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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tarchon" data-source="post: 1736602" data-attributes="member: 5990">Star Trek: the Next Generation regularly squeezed nanotechnology for juice.  "Nanites" came up a lot, and the Borg used "nanoprobes" pretty extensively in all the later series.A lot of what makes it into the popular media about nanotechnology is either complete sci fi or is fairly conventional microtechnology that replaces "micro" with "nano" in order to get media attention (and funding).  I did my PhD in nanoparticle detection, and I saw that quite a bit.  Our usual criterion for nanotech was to have design dimensions (CDs, for the semi folks) less than about 30 nm to seriously qualify as "nanoscale" (32 is roughly the square root of 1000, halfway between a micrometer and nanometer on a log scale - basically that's the decimal logarithmic rounding rule), though you can get by with 100 nm with a lot of hemming and hawing.  If you can demonstrate unusual scale-related quantum effects in the system, like with surface plasmon resonance, or reduced dimensionality, you get some nanocredibility, since that's really one of the key physical differences.More amusingly, in aerospace circles, it's common to refer to objects the size of a soda can as "nanosatellites."  Just get the latest issues of Analog or Isaac Asimov's Sci Fi and see what they're doing with it.One common misconception I've noticed is that people (at least Trek writers) tend to think of nanotechnology as being the same thing as self-replicating technology, which it isn't.  I really have a pretty hard time conceiving of independent self-replicating systems much smaller than 100 nm, and even nature hasn't been able to get below about 50 nm, if you exclude viruses, which need to use other organisms to reproduce.  I guess if you have carefully controlled environments, you can definitely get nanoscale self-organization (like micelles, for example) but little critters that go out and take over the Enterprise are probably at least in the micron range, even if a lot of their guts are nanoscale.</blockquote>

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