According to researchers this is just one of the more imaginative future possibilities which may not be far around the corner. Then you may be surprised to know that nanotechnology is already with us in the manufacture of things as mundane as spectacle lenses and car brake pads. Scientists are already making surfaces which are smooth to nanometre proportions. We already need this kind of precision to build computer chips. A nanometre is just one billionth of a metre.
Nanotechnology is small scale engineering at the extreme.
If we were all shrunk down to a nanometre in size and were strolling around on the average table top we would be walking through canyons over twenty Mount Everests deep. Nanotechnologists work at the scale of individual atoms, building and designing structures and machines just a few tens of nanometres is size. Although the word nanotechnology is relatively new in itself the ideas behind it have been around for some time. Scientists in many different fields have for decades been carrying out work on the nanometre scale and it is only recently that the umbrella term of nanotechnology has been coined to describe their work. The world was first introduced to the idea of nanotechnology over thirty years ago by Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman.