It looks as though yields of over 10 times what we can currently grow per acre are feasible if you control the CO2 concentration, the humidity, the temperature, all the various factors that plants depend on to grow rapidly.
Because of technological limits, there is a certain amount of food that we can produce per acre. If we were to have intensive greenhouse agriculture, we could have much higher production.
We are looking at a future where to a first approximation, everyone is wealthy.
The first approximation in this future that we're looking at is that everyone will be physically well off. They will have a great abundance in material goods, and I think that will soften some of the conflicts we see now.
Manufacturing takes place in very large facilities. If you want to build a computer chip, you need a giant semiconductor fabrication facility. But nature can grow complex molecular machines using nothing more than a plant.
Today we see a human population of over 6 billion people, many of whom have serious medical conditions, which either can't be treated or cannot be treated economically.
The new technologies that we see coming will have major benefits that will greatly alleviate human suffering.
If we can reduce the cost and improve the quality of medical technology through advances in nanotechnology, we can more widely address the medical conditions that are prevalent and reduce the level of human suffering.
The laws of physics should allow us to arrange things molecule by molecule and even atom by atom, and at some point it was inevitable that we would develop a technology that would let us do this.
Nanotechnology will let us build computers that are incredibly powerful. We'll have more power in the volume of a sugar cube than exists in the entire world today.
Nanotechnology is an idea that most people simply didn't believe.
One of the issues facing us today is that there are countries where there is a serious lack of resources, the standards of living are very low, and this creates a fundamental unease and discomfort in entire populations.
