Where did they all go?

My colleague Dexter Johnson (aka the Nanoclast) highlights a forthcoming report about the decline in the number of Australian nanotech companies, but it’s hardly surprising. Before anyone heralds the death of anything consider this:

• The global economy has resulted in a reduction of the number of companies in just about every sector of the economy. High streets where a third of the shops have closed are now common outside London, and everyone from estate agents to Starbucks have been rationalising, downsizing or going bust.
• As I mentioned back in 2001, most nanomaterials companies will go bust, some sooner, some later, but there is almost no way that anyone apart from large diversified chemical and materials companies can create a sustainable business in that sector. Of course if you told your VCs that nanotubes were the new gold you probably got closed down five years ago.
• Nanotech has been subject to a large amount of M&A activity, Singular ID being snapped up by Bilicare for example, thereby disappearing from the Singapore register of nanotech companies and joining the Indian pharmaceutical industry.
• Most nanotech companies were start ups, and most start ups don’t survive too long, whatever the sector.
• I can think of plenty of companies making use of nanotechnologies that no one would consider being nanotech companies, so how a nanotech company is defined is also part of the problem.

Of course I’m pre judging the report, and there may be more granularity and methodology than in this brief report. However what isn’t in doubt is the stupid and irresponsible nanotech market numbers that Lux Research keep repeating and which keeps finding its way into business plans and foresight documents. Any business plan that starts waffling on about the ‘nanotech market’ gets binned straight away. In our investment business we interested in tangible and quantifiable numbers not abstract, artificial and absurd concepts.

Now if I was working in a government agency which was being judged on the number of nanotechnology companies created/attracted/sustained I’d be looking trying to figure out how far and how fast I could move the goalposts.

Unlikely bedfellows they they may be, there seems to be a connection in some minds, and it keeps cropping up.  Apparently, this is part of a full-page ad in the Singapore Straits Times of Thursday, Oct 15, 2009.

UPDATE from our correspondent in Singapore….

Hi Tim,

I’m in Singapore for a few days and there’s a full page ad in the Straits Times just like you said.

It says they use a Nano Serum with ” nanosized particles 2000 times smaller than the skin pores around the breasts. When coupled with the unique gentle massage of our therapists, these particles penetrate deeply…. to achieve enhancement, firming and contouring.”

So there’s a dream job for you!

It has to be one of the funniest videos I’ve seen for a long time, and seems to have been made by the same people who keep sending all those mails telling me I have won the lottery. Poor punctuation, LOTS of CaPitaLs and a sound track lifted from a 1970′s porn film.

So it’s obviously a fake product designed to make people part with their money, which isn’t unusual, but what flummoxes me about it is the sequence 1’37″ into the video which shows someone with a stick fishing something out of a toilet!!!

There is frenzy in Kampala, especially among the middle class, of a new type of small glass, with near magical powers, claimed to enhance body mood and replenish water and other beverages with lost essential minerals. The glass is believed to have been developed at high altitude.

It costs between Shs500,000- 1,000,000. The glass, whose brand name is withheld, claims to make sick people get nutrients from its use. One pours water and drinks. It is also claimed that carrying it in one’s pocket makes them healthier.

It is one of the numerous products imported into the country based on a new era of advanced research based on nanotechnology, a science that manipulates matter at the scale of atoms and molecules.

The claims are total rubbish of course, and people have been complaining that it doesn’t work, but in much of the developing world there are no real enforceable standards on anything, from baby milk to drugs, or at least nothing that slipping a wad of notes to the right person won’t get around. I’ve seen similar materials, often claiming to be glass or ceramic based which can help with everything from better sleep to sexual stamina.

A major worry is, of course, that any fake or dangerous products making claims to contain nanotechnology tend to pollute genuine products, as we saw a few years ago with Magic Nano, which caused some respiratory problems but didn’t actually contain any ‘nanotech’. Despite that, it was cited as an example of the dangers of nanotech as recently as this month. Unfortunately, fake nanoproducts have the same potential to trigger knee jerk responses as genuine ones.

