Having the Vaguest Sense of What You’re Talking About

It would help immeasurably if those who have decided they are anti nanotechnology spent some amount of their energy in learning what nanotechnology is…not what it might be in some Crichton novel.

The advances in material science that nanotechnology enables makes possible the ability to bring clean and cheap (yes, it does cost money) water to regions of the world that desperately need it.

While arm-chair anti-nanotechnologists glibly decry efforts to best leverage nanotechnology to solving the planets water issues as some kind of venture capitalist ploy, there is some poor bloke in Africa that needs to desalinate his water so he and his family don’t die of thirst.

It’s possible to desalinate water, but it requires enormous amount of energy and expensive processes.

But imagine that nanotechnology-enabled photovoltaics were employed in solar panels. The nanotechnology would make the solar panels affordable and far more efficient so that the panels could be set up in that village in Africa to run the inexpensive and efficient desalination processes (made affordable by nanotechnology). Suddenly, that poor bloke in Africa has clean water to drink with very little cost. Is that a bad idea?

We don’t think so. As far as the NanoWater 2004 conference being more in line with venture capital, NanoWater has one distinguished venture capitalist on its speaker faculty. Why? Because Kevin McGovern has dedicated much of his efforts to finding ways that nanotechnology can be applied to solving the world’s water issues.

Will business find a way of making so money from supporting nanotechnology’s application to water technologies, like filtration, desalination, purification? We certainly hope so, otherwise it will never happen.

And finally, the argument of lumping initiatives to apply nanotechnology to environmental issues with the projects of building dams seems to miss one crucial point: Small is Beautiful. A nanotechnology-enabled solar panel to run a nanotechnology-enabled desalination process to bring water to a village, or on a larger scale to a country, is going in the exact opposite direction of building water dams.

Try as one might, the NanoWater initiative is not part of a larger globalization conspiracy. We just want to see nanotechnology do some good for people.