Levi Porter
13th October 2007 - 09:50 AM
Great looking future!
If real someday...when?
5 minute Nano Factory animation
Quantum_Conundrum
14th October 2007 - 04:19 AM
This is not really a new concept. It is basicly a replicator, made famous in Star Trek and other science fiction. It is plausible though.
Based on moore's law, the construction of the fictional hand held computer mentioned should be possible to the limits of uncertainty principle somewhere between 45 and 60 years from now. So that is somewhere between the year 2052 and 2067, and self assembly or nanotech like that mentioned in this presentation would obviously be required to construct such a computer.
In the past 5-10 years computers have actually been advancing faster than Moore's Law predicts, so that could bring the time sooner rather than later IF that trend continues. The introduction of spintronic computing and quantum computing should occur sometime between now and then as well.
A spintronic computer having processor, RAM, and secondary storage all being based on spin rather than magnetism, could have the exact same scale of chipset as the core 2 duo system on my desk, and yet it could have over 100 billion times the processing power and data storage capacity, depending on the application and data formating. As mentioned, this doesn't even account for minaturization.