Utility FOG Seminar Report

Abstract

Nanofog is a highly advanced nanotechnology, which the Technocratic Union has developed as the ultimate multi-purpose tool. It is a user-friendly, completely programmable collection of avogadro (6 x!023) numbers of nanomachines that can form a vast range of machinery, from wristwatches to spaceships. It can simulate any material from gas, liquid, and solid, and it can even be used in sufficient quantities to implement the ultimate in virtual reality. ITx researchers suggest that more complex applications could include uploading human minds into planet-sized collections of Utility Fog.

Introduction

Imagine a microscopic robot. It has a body about the size of a human cell and 12 arms sticking out in all directions. A bucketful of such robots might form a "robot crystal" by linking their arms up into a lattice structure. 

Rather than paint the walls, coat them with Utility Fog and they can be a different color every day, or act as a floor-to-ceiling TV. Indeed, make the entire wall of the Fog and you can change the floor plan of your house to suit the occasion. Make the floor of it and never gets dirty, looks like hardwood but feels like foam rubber, and extrudes furniture in any form you desire. Indeed, your whole domestic environment can be constructed from Utility Fog; it can form any object you want (except food) and whenever you don't want an object any more, the robots that formed it spread out and form part of the floor again.

Foglets In Detail

Foglets run on electricity, but they store hydrogen as an energy buffer. We pick hydrogen in part because it's almost certain to be a fuel of choice in the nanotech world, and thus we can be sure that the process of converting hydrogen and oxygen to water and energy, as well as the process of converting energy and water to hydrogen and oxygen, will be well understood.

Modes Of Operation

The Nano-constructs operate in two modes - "native", and "fog". In "native" mode, individual foglets move into different positions and perform certain mechanical operations depending on what object it is forming. For example, if it forms part of a table, then it would be motionless and locked. If the object was a fan, then most of the structure would remain locked, and only the foglets between the two parts would need to move. With a suit made of Fog, you might wrestle alligators, cheating a little by having the suit amplify your movements as it protects you from the alligator's teeth.

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of 

In the late twenty-first century, the "real" world will take on many of the characteristics of the virtual world through the means of nanotechnology "swarms." Consider, for example, Rutgers University computer scientist J. Starrs Hall's concept of "Utility Fog". Hall's conception starts with a little robot called a Foglet, which consists of a human-cell-sized device with twelve arms pointing in all directions. At the end of the arms are grippers so that the Foglets can grasp one another to form larger structures. These nanobots are intelligent and can merge their computational capacities with each other to create a distributed intelligence.