution. Then once a technology has reached a certain level of knowledge, experts and even the media jump on the bandwagon and assume the revolution of this technology will come hard and fast, which is often not the case. Much like the evolution of the technology itself, it still needs a great deal more time to really impact the market and every day life.

With carbon nanotubes, it was assumed that they would be ubiquitous in products within a few years, however like many other technologies, there were scaling issues to reaching industry due to quality and production. Being able to process a large volume of carbon nanotubes with a high level of purity of the the useful kind, such as semiconductor CNTs, wasn't as easy as many had assumed. There were also other problems in using them as electronic components. However those problems have been solved and now it is just a matter of continuous improvement, and growth of the market. The graph above comes from my research paper on the topic where I analyzed the price of carbon nanotubes by type and purity over the last 15 years and analyzed the production capacity of carbon nanotube manufactures for the last 10 years. Displayed are the prices for 40% - 60% percent and 90% as well as the current price for 99.9%. It is very likely that 99.9% as well as even higher percent CNTs will fall similar to others, especially as the demand grows and the total production capacity also increases. Which is very important, because to continue Moore's law, we will soon need to replace the silicon with carbon.

Looking For Laws: Moore's Law

Moore's law is one of those few times where a technology can be nearly perfectly predicted and projected into the future. Moore's law is a law of economics and scale. It states that the density of an integrated circuit will double roughly every two years. However it has been breaking down. The price of silicon transistors is actually going up as density increases, certain properties of processors have flattened out since around 2010, and soon it will be too difficult to increase the density of chips. Which is problematic since estimates place the economic growth due to Moore's law at 12 trillion dollars, in the last 20 years alone. In terms of GDP, Moore's law has added an extra point of real GDP growth annually from 1995 until 2011, this represents a 37% global economic impact.

But never fear, carbon is here. Since the price of carbon nanotubes is steadily dropping while the quality and production capacity is steadily increasing, in addition to the major problems for carbon nanotubes to be used in electronics having been solved, it is only a matter of time before they will replace current silicon transistors. This will allow Moore's law and it's economic growth to continue.

The Future

Because many of these technologies are predictable once past and current research is analyzed, and economic factors such as Moore's law are accounted for, some predictions about the future can be made.

8 to 10 years

Between 2018 and 2019 the first NRAM memory utilizing carbon nanotubes will become available from Nantero and Fujitsu.

The final node length of silicon will be at either 7nm or 5nm. This will occur roughly between 2018 and 2020.

Between 2020 and 2024 the first carbon nanotube processors will enter the market in some capacity.

3D printing and nanotechnology will combine both using biological means with artificial ribosomes and polyribosomes and non biological with materials like carbon. Whether nano 3d printing will only be in the lab or have some industrial applications in this time frame is unforeseeable, however the technology will develop allowing more bottom up manufacturing capacities. In general 3d printing that is more similar to current techniques might find wider adoption once more complex structures and different materials can be easily printed, the quality increases, and prices go down. This could all lead to the beginnings of a neo-industrial revolution in this time frame.





Biotech companies using gene therapy such as Juno will get FDA approval for some of their therapies to treat certain diseases such as some types of cancer at a much higher success rate than any efforts previously achieved.









With the price, quality, and production volume of carbon nanotubes in this time frame, many products will start coming out that utilize their properties to make stronger, lighter, and generally better products. Everything from processors and batteries, to larger engineered structures will start using them. It will be very important to further study health and environmental impacts of these materials.

15-25 years

Atomic precision manufacturing, as proposed by Eric Drexler should be a possibility in some capacity in this time frame, extending from the basic nano 3D printing previously outlined. The ability for complex mechanical machines to be assembled to within atomic precision will be the next evolution in nanotechnology and 3D printing. This will take the neo-industrial revolution to its peak once this technology creeps into industrial usage. This could even also be achieved by biological means. As previously stated, it is difficult to say whether any industrial applications of such technology will be viable in this time frame.

Conclusion

The coming age of nanotechnology will allow for many exciting advancements, from aiding us in building quantum computers, to helping us treat many diseases, and even make our every day products lighter, faster, stronger, and cheaper. As always when a new technology is theorized, it takes a long time for the world to catch up, and it is often hard to image exactly how it will change things.

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This article is based off of the research paper "Nanotechnology: Predicting The Future" I wrote and a YouTube video series for The Amateur Academic.