The Big Problems with Nanotechnology

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Hello mortals. Nanotechnology that is one of the five main pillars of science fiction that shaped our expectations for what the future would bring. Alongside it, I would put artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, and space travel.

[00:00:15]AI is making progress by the minute as we speak, and robots are soon to follow.

[00:00:21]For gene editing, we've got crisper therapies as well as upgraded crops that will withstand our screwed up climate in the future.

[00:00:28]Space travel also looks promising with plans of permanent lunar bases and Mars landings in the next couple of years.

[00:00:35]Overall, we hear about solid progress towards each pillar except for one technology at the nano scale. Also, can someone please change the music? Thank you. We have a very good definition for what that scale is. 1 to 100 nanome or 100,000 times smaller than the width of your hair. And what if I told you that once humanity conquers the nanospace, there are two more even smaller pillars that await to be reached by the homminid ingenuity. Pico technology, the manipulation of the atomic level, and phento technology, the world of the subatomic.

[00:01:10]But first, let's see where we stand as of now. When we say nanotechnology, we can refer to two different visions of it. The one of the nerdy coat wearers and the one of the nerdy non-coat wearers. If you ask scientists, nanotechnology is already here and very wellestablished, influencing every part of your life. The early 2000s is when commercial semiconductor processes moved below 100 nanome, literally becoming nanocale tech. At the moment, the transistor processes are at a scale of 2 nanome. That is, however, pure marketing tactics. The same way you'd wear height boosting shoes to stand taller on the self-defined dominance hierarchy.

[00:01:52]A two nanometer TSMC process for transistors corresponds to a physical gate length of about 12 nanome instead.

[00:02:01]But that's irrelevant. What matters is that your phone and computers all work thanks to nanotechnology.

[00:02:07]And so does your modern expensive sunscreen.

[00:02:10]If it's thin and invisible after you've put it on, it likely uses zinc oxide and titanium dioxide molecules which are in the nano range. Else, if it's that greasy, thick paste your parents rubbed on you at the beach against your will, we likely aren't talking nanotechnology.

[00:02:26]But that's not what we mean when we say nanotech. We want microscopic swarms of robots traveling through our body and killing all the cancer cells while giving us physical immortality and simultaneously stimulating the opioid receptors in the human brain to simulate the heroin high but without the withdrawal. I am sad to announce that we are not yet at that technological level, but we've made incredible progress that's gone mostly under the radar for the past decade. The second largest use of modern nanotechnology, second only to transistors, is mRNA vaccines. If you took the COVID shot, you experienced it.

[00:03:02]Scientists sequenced the viral genetic data, identified the part that would train your body to fight it, and encapsulated it in a shell of lipid nano particles called LNPs.

[00:03:12]Normally, mRNA quickly dies in the human body due to its fragility. But LNPs act as a useful Trojan horse that lets the instructions enter the cells without issues. Now, can that be used in the future to manufacture biological weapons?

[00:03:28]That's thankfully a problem for future us to deal with. Biological nanoweapons could become incredibly deadly and dangerous, but they will never be as cool as the 2500 tanks, planes, helicopters, and ships that you can command in our today's sponsor, War Thunder, the most comprehensive vehicle combat game ever made. Available for free on all the big platforms and now also mobile. If on top of being a science nerd, you also dabble in history, you'll appreciate manning the 1920s biplanes and armored cars all the way to today's fighter jets and main battle tanks that are part of the game spanning 10 major nations. Join over 95 million players in experiencing one of the most advanced damage systems in gaming. With every vehicle carefully detailed down to its engines, weapons, and crew, get that dopamine hit each time. The X-ray view shows you exactly where your shell pierced the enemy and what components are destroyed inside. Or enjoy a cortisol spike if you were the one that got penetrated. But guess what?

