Nanotechnology

Like most things in nanotech, assemblers are a big topic. Is an assembler even possible? What do we need to do to develop them? Who is working on them? When will we have them? And what will we be able to do with them? That's too many questions for one essay; I'll focus on the technology required to build one, and by extension, the schedule we might see. The point of this essay, as the …

…be produced in less than ten years; likely in fifteen; and almost certainly within thirty years. There are several motivations--military, economic, and political--for developing such a system, and even today there are several nations that could support an early assembler program. The basic required technologies exist today; within ten years they will be mature and usable by a relatively small commercial project. Military, and later commercial, competition will ensure that the assembler is developed rapidly.