References: NANOTECHNOLOGY Through nanotechnology, a strange metal that is extremely strong has been developed.Read about it here. -Nanotechnology Database: up-to-date sources of information on nanotechnology in the following areas: major research centers, funding agencies, major reports, and books. Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology - complete text of the book by K. Eric Drexler U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative - committed to long-term nano science and engineering research; synthesis, processing, and application of nano materials; and the exploration of nanodevice concepts.> Nanotechnology - provides a brief introduction to the core concepts of molecular nanotechnology, followed by links to further reading. What is Nanotechnology? - introduction to the nanometer-level technology. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, or 3-4 atoms, wide. From Nanotechnology Magazine

Nanotechnology Microtechnology is science done on the micron scale. A micron is a millionth of a meter.That is smaller than most of us can perceive. A micron is a thousandth of a millimeter.Our fingernail is about a millimeter in thickness. This is a very small measurement. And a nanometer is a thousandth of a micron; a billionth of a meter. The nanometer scale is the atomic scale. From “one side of the nanometer to the other there are only about three to five atoms . . . [and] atoms are the ultimate building blocks oflife.” Imagine the scientific and technological possibilities if we had the ability to craft material and life at the nanometer scale. If we could precisely piece atoms together at the nanometer scale we would have immense ability to control and alter the objects created or manipulated - the possibilities of precise creation at the nanometer scale are almost unbelievable. As R.E.Smalley explained at a presentation in Dallas in 1995: “The greatest example of [the power of nanotechnology] at present is in every living thing. It requires water to be around -the elixir of life- and I like to call it the ‘wet side of nanotechnology’ . . . This wet side of nanotechnology is incredibly powerful. In fact, the more you get to know about it, the more you are drawn in absolute awe. You think of how beautiful your daughter is, or a flower, or how incredible a human eye is that it can see, or a brain that can think. And then you think, this wet side of nanotechnology (what most people call biotechnology) can do anything.” But crafting on the wet side of nanotechnology (biotechnology) is extremely difficult, and has not been pursued for a variety of reasons: we do yet have the knowledge or the technology. Biotechnology has not been pursued as of yet, but dry technology has been manipulated by us for many years. With the industrial revolution, the development of dry technology, technology that can conduct electricity, has exploded. “[M]ost of the industrial revolution that led to our modern society is not a tribute to biotechnology. It's a tribute to the development of steam engines, and gasoline-powered motors, and all manner of electrical devices, including radios, telephones, TV's and computers -- all of which are technologies from the other side, the dry side. And increasingly I believe this is going to be an area of great development.”In the article linked above, R.E. Smalley gives a fascinating and frightening sketch of the technological advancement of humans over history, and maps out the implications ofmodern technology on the earth as a whole. He shows how the world’s recent rapid population growth is an extreme threat on the earth and that there will be some major changes in how we live and the state of where we live once the world’s population reaches 10 billion. And the world’s population will reach 10 billion before too long. “[S]ometime, about four to five hundred years ago, modern civilization started really taking off with the invention of the printing press” and other technologies that quickly followed. “As a direct result of these new technologies the population rose rapidly. By the time the of the second world war, we were at about two and half billion people on the planet. Amazingly, the population has now more than doubled just since the second worldwar. So, more than half this problem has happened during the living memories of either ourselves or of people in our families that are still alive. If all the population in North America, Europe, Eastern Europe, and Japan somehow disappeared, still we would have a tremendous population problem on the planet. Something is going to have to happen to change what has never happened before in the history of all civilization. This curve, this remorseless rise in population is going to have to stop.” So the question that Smalley is asking and each of us on the planet is asking is: “ "Can we sustain this? Can we have this planet with ten billion plus people on it, and have a stable world civilization, and give everybody -- every one of these ten billion people -- a reasonable lifestyle? " It's not obvious that we can. In fact, it is becoming fairly clear that we cannot - not with the current technology base.” Nanotechnology could be the technology to address this problem of survival in a worldwith such a rapid increase in population. In explaining the extent of the physical strain on the earth our new technologies exert, Smalley tells us: “The next question is what happens in the future-what can we predict? The trouble is we probably cannot predict very well in advance because the Earth is, as we say in technical circles, not a linear system . . . the Earth's climate is a sort of system that if you perturb it past a certain point, it will say "Okay,now I'm going to do something completely different." Well, what are we going to do about it? We have 6 billion people on this planet. Over two-thirds of these, roughly 4 billion people, live in undeveloped countries. And they are not going to go away unless there is some completely unprecedented holocaust, and we certainly don't want that. As the information age spreads within this undeveloped world, perceptions of vast imbalances in well-being will become vastly destabilizing. Currently 95% of all energy produced in the world is made one way or another by burning carbon, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If it is true that we're starting to see this signature of climate change already, we've got to stop this. Once it becomes clear that it's starting to have an effect, we aren't going to be able to suddenly fix it, because the length of time it takes for carbon dioxide to equilibrate with the oceans is estimated to be 100-200 years. "The effects on the atmosphere and the environment from fossil fuels are horrific when viewed on a historical timeline, and if we are to sustain the earth in the future we must come to use solar energy." Smalley explains why solar power is the only possibility for supplying energy to the world in the future in the second half of his article here.Could we provide for all the world's energy needs with solar power? The answer is clearly, Yes! It turns out that on a square of West Texas, 100 miles on a side, there is enough light coming down that if you can collect that and turn it into transportable energy at 10% efficiency, you could take care of our current little black dot, just 100 x 100 = 10,000square miles of Texas ( or maybe only 90,000 square miles of Arizona). So there's plenty of light coming down. Striking the earth every year there is over 10,000 times more solar energy than required to provide for the world's expected energy needs in 2050, the big black dot. In this super-efficient, low light level, solar energy converter of the future, down 'where the rubber meets the road', where that photon turns into stored energy, that's going to occur on a length scale less than the wavelength of the sunlight (about 400 to 1000 nanometers),and it's going to have to store the energy somehow: chemically, or as an electron going up into some sort of capacitor, or something like that. All this, intrinsically, is going to have to occur on the nanometer scale. It will be a nanotechnology. And we need it desperately. So it turns out that with such a solar nanotechnology you could create a solar power industry which could actually start solving some of these global environmental problems--itdoes have the muscles to address this energy issue world wide. We've got to learn how to build machines, materials, and devices with the ultimate finesse that life has always used: atom by atom, on the same nanometer scale as the machinery in living cells. But now we've got to learn how to extend this now to the dry world. We need to develop nanotechnology both on the wet and dry sides. We need it urgently to get through these next 50 years. It will be a challenge. But, I am confident we will succeed.”