While we develop all kinds of detailed regulations and testing procedures for nanomaterials, it’s worth considering what the rest of the world has to put up with!

Other conclusions are that “Liverpool, for example, is set to become a centre of excellence in stem cell research, while Manchester is tipped as a leader in robotics.” and “Glasgow is predicted to become a centre for renewable energies.”

While I’m always happy to see that Leeds is predicted to be a super city rivalling the City of London with its financial skills, I suspend my disbelief mainly in the hope that it may one day have a super football club as well.

I’m never quite sure how these predictions are arrived at, but it seems to be along the lines of assuming that if Newcastle has twice as much nanotech going on as a few years ago then nanoscience will underpin the regions economy by 2030, although I have to conclude that many of the science based conclusions are complete twaddle. Here’s what it says about nanotech:

Nanotech :
Hot spots
Bristol – Cambridge – Durham –London – Newcastle – Oxford
Nanotechnology applies to a very broad field of science that focuses on the design and control of things on a minuscule scale. It has huge potential and is in current use in industries such as beauty, medicine and textiles. Richard Feynman, considered the father of nanotech, postulated in 1959 that, because it involves work at a minute level, nanotechnology would eventually enable us to build any substance from scratch.

Not too bad for a beginner, but I was truly shocked by their complete and utter rubbish written on Stem Cells:

Stem cell research :
Hot spots
Cambridge – Edinburgh –Liverpool – London – Manchester

The ageing population is driving the stem cell industry. Stem cells regenerate the skin and keep it looking youthful but diminish as we age.

Stem cell technology, traditionally used for burn patients, is seen as the holy grail of anti-ageing. One of the reasons the UK has become an international hotbed for the stem cell sector is the lack of industry legislation. Universities and
researchers are effectively operating in a legal vacuum.

So there we have it – technology hot spots predicted by a bunch of people who couldn’t even be bothered finding out what the technology actually is.

We Need Your Jobs Data

During the Public Policy Tour, we received an assignment from Senator Wyden, Tom Kalil, and several other champions of nanotechnology: in order to make the best case for nanotechnology that they can, they need jobs information from you.  Nanotechnology businesses are among the few that are hiring, and our champions want to be able to show this.  We also need anecdotes that Senators and Members of Congress can use to personalize the data – specific instances in which you are hiring people, and the impact that you are having in your communities. In the days ahead, we will be asking you to participate in a survey that will help provide this important information.

There is an an obvious need to build a case for the Senators showing that nanotechnology has created jobs, but has it? Well if you take the preferred measure of the NanoBusiness Alliance, the “Nanotechnology Industry” then i rather suspect that the number of sustainable jobs created will be under a thousand, as most “nanotech companies” seem to subsist on SBIR and DARPA grants without showing any signs of real growth.

However if we want to look at the number of jobs created by nanotechnologies then it;s a different story – GMR and the associated precision manufacturing using focused ion beams which is used in hard disks enabled the iPod, which enable a whole new industry! The same is true in composites, pharmeceuticals, textiles and many other industry sectors, but the thing the Senators were promised by the NBA was a “nanotechnology industry.”

As far back as 2002 the NBA was getting its wrists slapped for coming with with stupid and naive predictions about the size of the ‘nanotechnology industry‘. As a comparison, I have added below the conclusion of an article I wrote for European Business Forum in 2003 disagreeing with the premise of their ever being a “nanotechnology industry.”

It is those stupid and naive predictions, the hype driven by a craving for attention that are now coming back to bite the NBA.  You can imagine the awkward scene:

“Ok guys, we bought in ten years ago, we gave you the cash so show us the results? How many jobs were created?”

“erm, let me send out an email and ask”

“So, just how big is the nanotechnology industry these days?