[00:04:28]You can now play War Thunder on the go thanks to the allnew mobile version on iOS and Android. It's your own personal pocket tank. Sign up on PC and consoles using the links in the pinned comment or video description and get a massive bonus pack as well, including the exclusive vehicle decorator, Eagle of Valor, 100,000 Silver Lions, and 7 days of premium account access. This bonus is available for a limited time only, so don't miss out. Download War Thunder today and experience modern combat, at least until nanotechnology changes the battle landscape. Speaking of nano, in order to create true sci-fi like self-propelling nanobots that travel through your bloodstream, we have to overcome three main hurdles. The first one is called the honey problem. At microscopic scales, fluids that to us behave normally, such as water, start feeling very viscous. The smaller you shrink, the harder it is to traverse liquids. For a nanobot trying to move through, your blood would feel like cold honey that hates technology. trying to move through that using reciprocal motion would be useless. The nanobot would simply be stuck in place like you running in a nightmare. That's why instead of reinventing the wheel, we should just take a look at what evolution already did, such as the bacterial fleella or corkcrews, which operate on non-rescrocal motion.

[00:05:51]The second big navigation hurdle is brownie in motion. Try walking in a straight line blindfolded during a category 5 hurricane after a bottle of vodka. At scales of under 100 nanometers, molecules move around erratically and would hit our nanobot from every direction, resulting in a seemingly random movement pattern that we couldn't control. So instead of controlling one bot, we send swarms of millions and then let statistical probability do its job of reaching the intended cells. The last big issue with navigating your bloodstream is its intensity. In the major arteries, your blood moves at almost half a meter/s.

[00:06:28]And for about a few microns long, it would be like the aforementioned you blindfolded and a vodka bottle deep trying to navigate a tsunami wave by swimming. The only current realistic solution is to keep them in a passive state while navigating the arteries and only activating them once they reach the capillaries with much gentler flow speeds. All in all, we're yet to achieve such active propulsion at the nanocale, but we're making progress. take nanobots therapeutics from France which coated the nanobots with enzymes that react with chemicals in the body like ura in the bladder resulting in propulsion.

[00:07:03]They designed them to target bladder and colon cancer and in early 2026 their nanowarms achieved a 90% tumor reduction success in mice with human trials soon to come. Bionaut Labs from the US uses a magnetically driven approach by guiding the nanobots to the cancer spot using an outside magnetic device with their primary focus being brain cancer. They are as well currently in human clinical trials. But even then, these are fairly specialized nanobots with one singular purpose as opposed to our sci-fi idea of intelligent swarms that can play Lego with your internal organs.

[00:07:44]And that leads us to our biggest nano hurdle. To give our nanobot a brain, we'd need to give it a functioning processor. A processor usually requires billions of transistors, each with a size of around 20 nanome. A 500 nanome sized bot simply cannot fit that. That math is not mathing. At most, we can onboard a few dozen transistors, barely enough to create a couple of logic gates. That won't autonomously keep you immortal. But good thing we can use DNA strands as logic gates instead. A biological computer, while slower, could at least make the nanobot follow simple if then instructions, which would be controlled and processed by a proper outside computer to communicate with that external computer. However, you'd need antennas. And guess what? At the nanocale, those would need to be hundreds of times larger than the bots themselves.

[00:08:38]So we either include big antenna bots in the swarm that act as commanders of the swarm or use graphine transceivers that operate in the terraertz range which however have a very limited range. The problems keep on coming and they don't stop coming. Good thing we have super intelligent AI coming soon to save the world and solve all these issues.

[00:09:04]Let's imagine that we've solved nanotechnology.

[00:09:07]Great. Finish your celebratory nano margarita and let's go even deeper.

[00:09:11]About 1,000 times deeper. Pico technology, the land of the atomic.

[00:09:17]Here we get to play around with individual atoms, manipulating their electron shell. We already do that with the outer electron orbit known as the valance using techniques like atomic force microscopy.

