Engines of Creation: The Coming Age of Nanotechnology

Drexler, Eric K. Engines of Creation: The Coming Age of Nanotechnology. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1987.

Listed in Samuelson's "On Extrapolation: A Supplementary Bibliography."

From the Wikipedia entry: Engines of Creation [...] is a 1986 molecular nanotechnology book [...] with a foreword by Marvin Minsky. An updated version was released in 2007. The book has been translated into Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Chinese.

The book features nanotechnology, which Richard Feynman had discussed in his 1959 speech "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." Drexler imagines a world where the entire Library of Congress can fit on a chip the size of a sugar cube and where universal assemblers, tiny machines that can build objects atom by atom, will be used for everything from medicinal robots [...] to environmental scrubbers that clear pollutants from the air. In the book, Drexler proposes the gray goo scenario — one prediction of what might happen if molecular nanotechnology were used to build uncontrollable self-replicating machines.

Topics also include hypertext [... and] space advocacy arguing that, because the universe is essentially infinite, life can escape the limits to growth defined by Earth.

RDE, completing, 25May19