“erm, well, there were a couple of dozen nanotech companies but a few closed down, it’s the recession y’know”

“But back in 2002 you put out a report saying there were over a hundred and it would be worth $700 billion by last year”

“erm, erm…”

Well the lesson for today, ladies and gentlemen, is it doesn’t matter whether you are hyping nanotech or running a Ponzi scheme, if you can’t deliver and you stick around too long you’ll get caught out. Most of the early nanotech boosters are now boosting clean tech, or synthetic biology, or geoengineering. While not many of them have a clue what they are talking about, at least they had enough sense to skedaddle before any of the predictions came true.

The tragedy of course, is that the tens of thousands of scientists engaged in nanoscience weren’t the ones who made those silly predictions, and weren’t the ones who egged on organisations such as the NBA to come out with ever more preposterous predictions, but will be tarred with the same brush as the boosters by the politicians.

Nourishing the roots of innovation: nanotechnology is not a disruptive force in itself, but its effect on existing products will be.

Tim Harper, 2003

A major difference between almost every historically disruptive technology and nanotechnology is that there is no focal point. In previous diffusions there is a clear path of adoption and displacement–whether water with steam, vacuum tubes with transistors or transistors with integrated circuits–based on a dominant technology. Of course no technology stands alone, so the house of cards that allows integrated circuits to exist spans polymers to metrology, but there the processing of silicon is a dominant technology. That focus has allowed the semiconductor industry to be defined, and measured. There is no nanotechnology industry, and probably never will be.

While nanotechnology can act as a magnet for funding, in terms of measuring the impact of technology, it is no more a meaningful definition than that of chemistry (the science of matter; the branch of the natural sciences dealing with the composition of substances and their properties and reactions). Our understanding of chemistry has enabled many of the world’s largest industries, but it was never embraced in the 1920s by investors and the public as the next big thing.

Perhaps a better example is our understanding of quantum mechanics, initiated by the discovery of the electron in 1897. The understanding that allows us to control the movement of electrons, initially along copper wire, and later through other materials such as silicon, has affected almost every aspect of our lives. From the light bulb to the cellphone we are ruled by quantum effects, yet no one would point to the diffusion of our understanding of the quantum realm as a disruptive technology.

So how do we track the diffusion of a technology we cannot define? Put simply, we can’t. Few consumers or even businesses give too much time to how things work, as long as they do, and they work better than the previous generation, or those of their competitors. Fundamental understanding is the job of quantum physicists and now nanotechnologists.

The answer is to look beyond nanotechnology, and to look at its effect on existing technologies. The three billion dollars of government funding worldwide has been mostly pouring into academic establishments, and the increase in our understanding of the molecular scale that it is enabling is already finding commercial applications. Business can already make use of the tools developed by academic nanoscience research to gain more insight into processes we already have some control over, whether in using nanocatalysis to improve yield and boost margins at an oil refinery, or using nanofibres to sell stain resistant clothing at a premium.

We are undergoing a period of massively parallel technological development, enabled not only by nanotechnology but also by the convergence of all branches of science. While nanotechnology may be the next big thing as far as governments and scientists are concerned, the applications will be far bigger and none of them will be called nanotechnology.

The political agenda is worth noting in the light of a piece in today’s Guardian, one of the left leaning UK daily newspapers. In an article exclusively about the military uses of microtechnology by the Pentagon, someone has deliberately added the headline ”

“Nanotechnology goes to war”

despite there being not one mention of nanotechnology in the entire article. Why? One can only conclude that an article about the military using smaller and faster electronics, something we all in fact do, wasn’t sufficiently interesting so the only way to get some attention was to concoct a link to something that would make its readers choke on their fairtrade organic tea. “The military are using nanotechnology, it’s outrageous, they must be stopped. Don’t open the door, they’ll ram GMOs & nanobots down your throat as soon as you open your mouth…etc”

Perhaps the saddest thing about both the EurActiv piece and the Guardian headline is that most positions on nanotechnology seem to have been taken along political lines (i.e if industry or the pentagon is doing it then it must be  bad) resulting in deliberate distortions of the facts.

