Back by popular demand is our Trashcompactor section. Something about this caught the imagination of a number of our readers, who have suggested a variety of candidates for pulping. One nomination this week is the Swiss Re report for quoting the dreaded trillion dollar market. As a re-insurance company, we can perhaps forgive that transgression.
Less forgivable is this item from European Commission Press Room which will warm the cockles of Robert Freitas diamondoid heart and have eurocrats tearing their hair out at seeing their rather excellent position paper on European nanotechnology reduced to meaningless piffle by the insertion of the astonishing claim (in the first paragraph) that “Commercial nanotech applications include ‘nano-robots’ the size of atoms that can be injected into the human body to cure diseases.” Whatever next, nanobots smaller than atoms?
If anyone had read the report they were promoting them may have found this passage relevant. “Headlines about e.g. self-replicating nano-robots, that are well beyond our present capability but are often presented as an immediate risk, demonstrate that there is an urgent need to provide information about present-day nanotechnology research and its possible applications.”
But into this weeks trash compactor, based on numbers of complaints goes, erm, TNT Weekly for suggesting that molecular nanotechnology and its associated diamondoid dreams may not be 100% realizable in the form originally envisaged. As firm believers in democracy we accept our fate with the traditional British stiff upper lip, even if we suggested nothing of the kind.
We do however, stand by our view that understanding the possible negative environmental effects of the kinds of nanotechnology already in widespread production is a far higher priority than those pesky but yet to be realized nanobots.
We also stand by our new policy of hanging, drawing and quartering anyone who interprets the above paragragrah as us suggesting that there may be a flaw in an equation in Nanosytems.