Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

Powering the Singularity 
We produce about 14 trillion (about 10
13
) watts of power today in the world. Of this energy about 33 percent comes 
from oil, 25 percent from coal, 20 percent from gas, 7 percent from nuclear fission reactors, 15 percent from biomass 
and hydroelectric sources, and only 0.5 percent from renewable solar, wind, and geothermal technologies.
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Most air 
pollution and significant contributions to water and other forms of pollution result from the extraction, transportation, 
processing, and uses of the 78 percent of our energy that comes from fossil fuels. The energy obtained from oil also 
contributes to geopolitical tensions, and there's the small matter of its $2 trillion per year price tag for all of this 
energy. Although the industrial-era energy sources that dominate energy production today will become more efficient 
with new nanotechnology-based methods of extraction, conversion, and transmission, it's the renewable category that 
will need to support the bulk of future energy growth. 
By 2030 the price-performance of computation and communication will increase by a factor of ten to one hundred 
million compared to today. Other technologies will also undergo enormous increases in capacity and efficiency. 

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Energy requirements will grow far more slowly than the capacity of technologies, however, because of greatly 
increased efficiencies in the use of energy, which I discuss below. A primary implication of the nanotechnology 
revolution is that physical technologies, such as manufacturing and energy, will become governed by the law of 
accelerating returns. All technologies will essentially become information technologies, including energy. 
Worldwide energy requirements have been estimated to double by 2030, far less than anticipated economic 
growth, let alone the expected growth in the capability of technology.
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The bulk of the additional energy needed is 
likely to come from new nanoscale solar, wind, and geothermal technologies. It's important to recognize that most 
energy sources today represent solar power in one form or another. 
Fossil fuels represent stored energy from the conversion of solar energy by animals and plants and related 
processes over millions of years (although the theory that fossil fuels originated from living organisms has recently 
been challenged). But the extraction of oil from high-grade oil wells is at a peak, and some experts believe we may 
have already passed that peak. It's clear, in any case, that we are rapidly depleting easily accessible fossil fuels. We do 
have far larger fossil-fuel resources that will require more sophisticated technologies to extract cleanly and efficiently 
(such as coal and shale oil), and they will be part of the future of energy. A billion-dollar demonstration plant called 
FutureGen, now being constructed, is expected to be the world's first zero-emissions energy plant based on fossil 
fuels.
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Rather than simply burn coal, as is done today, the 275-million-watt plant will convert the coal to a synthetic 
gas comprising hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which will then react with steam to produce discrete streams of 
hydrogen and carbon dioxide, which will be sequestered. The hydrogen can then be used in fuel cells or else converted 
into electricity and water. Key to the plant's design are new materials for membranes that separate hydrogen and 
carbon dioxide. 
Our primary focus, however, will be on the development of clean, renewable, distributed, and safe energy 
technologies made possible by nanotechnology. For the past several decades energy technologies have been on the 
slow slope of the industrial era S-curve (the late stage of a specific technology paradigm, when the capability slowly 
approaches an asymptote or limit). Although the nanotechnology revolution will require new energy resources, it will 
also introduce major new S-curves in every aspect of energy—production, storage, transmission, and utilization—by 
the 2020s. 
Let's deal with these energy requirements in reverse, starting with utilization. Because of nanotechnology's ability 
to manipulate matter and energy at the extremely fine scale of atoms and molecular fragments, the efficiency of using 
energy will be far greater, which will translate into lower energy requirements. Over the next several decades 
computing will make the transition to reversible computing. (See "The Limits of Computation" in chapter 3.) As I 
discussed, the primary energy need for computing with reversible logic gates is to correct occasional errors from 
quantum and thermal effects. As a result reversible computing has the potential to cut energy needs by as much as a 
factor of a billion, compared to nonreversible computing. Moreover, the logic gates and memory bits will be smaller, 
by at least a factor of ten in each dimension, reducing energy requirements by another thousand. Fully developed 
nanotechnology, therefore, will enable the energy requirements for each bit switch to be reduced by about a trillion. Of 
course, we'll be increasing the amount of computation by even more than this, but this substantially augmented energy 
efficiency will largely offset those increases. 
Manufacturing using molecular nanotechnology fabrication will also be far more energy efficient than 
contemporary manufacturing, which moves bulk materials from place to place in a relatively wasteful manner. 
Manufacturing today also devotes enormous energy resources to producing basic materials, such as steel. A typical 
nanofactory will be a tabletop device that can produce products ranging from computers to clothing. Larger products 
(such as vehicles, homes, and even additional nanofactories) will be produced as modular subsystems that larger 
robots can then assemble. Waste heat, which accounts for the primary energy requirement for nanomanufacturing, will 
be captured and recycled. 
The energy requirements for nanofactories are negligible. Drexler estimates that molecular manufacturing will be 
an energy generator rather than an energy consumer. According to Drexler, "A molecular manufacturing process can 
be driven by the chemical energy content of the feedstock materials, producing electrical energy as a by-product (if 