My estwhile colleague Dexter Johnson who also blogs for IEEE Spectrum received a number of plaudits from readers of the Foresight Institutes Nanodot blog after daring to suggest that the sunny optimism of current President J Storrs Hall might be rather displaced and that the assertion nanobots will save us may be rather missing the point.

Illustrating the difficullty of contrsuctive engament with fanatics, the discussion consited of

Pessimists like Dexter get a pyschological kick out of declaring that “things are bad man, get real”, much like the fundamentalist christians who claim that we are living in “the last days, the most awful phase in human history”, when in fact (for Europe at least) the 14th century is probably the best example if you want war, death and misery in abundance. Did armageddon happen? No it did not.

Dexter Johnson’s bad attitude is borne of ignorance.

and

“Dexter Johnson is an ignoramus whose ignorance leads him to view optimists with contempt.”

and even J Storrs Hall who waded into the debate with a comment that is simultaneously naive and hare brained

@Dexter: Saying “just some people who made some bad investments” is a very incorrect characterization of what I said. The bad investments are the effect: the cause is the widespread coordinated incorrect beliefs. There were lots of them, ranging from fund managers who thought they could use Li’s Gaussian copula without understanding its assumptions and applicability, to investors who thought they could trust the managers.

Nano-hype — the overpromising of near-term nanoscale bulk technologies — was clearly a very minor part of the problem, but it was real. I’ve been amazed how many people asked me for investment advice once they heard I’d written a book on nanotech. (My stock answer: “Buy land.”)

So that’s another argument settled. The various nutcases, fruitcases, burned out hippies and galactic megalomaniacs that orbit the Foresight Institute are always right, and scientists, governments, investors and anyone else who disagrees with them is an ignoramus.Whatever next? Crucifixians, gas chambers, or plagues of nanobots to root out any dissenting thought? It rather looks like “the leading think tank and public interest institute on nanotechnology” has been taken over by the nanotech equivalent of the Taliban, or at least some kind of set of nerds that have been driven to the brink of insanity by the thwarting of their plans for global domination and the inability to get a real live girlfriend.

Dexter got off lightly – the last time I questioned anything from this bunch a number of people wished various diseases on me. I wonder what Richard Jones’ postbag looks like?

Ray Kurzweil appears to be planning to use nanobots to bring his dead (since 1970) father to life according to this extract from a recent Rolling Stone interview reproduced at RoughType….

Using technology, he plans to bring his dead father back to life. Kurzweil reveals this to me near the end of our conversation … In a soft voice, he explains how the resurrection would work. “We can find some of his DNA around his grave site – that’s a lot of information right there,” he says. “The AI will send down some nanobots and get some bone or teeth and extract some DNA and put it all together. Then they’ll get some information from my brain and anyone else who still remembers him.”

When I ask how exactly they’ll extract the knowledge from his brain, Kurzweil bristles, as if the answer should be obvious: “Just send nanobots into my brain and reconstruct my recollections and memories.” The machines will capture everything: the piggyback ride to the grocery store, the bedtime reading of Tom Swift, the moment he and his father rejoiced when the letter of acceptance from MIT arrived. To provide the nanobots with even more information, Kurzweil is safeguarding the boxes of his dad’s mementos, so the artificial intelligence has as much data as possible from which to reconstruct him. Father 2.0 could take many forms, he says, from a virtual-reality avatar to a fully functioning robot … “If you can bring back life that was valuable in the past, it should be valuable in the future.”

Most of the comments at RoughType assume that Kurzweil is some kind of sociopath, and there has always been a fine line between genius and madness. Perhaps this does go some way to explaining why many in the singularian camp simply refuse to believe that their version of the future won’t happen – they are just looking for the parental approval they never had as a child.

