If you can design proteins for specific reactions, problems like mining uranium from seawater suddenly become a lot easier. You can design a membrane protein that’s able to trap uranium atoms and then bring them into a cell.
You might even have different bacteria for mining different minerals from the water. You leave the bacteria for some time in the water and they take in a bunch of minerals. Then you let the water out through nanopores that don’t let the bacteria through. Then you use a centrifuge to sort the bacteria by the materials they contain, and put each one in their own tanks. Then you heat the bacteria up with destroys the cell walls and makes the materials you are after fluid. You centrifuge again and have your materials.
I expect bacteria to be used that switch from the 3-letter genetic code to a 5-letter genetic code where a single letter mutation doesn’t lead to another amino-acid being used to have a bacteria for tasks like the above that doesn’t just mutate away.
There will be a bunch of things that can be done that are hard to think about now because it’s very different technology then we are used to.
If you have concrete usecases for molecular nanotech I could tell you whether I think that they are doable with it.
If you can design proteins for specific reactions, problems like mining uranium from seawater suddenly become a lot easier. You can design a membrane protein that’s able to trap uranium atoms and then bring them into a cell.
You might even have different bacteria for mining different minerals from the water. You leave the bacteria for some time in the water and they take in a bunch of minerals. Then you let the water out through nanopores that don’t let the bacteria through. Then you use a centrifuge to sort the bacteria by the materials they contain, and put each one in their own tanks. Then you heat the bacteria up with destroys the cell walls and makes the materials you are after fluid. You centrifuge again and have your materials.
I expect bacteria to be used that switch from the 3-letter genetic code to a 5-letter genetic code where a single letter mutation doesn’t lead to another amino-acid being used to have a bacteria for tasks like the above that doesn’t just mutate away.
There will be a bunch of things that can be done that are hard to think about now because it’s very different technology then we are used to.
If you have concrete usecases for molecular nanotech I could tell you whether I think that they are doable with it.