Nanobots For You

500 trillion nanobots might replace your blood in the future

Tuesday, September 16, 2003

Ever thought about holding your breath and swimming under water for hours at a stretch like a whale? Or sprinting like a cheetah for 12 minutes, without breathing even once!

It's no Sci-fi movie script or dream. The concept is very much real and might come true some day in the future. Scripted by scientists, Robert A Freitas and Christopher J Phoenix, it involves changing the very essence of life-replacing the blood coursing through your arteries and veins with over 500 trillion oxygen and nutrients carrying nanobots. The vasculoid system as it is called will just about duplicate every function of blood, albeit more efficiently.

Respirocytes, for example, are just one type of the nanobots that will make up this artificial blood. Freitas envisages respirocytes to be made up of 18 billion structural atoms that are precisely arranged to the last atom. Each respirocyte will have a tiny onboard computer, powerplant and molecular pumps and storage hulls that can transport molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

The bots will be a thousand times more efficient than the RBCs they seek to replace. Agreed this nano-robotic blood will be more than a little time in the making. But who knows, one day it could very well change the course of human evolution.

Benoy George Thomas

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