Luke’s $10k A Week Blog

Today I am going to blog about utility fog. It’s the coolest nanotech idea I have ever heard of. And while it needs an assembler to begin with, it doesn’t have to be self-replicating, so we could use it without the risk of decomposing the world into grey goo.

The nanomachines used to make utility fog are called foglets. Their design is very simple conceptually. 12 little arms, each with telescoping action, side-to-side, and rotating capability, are connected to a central hub. When they grasp each other, they form an octet truss framework, which is very stable. (Think of the honeycomb structure, then picture it 3-dimensionally.)

By letting go, and re-connecting at the appropriate times, these machines can simulate the properties of any substance desired — from air to concrete — given the right programming. They would be useful for making furniture, carpeting, and adjustible walls for your house.

Their density would only be 3% of the air, so if programmed to emulate air, plenty of breathable oxygen would enter your lungs. They could also be programmed to remove mucus, dirt, smoke, and other hazards from your lungs while they are at it.

Want a brand-new car? A few kilograms of utility fog loaded with the right programming could form into one. It would be solar-electric powered, and could easily hover instead of having wheels. Furthermore, if you ever got into a crash, the fog inside the car would cushion your body better than any seat-belt ever could. It would also be able to completely prevent damage to the other car.

If Ufog is ever invented, we could picture all new cars being produced this way by law — if only for the safety. Insurance rates would go through the floor! But in reality, people would come to realize that you don’t need a car. You would instead fly, invisibly, through a tube-like section of sky. The fog would be programmed for collision-avoidance, and you would have zero structural strain on your body from acceleration and deceleration — you probably wouldn’t even feel it. Thus, traveling from the US to China would take only a few seconds. It could in fact resemble teleportation — just push a button, and suddenly you’re there.

The possibilities are endless with properly programmed utility fog. Think of any future technology you want invented. Anything short of FTL travel, and it can be implemented with (or greatly assisted by) utility fog. The scariest (and most exciting) thing is that Ufog requires no new understanding of the universe to implement. All we need is the ability to manufacture smaller processors and components. This is just around the corner. Computer processors have not stopped shrinking, and components don’t trail too far behind. Once a method of producing a single foglet is invented, it’s only a matter of time before that can be duplicated massively enough to make them in the trillions.

Tune in next Sunday for Part 2, where I discuss Utility Fog IN SPACE!

No related posts.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 11:04 am and is filed under futurism, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.