X-Message-Number: 27246 Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2005 22:12:06 -0400 From: Francois <> Subject: Nanotechnology and fosil fuel replacement It has been pointed out often on Cryonet that the fossil fuels we currently use are running out. Sooner or later, we will have to develop alternatives or our civilization will revert to a pre-industrial state. Hydrogen powered fuel cells, gasoline made from coal, nuclear fission and fusion power, solar and wind power, all have been proposed as substitutes. All have advantages and drawbacks, but none are actually available in the short term. Switching from fossil fuels to these other fuels will also be very costly because they require distribution infrastructures very different from the ones we use right now. One exception to that is the coal derived fuel, but that would cause enormous problems of pollution and we would still run out of it in a relatively short time. There is one alternative that one could consider ideal, and that's ethanol. It is easily distributed through the existing infrastructure. It can power almost any device, from lawnmowers to rocket ships. It has low toxicity, is easily cleaned up in case of spills, has next to no environment cost and is not overly costly money wise. It also has the advantage of being indefinately renewable, at least in principle. It has one big drawback however, and it's the way it is currently manufactured. Ethanol is made by feeding sugar to yeast which ferment it into ethanol. That's how yeast gets the energy it needs to live, ethanol being the waste they reject after they process the sugar. Currently, that sugar is obtained directly from crops such as corn, or indirectly by breaking down waste cellulose. Either way, you have to dedicate farmland to growing these things, diverting it away from growing food. At the rate we consume energy, and considering how much that rate will increase when developing nations finally start catching up with the developped ones, I doubt there is enough farmland out there to handle growing both fuel and food. It occured to me that nanotechnology can provide a solution, a primitive form of it anyway. What we need are replicating assemblers programmed to make glucose from CO2, water and sunlight. We already have such devices, we call them bluegreen algae. These one celled organisms can replicate almost as fast as bacteria and can be grown in industrial settings. Using biotechnology techniques, or maybe even conventional selective breeding procedures, we could make a variety of bluegreen algae that produces more glucose than it needs and rejects the surplus in its environment, where ordinary yeast would pick it up and ferment in into ethanol. The efficiency of the process could be improved with time with those same selective breeding techniques. These organisms reproduce quickly and can therefore also evolve quickly. I'd say that within a decade of dedicated efforts, we could have ethanol factories capable of producing large quantity of the stuff, cleanly and virtually forever. Switching from fossil fuels to ethanol would then become a painless phasing out and phasing in operation. This is just an idea I'm throwing out there. I have neither the expertise nor the money to attempt to implement it, which is too bad because I smell a colossal fortune to be made from it. I do have some money to invest if someone else ever attempts it. Maybe someone reading this will be interested. At the very least, creating such a species of bluegreen algae would make a dandy research project for some university student. Maybe it's not all that relevant to cryonics, except that we do need the world of the future to have the capacity to revive cryonauts, and a reliable supply of high grade energy is a must for such a world to exist. Francois The Devil fears those who learn more than those who pray Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=27246