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only to reduce the heat dissipation burden)....Using typical organic feedstock, and assuming oxidation of surplus 
hydrogen, reasonably efficient molecular manufacturing processes are net energy producers."
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Products can be made from new nanotube-based and nanocomposite materials, avoiding the enormous energy 
used today to manufacture steel, titanium, and aluminum. Nanotechnology-based lighting will use small, cool, light-
emitting diodes, quantum dots, or other innovative light sources to replace hot, inefficient incandescent and fluorescent 
bulbs. 
Although the functionality and value of manufactured products will rise, product size will generally not increase 
(and in some cases, such as most electronics, products will get smaller). The higher value of manufactured goods will 
largely be the result of the expanding value of their information content. Although the roughly 50 percent deflation 
rate for information-based products and services will continue throughout this period, the amount of valuable 
information will increase at an even greater, more than offsetting pace. 
I discussed the law of accelerating returns as applied to the communication of information in chapter 2. The 
amount of information being communicated will continue to grow exponentially, but the efficiency of communication 
will grow almost as fast, so the energy requirements for communication will expand slowly. 
Transmission of energy will also be made far more efficient. A great deal of energy today is lost in transmission 
due to the heat created in power lines and inefficiencies in the transportation of fuel, which also represent a primary 
environmental assault. Smalley, despite his critique of molecular nanomanufacturing, has nevertheless been a strong 
advocate of new nanotechnology-based paradigms for creating and transmitting energy. He describes new power-
transmission lines based on carbon nanotubes woven into long wires that will be far stronger, lighter, and, most 
important, much more energy efficient than conventional copper ones.
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He also envisions using superconducting 
wires to replace aluminum and copper wires in electric motors to provide greater efficiency. Smalley's vision of a 
nanoenabled energy future includes a panoply of new nanotechnology-enabled capabilities:
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•
Photovoltaics: dropping the cost of solar panels by a factor of ten to one hundred. 
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Production of hydrogen: new technologies for efficiently producing hydrogen from water and sunlight. 
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Hydrogen storage: light, strong materials for storing hydrogen for fuel cells. 
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Fuel cells: dropping the cost of fuel cells by a factor of ten to one hundred. 
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Batteries and supercapacitors to store energy: improving energy storage densities by a factor of ten to one 
hundred. 
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Improving the efficiency of vehicles such as cars and planes through strong and light nanomaterials. 
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Strong, light nanomaterials for creating large-scale energy-harvesting systems in space, including on the moon. 
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Robots using nanoscale electronics with artificial intelligence to automatically produce energy-generating 
structures in space and on the moon. 
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New nanomaterial coatings to greatly reduce the cost of deep drilling. 
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Nanocatalysts to obtain greater energy yields from coal, at very high temperatures. 
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Nanofilters to capture the soot created from high-energy coal extraction. The soot is mostly carbon, which is a 
basic building block for most nanotechnology designs. 
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New materials to enable hot, dry rock geothermal-energy sources (converting the heat of the Earth's hot core into 
energy). 
Another option for energy transmission is wireless transmission by microwaves. This method would be especially 
well suited to efficiently beam energy created in space by giant solar panels (see below).
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The Millennium Project of 
the American Council for the United Nations University envisions microwave energy transmission as a key aspect of 
"a clean, abundant energy future."
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Energy storage today is highly centralized, which represents a key vulnerability in that liquid-natural-gas tanks 
and other storage facilities are subject to terrorist attacks, with potentially catastrophic effects. Oil trucks and ships are 
equally exposed. The emerging paradigm for energy storage will be fuel cells, which will ultimately be widely 

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distributed throughout our infrastructure, another example of the trend from inefficient and vulnerable centralized 
facilities to an efficient and stable distributed system. 
Hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells, with hydrogen provided by methanol and other safe forms of hydrogen-rich fuel, 
have made substantial progress in recent years. A small company in Massachusetts, Integrated Fuel Cell Technologies, 
has demonstrated a MEMS (Micro Electronic Mechanical System)-based fuel cell.
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Each postage-stamp-size device 
contains thousands of microscopic fuel cells and includes the fuel lines and electronic controls. NEC plans to introduce 
fuel cells based on nanotubes in the near future for notebook computers and other portable electronics.
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It claims its 
small power sources will run devices for up to forty hours at a time. Toshiba is also preparing fuel cells for portable 
electronic devices.
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Larger fuel cells for powering appliances, vehicles, and even homes are also making impressive advances. A 2004 
report by the U.S. Department of Energy concluded that nanobased technologies could facilitate every aspect of a 
hydrogen fuel cell-powered car.
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For example, hydrogen must be stored in strong but light tanks that can withstand 
very high pressure. Nanomaterials such as nanotubes and nanocomposites could provide the requisite material for such 
containers. The report envisions fuel cells that produce power twice as efficiently as gasoline-based engines, producing 
only water as waste. 
Many contemporary fuel-cell designs use methanol to provide hydrogen, which then combines with the oxygen in 
the air to produce water and energy. Methanol (wood alcohol), however, is difficult to handle, and introduces safety 
concerns because of its toxicity and flammability. Researchers from St. Louis University have demonstrated a stable 
fuel cell that uses ordinary ethanol (drinkable grain alcohol).
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This device employs an enzyme called dehydrogenase 
that removes hydrogen ions from alcohol, which subsequently react with the oxygen in the air to produce power. The 
cell apparently works with almost any form of drinkable alcohol. "We have run it on various types," reported Nick 
Akers, a graduate student who has worked on the project. "It didn't like carbonated beer and doesn't seem fond of 
wine, but any other works fine." 
Scientists at the University of Texas have developed a nanobot-size fuel cell that produces electricity directly from 
the glucose-oxygen reaction in human blood.
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Called a "vampire bot" by commentators, the cell produces electricity 
sufficient to power conventional electronics and could be used for future blood-borne nanobots. Japanese scientists 
pursuing a similar project estimated that their system had the theoretical potential to produce a peak of one hundred 
watts from the blood of one person, although implantable devices would use far less. (A newspaper in Sydney 
observed that the project provided a basis for the premise in the 
Matrix
movies of using humans as batteries.)
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Another approach to converting the abundant sugar found in the natural world into electricity has been 
demonstrated by Swades K. Chaudhuri and Derek R. Lovley at the University of Massachusetts. Their fuel cell, which 
incorporates actual microbes (the