Molecular nanotech...

I did find this nifty movie...

... beware though, for one, it's quicktime (I hear some people are allergic to it), and for two, it's no less then 80 megs big.

user link on www.foresight.org

Still, I found that pretty interesting and impressive, with all it's consequences... I wonder if such a thing could be ever constructed. And if yes, if it was in any foreseeable future. It would be really awesome to have one of those factories at home.

Mulletkewl. I don't have Quicktime, but VLC will play quicktime files.

That vid's pretty sweet.

How far off, realistically, do you think something like this really is?

I understand there's serious health concerns with inhaling nanoparticles, not to mention what happens if they multiply out of control and engulf Earth in a huge mass of grey nanogoo

It's still pretty far off, not to mention the fact that the infrastructure needed to produce the first nano-factories is pretty intense. Designing on the molecular scale isn't easy

Also, there are a lot of toxin hazards should a fault appear in a nanofactory. Nano-particles that can seriously screw up your organs could be produced, although over time and perfection of nanotech, this would be minimized. Still, scary though.

Well yeah, admittedly this is still far off, but I could imagine it becoming eventually reality (may take a hundred years though...). In regard for a grey goo scenario, while this is popular, I think it's unlikely. The main reason is that this wouldn't work from the issue of thermodynamics, and in regard for raw materials. For one, nanomachines wouldn't use any raw material. If you look at the machines in the video, they only use acethylene. Also, on Earth most minerals in rocks are already in oxygenated energy states and wouldn't be of much use since breaking them down would require extra energy. Also, if the nanomachine was hydrocarbons-based, it seems likely that it would get competition from bacteria.