Abstract:
David Frenkel: The famous inventor Raymond Kurtzweil, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote last year in New Scientist: "Nanotechnology-based manufacturing will enable us to apply computerized techniques to automatically assemble complex products at the molecular level. This will mean that by the mid-2020s we will be able to meet our energy needs using very inexpensive nanotechnology-based solar panels that will capture the energy in 0.03 per cent of the sunlight that falls on the Earth, which is all we need to meet our projected energy needs in 2030."