| Natural Nano-Tech Dave Dietzler A guy says to me one day,"Imagine something the size of a dime that you throw in the sand and it grows into a chemical factory that supplies construction materials and other products." He was thinking of some kind of nano-chip that could do all this. I really have doubts about such a silicon based chip, but there is something that could make this miracle happen-an acorn. The days will come on the Moon and Mars when we have domed cities with trees growing in them. When the leaves fall we will use them for mulch and possibly paper. We could do a little tree surgery and saw off branches and patch the cuts up with mud or plastic. This will cause other branches to grow even faster. The bark could be removed from the branches we cut off and used to make paper and then limb dried, sawed up and turned into real wood furnishings. The saw dust would go to the paper mill. Wood and paper will be expensive commodities on the Moon and Mars. Not everyone will be able to afford the luxury of these possessions, but that's life. Sugar maples will supply syrup and apple, cherry and peach trees will supply fruit as well as leaves that fall when we induce artificial autumns in the domes by turning down temperatures and closing the light shields early. Pines could supply rosin and fallen dry needles would go to the paper mill where all sorts of cellulose bearing plant and tree byproducts are used. We will cultivate low-THC industrial hemp and bamboo. Under tropical conditions bamboo can grow two inches per day. As for smokable hemp that will have to wait for changes in US law. Entire metal chambers could be filled with bamboo and when we want to harvest we will just hack into there with machetes made of lunar steel. Bamboo will be used to make furniture, blinds and can even serve as a painter's medium. Hemp can be used to make paper, canvas, cloth, wax candles, soap and many other products. It naturally repells weeds. Before domes of silica or aluminum oxynitride are built on the Moon we will build habitat within lava tubes. We can see them in rilles. Some are hundreds of meters wide. We will have to clear boulders from entrances and locate cracks and other openings and seal them with concrete. Since concrete can set underwater I see no reason it can't set in the vacuum if we are willing to sacrifice some water. The walls of the lava tube might be porous so we'd have to coat them with concrete. Shafts for light pipes would be dug into the tubes to provide sunlight with heliostats. Within lava tubes there will be trees and many other plants cultivated from amazing natural nano-devices, seeds. Nature supplies other nano-devices. Brewer's yeast for beer and wine. While some dream of a liter of nano-bots that can make anything they desire others slake all their desires with a liter of beer. Besides the universal medicine of alcohol, there are many other medicines that can be made by natural nanobots. Orange mold makes penicillin and it is possible to genetically program bacteria to make other medicines and chemicals too. And of course molds are necessary to make tasty though sometimes smelly cheeses like parmesan and romano. With artificial wombs it may be possible to grow livestock from embryos or just sperm and ova shipped up to the Moon in sealed test tubes. We must wonder; if biological science is this advanced, might it not be possible to just culture meat cells instead of raising livestock?? It depends on how much value there is to animal by-products besides meat like milk (therefore butter, cheese, yogurt and ice cream), leather, horn, bone, fur, wool, organic fertilizer (dung and urine), entrail meats, entrail livestock feed, dog and cat food, fat for cooking grease and soap, etc. Plants, livestock, yeast, molds, and bacteria are all self replicating too. Given the bounty of natural nano-tech supplied by Nature I wonder sometimes why man is trying to out do nature with silicon based devices. There are some wonderful nano-structured materials, nano-capsule delivered medicines, labs-on-a-chip, nano-digital circuits in the making or being made already, but I don't see much use for nano-bots to assemble a simple metal part that can be made by casting atom by atom when by nature the atoms crystallize on their own. Carbon 60 nano-fibers for absorbing hydrogen or helium without super cooling would be a welcomed technology on the Moon. Although free super cold is available on the Moon with Sun shielded space radiators, these won't be practical for volatiles scavenging robots. Hydrogen can be absorbed into metal powders and this is very compact but very heavy. If carbon nano-fibers can soak up hydrogen and helium without being too heavy this would be very beneficial. The possibility of room temperature superconducting carbon nano-fibers is intriguing also. |
 |