NANO...WHAT?

Yes, Nanotechnology is our third bad thing we have to consider after economic and environmental melt downs. With the trillion Euros flooding into the international banking system by European governments we’ll have a bit of a pause here, even though we can hardly hear ourselves think above the sucking noises this morning as that trillion is swilled up by other banks, investors, and lending institutions. And the 1% couldn’t care less that this trillion they’re swilling in the trough is actually the blood and tears and sweat of their people. Perhaps we should, in all decency, look away. Unsocialized people who are high on greed are a shameful spectacle. Let us look to the Occupy Vancouver people for inspiration.

I believe that the Occupy movement is the first wave of an upwelling of public discontent. This is such a strange time. We have increasing poverty and job loss but at the same time, great breakthroughs in scientific discoveries.
Like how to add extra genes to a Pacific salmon’s genome. And patent it for future commercial use. Kudos to our DFO for their help in creating artificial salmon. But the horrors of mangling fish genomes and patenting the process pales in significance compared to what nanotechnology has in store for us.

Just as our leaders in government and finance didn’t prepare us for the financial meltdown two years ago, they haven’t, and won’t prepare us for what lies ahead in the job sector. Mechanization and computerization has decimated jobs. The primary jobs for many young men in the future will be digging into the bowels of the earth for oil, gas, and minerals, or clear cutting forests for raw log export or building and staffing prisons. Or being a prisoner. When I was growing up young men who couldn’t find jobs could always join the army. Not so much now. Harper is cutting military personnel. It’s not just salmon who are getting rewired. So is the military.

Ordinary technology has already automated, mechanized or computerized everything a lot of private companies and public services can bear. But nanotechnology? That’s a whole new deal. You can see a computer. You can’t see a nanotech machine. They’re too tiny. They’re built from the bottom up by scientists who are learning to manipulate these tiniest of atomic particles to make all kinds of stuff. And some of the stuff you really don’t want made. Aside from probably killing off the rest of the jobs, even the resource extraction ones (but the prison industry will probably surge) this has the most direct, destructive, hellish applications imaginable. What is that? Or course, the military.

Specifically, the US military. They will have the military patents. Nanotechnology presents the perfect weapon for killing vast numbers of people. Undetected. The nano machines are much too tiny to be detected. Some foreign people raise a fuss about unmanned drones because they can see them. At least until the bombs are actually dropped. But by possessing nanotech military weapons that can’t be seen, even a very small group of people can possess the world. Maybe the same small group that posses the banks and lending institutions. The 1%. If anybody complained they would simply be vaporized. No mess, no bother. I think we all need to learn all we can about nanotechnology.