Engines of Creation: The Coming Age of Nanotechnology

Drexler, Eric K. Engines of Creation: The Coming Age of Nanotechnology. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1987.

Listed in Samuelson's "On Extrapolation: A Supplementary Bibliography."

From the Wikipedia entry:

Engines of Creation [...] is a 1986 molecular nanotechnology book [...] with a foreword by Marvin Minsky. An updated version was released in 2007. The book has been translated into Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Chinese.[1]

The book features nanotechnology, which Richard Feynman had discussed in his 1959 speech "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." Drexler imagines a world where the entire Library of Congress can fit on a chip the size of a sugar cube and where universal assemblers, tiny machines that can build objects atom by atom, will be used for everything from medicinal robots [...] to environmental scrubbers that clear pollutants from the air. In the book, Drexler proposes the gray goo scenario — one prediction of what might happen if molecular nanotechnology were used to build uncontrollable self-replicating machines.

Topics also include hypertext [... and] space advocacy arguing that, because the universe is essentially infinite, life can escape the limits to growth defined by Earth.[2] 

RDE, completing, 25May19