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MONTREAL — Aug. 28, 2002 — Nanotech guru Richard Smalley is working on a new challenge — his biggest one yet.
And he traveled Monday to Montreal to test it in front of an audience of aerospace scientists gathered at a former fortress that happens to sit in the shadow of a large geodesic dome. Smalley, of course, won a Nobel Prize for work on a rather small one called C-60, the novel carbon also known as Buckminsterfullerene in honor of Buckminster Fuller, who invented the geodesic dome.
With his trademark flourish of science lecture laced with references to poetry and philosophy, Smalley told the audience of roughly 100 researchers attending the CANEUS Canada-Europe-U.S.-Asia workshop on the aerospace applications of nano- and microtechnologies that he aims to prove that nanotech can help save the world.
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And he set about making the case that nanotechnologists, believe it or not, are thinking too small.
When he asked the audience of scientists to name the “most impossible problems facing us,” they came up with: energy, water, selfishness, population, pollution, climate change, food, religion, wealth imbalance, health and war.
“Other than religion, and well, maybe selfishness,” he said, “I think nanotech will play a role in providing the answers to these seemingly impossible problems that we all agree are soon going to be our children’s problems. My idea is that if you solve the energy question, you’ll solve a lot of those other problems in the process.”
Smalley has been formulating this theory that nanotech can save the world over the past several months, most recently in testimony at a congressional hearing on the future direction of the U.S. Department of Energy.
Smalley’s opening statement in the congressional hearing put Monday night’s talk into context: “I will get right to the point. Energy is the single most important problem facing humanity today. We must find an alternative to oil. We need to somehow provide clean, abundant, low-cost energy throughout the world to the 6 billion people that live on the planet today, and the 10+ billion that are expected by the middle of this century. The cheaper, cleaner, and more universally available this new energy technology is, the better we will be able to avoid human suffering, and the major upheavals of war and terrorism.”
Smalley is not the first one to suggest that it’s high time for humankind to find an alternative to fossil fuels, which now account for nearly three-quarters of the world’s energy consumption. Likewise, boosters have long predicted that at the very least nanotechnology, specifically nanotech-enhanced improvements to prosaic things like catalysis and filtration, can help improve the efficiency of the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, and reduce harmful byproducts like carbon dioxide theoretically by orders of magnitude over existing technologies.
What Smalley is pondering, however, is the day when nanotechnology flat out comes up with a practical alternative that makes fossil fuels a moot point. He is not talking about hydro or wind power (too location-specific). Nor is he talking about nuclear power. “There isn’t enough uranium to replace fossil fuels,” he said.
His alternative? Energy from the sun and the Earth’s core. “I don’t know how it would work yet,” he said. “And I don’t know if it will make anybody rich and I don’t want applause, I just want to know if there is a life force to this argument. I think there is.”
There certainly was force to it Monday night — not enough to solve the immense technical challenges of harvesting the immense heat trapped at the Earth’s core and blasted out into space every nanosecond from the surface of the sun, but therein lies Smalley’s mission.
Tim Harper, chief executive of the nanotech information service CMP Cientifica, said no doubt about it: “Once again, Smalley is onto something. This is the kind of thing that can really focus our efforts.”
But will it be enough to curry the necessary funding at a time when government science budgets and capital markets are already stretched thin? And, as one conference participant said to another: “Smalley’s idea would change everything. I’m quite sure for the better, but his president likes oil and his vice president isn’t too keen on alternatives. Let’s hope for the rest of the world’s sake that those two are thinking about the problems our children will face if they don’t at least find the courage to test Rick’s theory.”