By appropriating the term nanotechnology for what it was they were doing, the scientists had pulled a neat rhetorical trick: they were associating themselves with the wonderful promises of Drexler’s vision without having explicitly promised anything themselves. And they reaped the benefits of billion-dollar funding levels worldwide, interest from investors and the media, the cream of the students, and all the rest.

What always mystified me about the Foresight Institute(and associated groups) is that they simultaneously wanted to keep nanotechnology to themselves but put no effort whatsoever into doing any science that make make their dreams come true. As soon as the scientific community begins to investigate nanotech they start prancing wildly around waving sticks and accusing all kinds of people of stealing it. Now, as a recipient of the Foresight Communications Prize in 2003 I recall that the molecular manufacturing community did all that they could to reap the benefits, it’s just that sitting in front of a computer all day speculating about what a nano enabled Utopia would be like wasn’t felt by government or industry to be an any more worthy recipient of funding than sitting in front of a computer all day speculating on what it would be like to be a potato.

It’s a real shame. The early work by Drexler was uniquely visionary,and I can’t help thinking that his adoption by a bunch of silicon valley nerds rather than exploring the ideas within the scientific community is a mistake of tragic proportions. Certainly demanding that scientists do what they were unwilling or incapable of doing and then getting all bitter and twisted over a word, and a poorly defined one at that, isn’t going to advance their cause.

The problem is that the propagation of these rather odd ideas is continuous, just when you think the last nanobot has been squashed you find another infestation in some corner of the interweb. Once people get it into their heads that nanofactories will be built there is no rational argument that will dissuade them – rather like a bunch of religious fanatics.

It’s a little like attempting to build rather splendid house, or if you subscribe to the nanotech saving humanity idea, a social and cultural centre, only to find that one of your neighbours sneaks in and regularly defecates in your swimming pool. It’s not the end of the world, but you rather wish that they would find something more positive to do. (This is the bit where I usually get challenged to prove whether there is any evidence that nanofactories will not work, and have to fish around for a suitable metaphor for attempting to prove a negative…)

While none of the fears voiced were particular novel, I was rather charmed by the innocent naiivety of the participants. The lay people, effectively people pulled off the streets with no knowledge of nanotechnology and then asked to bravely give an opinion on it, were perhaps the most open minded of the participants. During the course of the project they had been browsing the web, making up songs and producing plays about the perceived evils of nanotechnologies.  Despite all the time spent on Wikipedia learning about mind/machine interfaces were still willing to shake the hands of eminent nanotechnologists without any fear of being assimilated or contaminated by nanobots or nanoparticles.

As with most public engagement exercises, and there have been plenty, there was a realisation that technology is, in general, a good thing but can of course be used for a wide variety of purposes, not all of them beneficial to humanity. It was interesting that one of the fears is that we might slide into a kind of society which we don’t particularly want, but on the other hand I don’t remember much debate about the use of closed circuit TV, traffic cameras or councils popping  microchips in your dustbin, something that most people wouldn’t want but nonetheless are becoming increasingly commonplace, so perhaps it doesn’t matter what we want?  There were other fears raised as well, but the meeting reports will hopefully address these in a disinterested way and avoid the usual temptation to produce a report calling for things to be regulated/monitored/banned or have moratoria slapped upon them because that is what the people funding the project, in this case the EU, are perceived to want to hear.

What was almost shocking was the implied assumption, perhaps understandable among the lay people and but surprisingly also shared by the social scientists that because a scientist does something in a lab it will inevitably end up affecting society. It’s a little like assuming that everyone who picks up a pen to become Oscar Wilde, or anyone who picks up a guitar to inevitably become a rock star – nothing could be further from the truth and it was rather surprising that the whole process was based on the (false) assumption that science has any direct impact on society, because it usually doesn’t.

