Nano & Nature

Return to the Garden

Here's another way nanotechnology could help nature. We will build underground and reduce our need to occupy every square foot of the planet. Instead of skyscrapers that reach 3000 feet, why not bury them and contribute the surface to a local nature conservatory? Put transportation below ground as well. Turn the surface of the Earth into a sparsely settled, recreation area with forests, prairie, footpaths, lakes, coliseums and bike paths covering the land that now is paved with concrete and roadway.

It is certainly a long term goal. No one wants to live in a hole while their neighbor lives in a national forest. But there might be a high percentage of the population that would trade surface rights for a tax break. All factories, office buildings and warehouses should, in my view, be underground. With high resolution voice and video communication as common as telephone and email is today, we may find our living styles adapt quickly to a home and community tens of meters below the surface.

How does a nano robot dig a hole big enough in which to build a house? Since we are not in favor of self reproducing nanobots, we would need to create the mass quantity of robots sufficient to do the job on site. We would need an outdoor bot generation facility to actually build the enormous quantity of nanorobots required to build any structure large enough for human habitation. Probably something that is moved from one site to the next. This bot generation facility would probably be a mobile collection of large boxes that arrive on site after you call and set up an appointment.

Talk to it, verify your identity and give it the go-ahead. It's already knowledgeable of what you want it to do. It taps into a local power grid, runs off a fuel cell or else extrudes and erects a temporary solar collector depending on conditions at the site. The boxes contain enough intelligence to carry out the task, but are not what we would consider a person. The boxes couple, divide and generally put together all the systems needed to deliver material down into the hole and to extract the earth and rock from the hole. They brought one big block of carbon that is usually sufficient for a job of this size. They may need additional carbon on site. They need fuel to run the robots. They need to transport a few thousand tons of excavation material to a local fill location or load it onto surface transport to some other location. Assuming they can't tap into a local underground material transport tunnel. Should be one within a few hundred meters, but we might have to wait to build a spur line to make that connection if the building site is isolated.

If carbon material is not available as organic rubbish, you will probably have had a pile of carbon feedstock delivered to your site. Anything from organic waste to diamond grit. The digger systems will find it and, once it's original carbon is gone, eat the pile to create the umpteen trillion nanobots that are needed. Since the nanobots get recycled over and over, the job only requires a limited quantity of carbon.

Once the digger starts to dig, one object shaped like a big bass drum becomes the focus. The lower surface extrudes a thick liquid that sinks into the dirt below it. You can watch the drum sink into the ground dragging it's umbilicals behind it. The pipes pulse with material going in and coming out. The excess rock and dirt is extracted and the hole grows slowly.

Within two days, the hole is essentially excavated. The slick interior surface is a single mechanical unit with walls a meter thick and waterproof. The entire building stucture is crack proof up to a Modified Mercalli of XI. The building rides with the earth movement like any other rock embedded in the earth.

The interior is sculpted to provide essentials like floors, walls, plumbing, hardware attachment features, lighting pipes, and other unique features designed in long before the digger was on site.

The surface entrance may be the equivalent of a rest booth that blends into a grove of trees. You would need to be within 20 meters to know it was there. That depends on whether the building is part of a below ground community with transportation, and walking space close to the unit. If not, it may require access to a road as we do now. The surface installation might be more substantial and include a garage and other features of a house we have today.

I hope this short trip into the future paints an alluring picture. I'd love to breath clean, cold air with the smell of pine trees and honeysuckle vines. Living in a city, that never happens.

John

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