Words matter. These are the best Ralph Merkle Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Nanotechnology is an idea that most people simply didn’t believe.
The new technologies that we see coming will have major benefits that will greatly alleviate human suffering.
If you think the technology is infeasible, you don’t worry about what it might do and what its potential is.
The first approximation in this future that we’re looking at is that everyone will be physically well off. They will have a great abundance in material goods, and I think that will soften some of the conflicts we see now.
One of the things that we can say with confidence is that we will have much lighter, much stronger materials, and this will reduce the cost of air flight, and the cost of rockets.
We see an entire planet which has many limitations.
Lighter computers and lighter sensors would let you have more function in a given weight, which is very important if you are launching things into space, and you have to pay by the pound to put things there.
If we can reduce the cost and improve the quality of medical technology through advances in nanotechnology, we can more widely address the medical conditions that are prevalent and reduce the level of human suffering.
A potato can grow quite easily on a very small plot of land. With molecular manufacturing, we’ll be able to have distributed manufacturing, which will permit manufacturing at the site using technologies that are low-cost and easily available.
We can grow crops less expensively because molecular manufacturing technology is inherently low cost.
As in any technological revolution, there will be winners and losers. On balance, everyone will come out ahead, although there will be particular companies that will not be able to cope with a new environment.
Today we see a human population of over 6 billion people, many of whom have serious medical conditions, which either can’t be treated or cannot be treated economically.
One of the issues facing us today is that there are countries where there is a serious lack of resources, the standards of living are very low, and this creates a fundamental unease and discomfort in entire populations.
There are certain things that are inherently scarce. For example, there is only a certain amount of beachfront property in California. It is going to be scarce, it is going to be expensive.
Machines built by human beings they will function correctly if we provide them with a very specific environment. But if that environment is changed, they won’t function at all.
Because of technological limits, there is a certain amount of food that we can produce per acre. If we were to have intensive greenhouse agriculture, we could have much higher production.
The laws of physics should allow us to arrange things molecule by molecule and even atom by atom, and at some point it was inevitable that we would develop a technology that would let us do this.
Nanotechnology will let us build computers that are incredibly powerful. We’ll have more power in the volume of a sugar cube than exists in the entire world today.
