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Therein lay the true power of this technology. Not only is everything that is learned preserved, that learning itself is put to work in learning how to replicate more and more complex objects, including food, chocolate especially. And with the replicators replicating themselves, the economic growth factor would be roughly equivalent to that of compound interest, but at a much, much faster growth rate than that offered by banks. The first replicators would be horrendously expensive. The next and the next and the next would drop in price quickly, becoming dirt cheap-literally. Think of the implications of Star Trek-type replicators being put to work in every American kitchen and garage! And not just in America.

Let's push our analysis even further. The impact of nanotechnology-especially when we get replicators-on human society will be overwhelming. "Revolutionary" has been so often overused and ill-used as a descriptor that it can't do justice to the utter transformation nanotechnology will bring to our everyday lives. Most of the work done in agricultural, industrial, and service-oriented economic sectors involves making copies, copies of plants and animals, consumer products, and reports. Any technology that can replicate things more quickly and cheaply than every technology we use today, not to mention doing so far more precisely and consistently than human effort alone could ever hope to achieve, and is itself replicable, is bound to have a profound impact on every human economic system existent, all of which having been based up to now on the allocation of scarce energy resources, raw material, machines, and labor.

Nanotechnology makes everything a resource and makes products literally dirt cheap or garbage cheap. The ultimate recycling system. Your garbage would no longer be garbage. It would become valuable feedstock for your nanotech vats. Don't throw it away! The same goes for your toilet effluent and your chimney emissions. The logic of nanotechnology will demand reuse of every atom, rather then dumping them unwanted in landfills, rivers, and the atmosphere. Just think of it as high-tech compost. Seen rightly, the Nanotechnology Revolution is an environmentalist's dream.

I predict that when nanotechnology reaches maturity, no existing economic system will survive in its present configuration-including the American economy. Individuals and families will be able to own their own production facilities and may, if they choose, return to subsistence living,

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