Word: carbonization
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...biotechnology is limited by the tasks cells already know how to carry out. Nanotech visionaries have much more ambitious notions. Imagine a nanomachine that could take raw carbon and arrange it, atom by atom, into a perfect diamond. Imagine a machine that dismembers dioxin molecules, one by one, into their component parts. Or a device that cruises the human bloodstream, seeks out cholesterol deposits on vessel walls and disassembles them. Or one that takes grass clippings and remanufactures them into bread. Literally every physical object in the world, from computers to cheese, is made of molecules, and in principle...
...each time one computing technology has reached its limit, a new approach has stepped in to continue exponential growth (see "What Will Replace Silicon?" in this issue). Nanotubes, for example, which are already functioning in laboratories, could be fashioned into three-dimensional circuits made of hexagonal arrays of carbon atoms. One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry would be 1 million times more powerful than the human brain, at least in raw processing power...
Everything in the physical world is made of atoms. Nanobots manipulate atoms. Thus nanobots could in principle make anything from apples to airplanes. Nanobots will probably be made from carbon nanotubes, a new form of carbon that is astonishingly versatile...
NANOTUBES Carbon molecules form a hexagonal mesh that curls into a cylinder like a tube of chicken wire. About 100 times as strong as steel and 50,000 times as thin as a human hair, they can serve as the structure of a nanobot. Acting as semiconductors, nanotubes are also ideal for building a nanobot's tiny microprocessor brain...
...diamond's extraordinary clarity and strength make it an ideal building material, but also terribly hard to work with. Nanobots, however, could make diamonds in any shape at all--a sheet a few millimeters thick, say, to make a scratchproof window. And because the basic feedstock is ordinary carbon, these diamonds are as cheap as glass...