For any particular bit of science to have any impact is has to go through a number of gates and clamber over hurdles of ever increasing height and complexity. Science has its own checks and balances with publication and peer review, but most entrepreneurs will tell you that is almost trivial in comparison with actually getting that science onto the market, something that has to be done before it can have any effect. Let’s not forget that it was 1953 when the secrets of DNA were unravelled, yet genetic screening for more than a small number of diseases and characteristics is still prohibitively expensive. It was not the scientific discovery that changed society, but the development of methods of applying that knowledge, such as automated gene sequencing, and much of that was done in the commercial world.

Was it useful? Well perhaps from an intellectual point of view in the same way that an animated discussion over dinner, or even in a pub can be an interesting diversion. I also think it is useful for the science community to engage with the public and reflect on what we should be doing better to communicate what we do as well as how and why. What also struck me as rather odd, or perhaps just mind bogglingly stupid, was the idea of asking people who know about as much about nanotechnology as they do about credit default swaps to give an opinion on the subject to another bunch of people who also seemed to understood very little about the subject, especially as the project involved examining the link between two rather nebulous and undefined terms, ‘nanotechnology’ and ‘responsible.’  While I think I understand what is meant by nanotechnology, and even if the definitions used by other people may differ from mine we can at leat have a meaningful discussion, the idea of responsibility is inextricably bound up with ethics, which opens a whole new can or worms. Ethics aren’t something that can be defined, and are indeed a product of a number of things such as your political and religious views, your upbringing, the society you live in and your position in the society. As an example, someone in government planning may envisage a scenario where a certain number of civilian deaths is acceptable and see no real ethical problem, whereas the families of those civilians certainly would see a very big problem!

One of the jobs of social scientists is to wrestle with these poorly defined issues and find a way to tease out some patterns and perhaps draw some conclusions, but I’m unclear whether discussing ‘nanotechnology’ and ‘responsibility’ is any more useful than spending a few days discussing ‘walruses’ and ‘ice cream.’

My only involvement with social science was a couple of years of social geography, used as a sort of counterweight to the maths and physics at university, so what appears quite senseless to me may actually be something of great interest to a social scientist, and conversely what appears a rather fascinating and important financial instrument or bit of science to me may appear rather silly from another viewpoint and as a result I’m curious about what the the result of the exercise will be.

As far as I know, the result of all of this discussion will involve a short film and no doubt a lengthy report, but will there, or indeed can there ever be any conclusions or recommendations from this type of exercise?

I would like to elaborate more, but I have had  to be rather non specific as the organisers were rather put out by the idea of any of the information being garnered leaking out via twitter which apparently was ‘not on.’  A laptop displaying this page was rather peevishly produced to indicate that  if any hint of the top secret deliberations were to be emitted into cyberspace than ‘they’ would know about it and take some unspecified action. As every discussion was being digitally recorded and filmed, I was left wondering whether this was a contradiction that was only visible to me. Ironically one of the public fears most often voiced was that technology could lead to increased surveillance and a consequent loss of privacy!

The issue goes way beyond vaccinations however, and gets to the heart of science journalism. Many people have been successfully persuaded by the anti GMO lobby that science is all about people making money and Jenni Barnett actually voiced her worries with ‘hold on a minute, there’s a drug company that’s making lots of money out of it (vaccines)’ – does she think that vaccijes grow on trees (which might also be owned by someone?).

What really appals me is not just the lack of understanding about science  – that is understandable and is why we call on experts in various fields to guide us, but the fundamental ignorance of basic economics. Whether GMO’s, vaccines or nanotechnologies, somebody has to make some money out of it at some stage otherwise their is no incentive to develop better drugs, materials, or anything else.

Ah, goes the Islington fdinner party argumemt, but shouldn’t the state fund this altrusitic reseach? Well it could, but the state has to get its money from somewheer, and that is a result of businesses commercialising technologies and paying tax.

