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

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