Re:What We Get Wrong About Technology
by tachyonbeam on Wednesday August 30, 2017 @09:40AM
(#15132040)
And even if we did have atom-precise manufacturing. This could enable say, the construction of nanobots, and these could possibly be used to perform surgery or cure cancer, but making nanobots that cure cancer, even if you already have nanobots, is probably more challenging than the Apollo moon mission (how do you control a swarm of tiny spaceships to make them do useful things inside a human body?). The possibilities (and challenges) are endless.
I don't know whether there is more basic science to be discovered, but even if there isn't, there is plenty of technology to be invented within the scope of existing science. Atomically precise manufacturing, for example: we know about atoms, but our ability to work with them is still crude in the extreme.