In the excellent book, "Nanofuture," by J. Storrs Hall, the author describes a possible future scenario where the United States and the West fall seriously behind China in nanotech development.
"It's 2015. In the United States, business as usual has been allowed to prevail. Interest in science has continued to decline. Virtually all the scientists and engineers our universities produce come from, and most return to, other countries. Funding for research is mostly for medical applications, and that is mired in political debates over stem cells and choked with red tape attempting to make it totally safe.
Meanwhile, China has pushed ahead on a broad range of fronts and has produced Stage III replicators. Products begin to appear from China that cannot be made economically anywhere else. No official notice is taken in the United States because our labs can still produce better stuff in expensive, one-off, form. The Chinese are accused of "dumping" and some nanotech products are banned.
China proceeds to stage IV and Western Technology begins to look distinctly second-rate. They are rumored to have engineering design supercomputers. The latest generation of Chinese jets and spacecraft have significantly better capabilities than ours and was designed and produced in half the time. The US military sounds an alarm.
The administration undertakes a crash program to demonize nanotech as "weapons of mass destruction" and get a UN resolution prohibiting it anywhere in the world. This stalls in debated and goes nowhere. The United States makes a unilateral ultimatum to China demanding a halt to all nanotechnology. China demurs, and announces that if attacked with nuclear weapons, it will release aerovores into the atmosphere."
I find this a very terrifying scenario, especially because of China's past track record and probable intentions for the future. Does the U.S. have a very good chance of falling behind technologically as shown in the scenario? And how do you think the Chinese government would use such technological/military superiority if they had it?
Best wishes,
John Grigg