What this rather disgraceful incident shows is that there does seem to be a major prejudice against science and scientists, and that the work of one bad scientist is held to be correct because it fits nicely with existing prejudices rather than being correct.  As science touches every part of our lives we do need much better science education, we also need to look hard at how the public engages with science, and also how to improve media reporting of scientific issues. Once politicians start picking and choosing which scientific results they like and don’t like rather than accepting that you have to take science as a whole – that way any anomalies get ironed out, we are on a very slippery slope and science starts to become a tool, like statistics, where the data can be manipulated to reinforce preconcieved notions or even for political gain.

In the current climate in the UK where any perceived slight such as calling someone a one eyed Scottish idiot is seen as “an absolute outrage of the worst kind” with demands for sackings and apologies by apoplectic politicians,  I have to wonder why accusing the entire science community of being corrupt liars goes almost unnoticed? Demands for the sacking of the journalists responsible on a postcard to this chap please, who apparently will know what you want even before you do!

I do wonder how much the Singularians would agree about the post utopian scenario here?

We are on the brink of the next most significant scientific age – the nanotechnology revolution. Imagine a world that is no longer dominated by the persistent search for supplies and energy. Energy derived from the quantum scale, as pervasive and apparently as clean as the force of gravity itself, will be providing power for our needs. Factories and the control of capital forces will be obsolete. Nanobots will be creating whatever article is required for us from the periodic table, on demand and from the waste products of a previous age. Our water and air will be pure, rejuvenated by these same nano-processes that have recycled all the materials that previously fouled our planet. Product life cycles will essentially become almost organic – a virtual homeostasis will ensure that articles never wear out. And when we discard these items from boredom, the constituent elements will be cleverly recycled or used in something else, rather than piling up in toxic landfills. Since there will be no need of a medium of exchange, the need for currency and the propensity to hoard money will vanish from the human consciousness. Wealth and its attendant conspicuous consumption will vanish. We will no longer be referred to as “consumers” for there will be no more “suppliers” to profit from our devouring habits. We will no longer need to own property to pass on to our descendants, since there will be no need to accumulate wealth to survive. Health issues, and problems with genetic deformities will also benefit from this nanoutopian environment – most diseases and congenital problems will have passed from existence. We humans will have nothing to do but to pursue our real purpose in life.

But that is the problem.

Aside from occupying our time with the search for food, clothing and shelter, the majority of us humans seek entertainment, sleep and reproduce. If we suddenly found ourselves no longer distracted by the need to accumulate supplies and gather wood for fires, so to speak, there is not much more to do in the cave than to turn our attention to reproducing.

And that we would do with wild abandon.

The release of free energy and the presence of “machines” which provide us with molecularly assembled goods and services would see the earth blossom in a ‘pink-tide’ – a wave of human population blooming like pine trees in an Alabama spring. World population, already over six billion served, would double in a quarter generation. Normal healthy people just behave this way – it is perfectly natural. Without some kind of natural predation, our species will cover the globe. Energy and nutritional demands, along with disease, have served as constraints for the known history of the planet. Removing these limiting factors will have a natural and predictable outcome.

This is a possible explanation for two unrelated, but connected, topics of discussion. First, there is in some circles, a pervasive expectation that the “Illuminati” intend to reduce world population by about 80% and establish a New World Order, as advertised on the Dollar Bill. Secondly, many people who look into the subject of secrecy regarding the alleged governmental truth embargo on things extraterrestrial demand a release of technology and information that may be of value in human society by reducing suffering from things such as disease and starvation and the lack of affordable energy.

As we stand expectantly on the verge of this nano-revolution, and begin to understand the implication of being able to manipulate the basic elements of matter and life, we begin to see that there is a possibility of a simultaneous deployment of both of these elements of the future. While nanotechnology is a potential clean and environmentally friendly method of supplying human needs, it is also a very handy mechanism for the modification and/or elimination of objectionable life forms (80% of us). Combined with ‘free energy’, the supply of the needed accoutrements of life by nanobots will enable said Illuminati to live without any of us “useless eaters” and will prevent and assuage a gross overpopulation of the planet and its continued degradation.