We have the technology
Most aircraft design schemes call for advances on wing and fuselage shapes pioneered in today’s stealth aircraft. Some futurists envision aircraft without wings that maneuver by thrusters mounted in the fuselage. Others see radical revisions of old designs, like updates to biplane wing construction and advanced helicopter mechanics.
Whatever the case, most futurists are drawing on existing technology to project future aircraft. John Peterson, president of The Arlington Group, a Virginia-based aviation think tank, sees a future when tiny robots build aircraft in seconds using a vat of goo and nanotechnology.
“ Instead of making things from the top down,” Peterson said, “there’s a good chance we will make things from the bottom up.”
Essentially, Peterson sees a time when tiny robots roughly the size of a molecule with sensors, computer code and an articulated arm, reproduce themselves by the billions in fractions of a second.
“ For a given project, one of those tiny machines would be built and loaded with the very complex computer code that describes the material, shape, finish and other characteristics of the final product,” he said. “Then that first machine would make another of itself, the two make four and so on. In seconds, you would have literally billions of the machines.”
Then the machines would begin working on whatever project has been encoded in their computer code. Imagine a vat slightly larger than the average fighter jet. Technicians pump in a slurry of materials, organic compounds and other elements needed in aircraft production, but in liquid form. Now someone adds a single nanotech machine. Less than one minute later, a new fighter aircraft, built entirely from the elements in the slurry and by billions of tiny machines, stands in the vat.
Fantastic? Sure. Possible? Peterson thinks so.
“ The significance of this possible revolution cannot be overestimated,” he said. “When the very essence — the atomic configuration — of materials can be determined, an extraordinary (array) of possibilities opens up in many areas.”
