3 December 2020 Ralph Merkle If we can reduce the cost and improve the quality of medical technology through advances in nanotechnology, we can more widely address the medical conditions that are prevalent and reduce the level of human suffering.
3 December 2020 Ralph Merkle If you look at the various strategies available for dealing with a new technology, sticking your head in the sand is not the most plausible strategy.
3 December 2020 Ralph Merkle Lighter computers and lighter sensors would let you have more function in a given weight, which is very important if you are launching things into space, and you have to pay by the pound to put things there.
3 December 2020 Ralph Merkle If you look at the human condition today, not everyone is well fed, has access to good medical care, or the physical basics that provide for a healthy and a happy life.
3 December 2020 Ralph Merkle We can grow crops less expensively because molecular manufacturing technology is inherently low cost.
3 December 2020 Ralph Merkle A molecular manufacturing technology will let us build molecular surgical tools, and those tools will, for the first time, let us directly address the problems at the very root level.
3 December 2020 Ralph Merkle Today we see a human population of over 6 billion people, many of whom have serious medical conditions, which either can’t be treated or cannot be treated economically.
3 December 2020 Ralph Merkle If you think the technology is infeasible, you don’t worry about what it might do and what its potential is.
3 December 2020 Ralph Merkle The laws of physics should allow us to arrange things molecule by molecule and even atom by atom, and at some point it was inevitable that we would develop a technology that would let us do this.
3 December 2020 Ralph Merkle Nanotechnology will let us build computers that are incredibly powerful. We’ll have more power in the volume of a sugar cube than exists in the entire world today.
3 December 2020 Ralph Merkle Many people in the world today are not starving because there is an inherent inability to produce food, they are starving because they are caught in the middle of political fights and blockades that have been used as weapons.
3 December 2020 Ralph Merkle Disease and ill health are caused largely by damage at the molecular and cellular level, yet today’s surgical tools are too large to deal with that kind of problem.
3 December 2020 Ralph Merkle Food is available, but it cannot be shipped into an area, so the people in that area suffer the consequences.
3 December 2020 Ralph Merkle If we attempt to block the development of new technology, we effectively have ensured that the most responsible parties will not develop them.
3 December 2020 Ralph Merkle Because of technological limits, there is a certain amount of food that we can produce per acre. If we were to have intensive greenhouse agriculture, we could have much higher production.
