Nanofactory
From Future
- The most plausible route to a Nanofactory is via Custom manufacturing or Rapid Prototyping at progressively smaller scales - Miniaturization the top-down approach.
- Micro fabrication will require tiny precision engineered Hands And Grips for Robots. These will be one of the first targets of general-purpose micro-manufacturing.
The other routes to Nanotechnology are more likely to lead in the short term to custom products and not to general purpose manufacture.
- The bottom up route, using Biotechnology, is constrained by being adaptations of existing naturally occuring protein and enzymes and our custom derivatives.
- The third route via Lithography, leveraging the photographic-reduction process used in modern chip manufacture to produce micro machines (SEMS), is also less likely to lead to a general purpose Nanofactory. The reason is that that technology is planar, and silicon based. Moving to 3D and other non silicon-like materials is very hard.
