What is utility fog ?
Utility fog is a concept of Dr. J. Storrs Hall, a nanotechnologist searching an alternative for seatbelts. Instead of a belt, he envisioned a cloud of small machines that interlock arms to save him from collision. Radically extending this concept, if we have a group of airborne robots, we could program them to imitate wide varieties of objects to perform many tasks, so it is called the utility fog.
Since the idea was brought up, utility fog has been a subject of many technical papers. Often design assumptions are about 100 micrometers in diameter with arms extending in all direction. It would require molecular manufacturing in creating this utility fog. It is a form of manufacturing skilled to design products to atomic precision.
Most likely, utility fog will be created out of covalently attached diamond, or carbon, it could be very strong, able to manifest durable objects. Then, they could dispense if they are no longer needed. Eventually, cities might ne created out of utility fog, where persistent structure is forgotten for buildings that morph to conform to the urgent needs of the inhabitants.
A human being carried by utility fog in midair can fly without any aerospace gear. A large quantity of utility fog could copy wide varieties of backgrounds by changing is optical properties and surface color accordingly. Although utility fog is like a far-future technology, it could really be possible in the next future however; molecular manufacturing would likely be required.
March 18th, 2009 at 7:31 am
One of the major things that holds back human progress is the way that
mediocrity rewards itself for blocking
a meritocracy and everyone now has to pay the price for that with a major economic recession before any progress
can be made