Nanotechnology

This method kindly suggested by Leslie Turriff.

Many of you with a familiarity with Star Trek or other sci-fi tales will know the premise of Nanotechnology: robots engineered on a microscopic or even molecular level. While this science is still very much in its infancy, its implications are truly revolutionary. Molecule-sized devices could theoretically be made to be self-replicating. Thus a few 'nano-bots' could become millions or billions of nano-bots, all carrying out their specific tasks at a molecular level, but in total, producing macro effects. Many uses in manufacturing and medicine have been proposed. A nano-bot programmed with the structure to make a toaster for instance, could be dropped into a quantity of some raw material. The 'bot would replicate and set about turning the raw material into a toaster: literally building it molecule by molecule. In medicine, it has been suggested that micro-miniature surgical devices could cruise along a patient's smallest blood vessels, eradicating diseases or cancers, repairing damage and breaking down clots. Present technology is years from this magical age: a nano-bot's programming would have to be rigorous and fool-proof, especially in medical applications: not the least of these problems is to make the nano-bot intelligent enough to know when to stop replicating itself. While the notorious Grey ooze Scenario (rampant nano-bots eating the world) may be something of an exaggeration, it wouldn't take much to endanger a patient's life: imagine the irony of a nano-bot that removes a fatal blood-clot, only to end up plugging the same artery with too many copies of itself! However, if the problems could be solved, here would be a radical way of transformation. Nano-bots could literally reconstruct a body from one form to another, providing they had the requisite information. Whether this would be a comfortable process or one in which the subject would have to be heavily dedated would have to be seen. The subject, if being rebuilt into a horse, would also need to either eat constantly or be intravenously fed with raw material for the nano-bots to build mass with. The easiest route would result in a horse that is equine cosmetically only: still genetically human. However, eventually nanotechnology might be be able to re-engineer DNA itself, and thus make a true equine.

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