First, serious discussion about nanotechnology is clouded by references to the concept as a marketing ploy – that is the iPod Nano, nano-processors and nano materials used throughout the many industries. Nano sizing is not the essential element in the discussion – there are and have been particles this size in our environment from the beginning. The important element is the ability to control the elements of this particle. Building these particles, on a molecular level, enables the implementation of any number of technologies at a scale which can not be seen. Particles made on this scale can only be seen with the most sensitive and specialized equipment. One cannot inspect the contents of these products using the technology of a jewelers loop. Nanotechnology means programming the construction of materials from the molecular level, and incorporating functionality beyond anything previously imagined. It means molecular assembly to the extent that the particles themselves self-assemble into the programmed configuration, similar to the way DNA assembles itself based on the genetic code. There is nothing simple about this technology – it is essentially tampering with the very basis of the material universe. This is a product that is created by corporate or government science, and which is unregulated and not monitored at any stage. There is no one looking out for the possible abuses of these systems, and worse, there is no technology available to combat or control the devastating possibilities except those tools in the hands of those who made them in the first place.

Secondly, nanoscience is the future. Molecular manufacturing will completely replace contemporary forms of making the objects we need, and that as a necessary reality. The simple fact is that when a molecular formula is known - either by invention or reverse engineering – it then can be assembled by nanobots from raw materials found in the periodic table and available in everything, without lighting the first foundry flame, sharpening the first die or tool, or hiring the first unskilled laborer. The future is clean, not because we have made cleaner factories by following the 5S practices of Taiichi Ono, or have all adopted the perfect quality policy eliminating all waste. The future is clean and orderly because nano assemblers, and disassemblers make the items the dominant life form on the planet require and have neatly recycled the trash of history and used it efficiently for other purposes. This is a far-out utopian concept today, and one that will not work in a capitalist paradigm guided by the hording mentality. The world capitalist economy must first be shifted to some alternative form. It is nonetheless the essence of the study of molecular manufacturing and it the only possible future in which this planet’s environment survives.

But what we do not know, that we do not perceive when the term nano is uttered in advertising and media, is the fact that this science has been ongoing for almost three generations, or fifty years, in a serious way. The news that reaches the general public is only a tiny part of the actual extent of development that has been achieved in that time. And like zero-point, or “free” energy, it is a technology that our sociology is not currently able to adopt – it is non-exploitable in terms of a persistent financial agenda. The main form of resistance to nanoscience and molecular manufacturing is the fact that it is about as controllable and billable as sunlight. There is no exploitation possible when energy is free and materials are produced from waste matter overly available on this polluted planet. Only a small window of exploitation opportunity exists and that is in the control of the molecular formulas needed to instruct the nanobots what to build – very similar to the issue of maintaining rights to computer software via the “dot-net” method and the retention of media rights to entertainment products through licensing. The axiom that “knowledge is power” is really going to be fleshed out as the cheap and efficient technologies of free-energy and molecular assembly proliferate and eventually overtake our world.

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