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Frankestein ad 2000

  • 14/10/1995

"TERRAFORMING" is a verb coined roughly two decades ago by a hippiest club of Young American scientists, now braindead - let's call it Science Fiction for Optimists. Unless you know that a programme for "seeding" Mars with Earth bacteria and chemicals and transforming its hot, dry, anthropophobic atmosphere into a "human compatible" broth was considered by NASA in the 60s as deserving of deeper scientific inquiry, you will tend -- and rightly so -- to dismiss terraforming as a lot of fantastic crock.

But within the magic realm of genetic transmutability, terraforming is back in the news again -- it is the vehicle that key environmentalists hope will help repair not the Red Planet but parts of the Blue Planet, Earth, that have been mutilated almost beyond recognition by the jackboots of human progress.

Terraforming -- making the most intractable topography capable of supporting rather trail human lives -- is nano technology at its most angelic and graceful. When in June 1992, K. Eric Drexier, the author of nanotechnology as scientists know it today, addressed 40 case-hardened cynics in Capitol Hill for recognition and funding, he spoke of building another highway to paradise: recreating nature itself, bottom upwards, molecule by molecule, perhaps atom by atom.

But you don't have to be a Luddite to understand the fear of the consequences of such power, if you had the technology to gum together atoms as and when, make molecules, control and refurbish dna at will, you would, as Drexier was fond of saying have "effectively complete control of the structure of matter" ... "the complete control of human biology". You could use the technology to alter the atoms of, say, shoe laces, and produce jam tarts, or methane to produce ozone; all hunger satiated, all material desires accomplished, freedom from the tyranny of ageing.

Nanotechnologists are thinking of using "assemblers" -- molecular robots -- to cut and splice dna. At the heart of this end of nanotechnology is the American Human Genome Project, set up to map out the complete human molecular blueprint, a billion base-pairs or nucleotides, with maybe the assemblers standing by to carry out molecular surgery to rid humans of whatever diseases they happen to be suffering from.

At the other end hangs the question of molecular domination, technology at the sharp edge of politics; the beast that ensiaves atoms first will rule the world. The unfortunate metaphor that Drexier used to convey the enormity of the goal of nanotechnology was that of "roast beef" popping out of the Black Box or Meat Machine. Roast beef from corrupted computer floppies! Nanotechnology for Macdonalds! End of the constant hunger that stalks over 45 per cent of Earth's population!

The Japanese had other ideas. If nanorobots a few molecules to a side could be sold, who gave a damn what they were called? So the Japanese established laboratories for inventing nanomachines so microscopic that they could enter cells and go snip-snip on dna heilces. There is huge money locked up in firms like a Lab for Nano-Electronics Materials, a Lab for Nano-Photonics Materials and a Lab for Exotic Nano-Materials; the Yodhida Nano-Mechanism Project, the Hotani Molecular Dynamic Assembly Project, the Kunitake Molecular Architecture Project... etcetera ad infinitum.

This is the heart of the matter, and no puns intended. Regis, a protessional philosopher at New York University and no novice at scientific futurology, knows full well but won't be explicit about the fact that something as powerful as nanotechnology can promise utopia but can, and perhaps will, deliver subatomic mayhem more readily than create an uncompromised Garden of Eden. History says so. Any way you look at it, nanotechnology is big promise, bigger trouble.