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March 12, 2004 — Many cultures share a similar myth of a time when humans lived in pristine communion with their surroundings, each their own visions of Eden. But then, the stories go, humans transgressed against the laws of nature (or God) through attainment of knowledge. For this crime, humans were forever cast out of paradise.
The memory of what life was like before this evolutionary fluke of “knowledge” plagued mankind has survived within us only as a vague longing for Eden.
In the autumn of 2003, I found my Eden at the edge of the North American continent on a rough patch of coast called Big Sur. My favorite photograph from that trip was of beams of sunlight tossing foggy spears through the redwoods and onto our cabin, the rocks and the Big Sur River. Considering where I had been a few days before, Big Sur seemed to be sending me an obvious message.
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The previous few days spent near San Francisco with nanotech theorists invited by the Foresight Institute seemed almost sacrilegious when I sat on my river rock, wondering how these scientists, in their arrogance, could think they could take the water from this river and “improve” on it.
It was one of those “Eden” moments that was destined to be short-lived.
Hitting myself with a “60-Minutes”-style ambush interview, I made short work of my sentiment: Not all water is “pure,” whether from natural sea salt or manmade pollution. So, to “arrogantly” manipulate matter on the molecular level can also be to bring it back to an ideal state.
That out of the way, I took out my notes on Carlo Montemagno, a nanotech researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. But hold that thought. I’ll get back to Montemagno later.
Meanwhile, in another part of the world …
Israeli-Palestinian strife was escalating in a region where the quest for Eden had created just the opposite of paradise. But bubbling below the surface was one area of cooperation: protection of the region’s scarce water supply. “Palestinian and Israeli water and wastewater infrastructure is mostly intertwined,” one Palestinian official had said during the height of the uprising, and thus all water supplies were to be protected.
Israel’s technological advantage in water purification has given peace advocates some new hope. The chant of “land for peace” among the Israeli left is slowly giving way to “water for peace.” They hope that nanotech solutions to water desalination could produce a surplus of fresh water that could be shared with the Palestinians, or used as leverage in future negotiations.
One such old lefty is a guy who has been cast out of his share of Edens: former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.
Last year, Peres paid a visit to Uri Sagman, co-founder of C Sixty Inc. and the Canadian NanoBusiness Alliance. Sagman and Neil Gordon, who heads the alliance, attended the same high school in Montreal and now, with the visit of a world leader, they found a new sense of mission together.
Peres asked Sagman how Canada’s nanotech community could help. Sandia National Laboratories started a water technology roadmap a few years back, Gordon said, but made very little mention of nanotech. “It had some good points, and it was talking about clean water and cheap water and accessible water and so on, but it didn’t really connect the dots with new types of technologies that are coming on-stream, with new materials, new types of filtration systems, devices and everything that can be brought to the world through nano.”
Right now, the “Nanotechnology Clean Water Initiative” is “lining up universities, government labs, nanotech companies, as well as non-nano mainstream water companies to participate,” Gordon said.
When will an official launch announcement come? “I could only speculate,” Gordon said. “It’s so easy to start releasing things, when you have the Raelian community talking about cloning humans and so on. There are certain things that need to be done first before you go off and make certain claims.”
Speaking of the Raelian religious sect, I had last left us hanging from a Big Sur cliff following a Foresight conference. We’ll continue down that stream.
Carlo Montemagno makes molecular devices that contain “embedded intelligence,” each molecule working in tandem with another to produce a desired action. His first application? Yes. Water purification. “We use membranes incorporated with some molecules that selectively only transport water molecules through, and with very, very high efficiencies,” Montemagno said. “The end result is that projected performance is at least 100 times better, maybe 1,000 times better than the best … filters.”
Best of all, he said, the technology would enable water to be delivered “at a cost where Third World nations will be able to use it.”
Montemagno’s final comment remained in my mind as I climbed off my rock. “Think about making systems in which we hijack, and we engineer to our own devices, small subsets of all of the great wealth of things that living systems do to solve our needs,” Montemagno said. “That’s what I do.”
The road to Eden, it seems, is paved with knowledge of good and evil — and engineered molecules.