[00:09:30]Piccote Tech, however, would allow us to manipulate inner shell electrons, potentially creating impossible chemical bonds or elements with entirely new properties, like a metal that is transparent or a gas that is as heavy as my existential desire to return to the eternal slumber. We could also use the energy levels of internal electrons as bits of data, creating SSDs billions of times more dense. But why stop here? Now that we've broken the pico scale, let's venture 1,000 times deeper again onto the land of femtochnology.

[00:10:01]At this point, we don't play around with atoms or their electron orbitals, but instead we manipulate atomic nuclei themselves. If an atom is scaled up to the size of a baseball stadium, the nucleus wouldn't be bigger than a baseball. So if conquering nanotechnology would require us to reach around a type 1 Kardashev civilization, phento technology might not happen till type two or beyond.

[00:10:24]Sci-fi nanobots might need 10 electron volts to break a simple chemical bond from a molecule. That's doable. But to break up the strong nuclear bond between protons and neutrons, we'd need millions of times as much. With proper mastery over the strong nuclear force, we could theoretically turn lead into gold or toxic nuclear waste into harmless helium by simply adding or removing protons and neutrons at will. There could be phento batteries made up of nuclei in excited states that hold massive amounts of energy which could power entire cities for months while being the size of rice grains.

[00:11:01]Or maybe, just maybe, Fento technology would allow us to create the element zero, also known as neutroneum, a substance made purely of neutrons, the thing that makes up neutron stars. A single cubic centimeter of this phento structure would weigh millions of tons, but would be practically indestructible, easily allowing for razor thin space elevators or unbreakable spaceships. But as crazy exciting as these discoveries sound, so crazy difficult are the hurdles to achieving them. Remember the one mega electron volt required to break the strong nuclear force and model the nucleus. Turns out you will first vaporize the atoms of the tool that you are using before you touch the nucleus.

[00:11:40]You could use a large hydron collider if you're patient at manipulating one subatomic particle at a time. But even then you bump into the problem of quarks suffering from abandonment issues. The strong force acts like a rubber band.

[00:11:53]The further you pull two quarks apart, the more energy builds up in the glue and field holding them together.

[00:11:59]Eventually, the band snaps and that stored energy instantly creates a new quark anti-quark pair. You can never hold a lone quark. And even if you somehow found a workaround, you're still bound to encounter the final boss of phento physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Here, we aren't talking about some limitation of our measurements or tech. This is instead a limit imposed by the universe angry at us for going where we aren't really supposed to. At a fundamental level, the more you pin down the position of a subatomic particle, the less certain its momentum becomes and vice versa.

[00:12:35]So now if we want to manipulate a single nucleon at the scale of about one phentoter or in other words very close to zero, the momentum uncertainty will inversely swing up close to infinity.

[00:12:47]that will result in the pinpointed particle vibrating and oscillating harder than the Bitcoin charts when you think of buying. And again, that's not just something we can work around once we become a type 2 or type three civilization. For all we know, that's a hard boundary imposed by physics. FTO technology might be humanity's unattainable frontier.

[00:13:08]But one century ago, humans were also certain that airplanes were 10 million years away from being developed.

[00:13:15]Now, I'm not saying that we shall conquer any scientific issue that we are yet to face. There might not be any solutions to faster than light travel. A reason why we don't see galactic alien empires might be because every civilization simply cannot efficiently expand between the stars and never will.

[00:13:32]Same for futuristic nanotechnology. It's possible that dealing with all the hurdles associated with it is simply not feasible ever. But given humanity's track record for scientific development, I'd say that there is an equally probable, if not more likely, possibility that we are just at the start of the cosmic puzzle assembly process. With each new fitting piece uncovering even more potential for discovery, both outwards into the stars and inwards into the subatomic and also sideways into modern vehicle combat with War Thunder. Use the links in the pinned comment or description to grab your massive bonus pack for PC and consoles, including the 7 days of premium account and other goodies available for a limited time only. So, make sure not to miss it.