THE BIGGEST BREAKTHROUGH IS VERY SMALL INDEED
Mankind has taken its first tentative steps into the 21st century, peeking cautiously into the depths of imagination where the illusory veil of fiction meets the calculated precision of science. There is a breakthrough technology that modern knowledge, coupled with brilliant minds, has only just begun to explicate in the larger sense for practical application. Perhaps one of the most potentially useful inventions ever conceived has already permeated throughout our modern society, but the true power of nanotechnology has yet to be unlocked.
Nanotechnology is not a novel concept. The ancient Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus conjectured that if a piece of copper were halved continually, eventually the copper would no longer be divisible. This particle was defined as an atom. In 1959, Richard Feynman discussed the idea of working on the atomic scale during a lecture titled There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom. Feynman believed that, if materials could be manipulated on an atomic scale, more complex molecules and chemicals could be synthesized. He went on further to conjecture about building microscopic robots that could be ingested for medical purposes.
The possibility of surgical nanobots could restructure the way the medical community approaches healing the body. No longer will invasive procedures increase the risk of secondary, and sometimes lethal, infection – swallow a capsule of nanobots, and the microscopic units will work in tandem to defeat any foreign entities discovered in the body. Sporting the ability to inject powerful serums directly into cancerous cells, the therapy will circumvent debilitating side effects related to chemotherapy and radiation. Bones could be mended from the inside and hypothetically strengthened. Repairs could be made to neuronal connections, making once dead areas of the brain respond to stimuli – a resurrection of cerebral functionality....