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Comment by bananasbandanas | Hacker News Reader

If you're interested in some fiction with this concept: In Neal Stephenson's 'Diamond Age' humans have mastered assembly of individual atoms in basically arbitrary ways. They use it (among other things) to create flying airships with an envelope made of diamond with a vacuum inside. Found it to be a fun read in general.

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I've really enjoyed several of Stephenson's books, but 'Diamond Age' was one I couldn't get into. I need to give it another shot.

On the subject of Sci-Fi, there's also a vacuum airship featured in one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels - 'Tarzan at the Earth's Core'. It is of course much less scientific than Stephenson's version though.

He really likes to drop readers in with minimal explanation into a world, he's gotten much better at it over time but Diamond Age is both one of his earlier works and one of his most esoteric worlds with the odd neo-Victorians etc.

That's always a fun blast from the tech hype past where nanotechnology was going to be pure magic with tiny machines capable of doing anything. That was an exciting possible future while it lasted, nanotechnology is doing neat stuff but it's nowhere close to the wild promises.

I too always thought the field of clatreonics (1) would be further along by now.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claytronics

Yeah we're starting to do that but the individual pieces are pretty large and I think we're much more level headed about how small they can be shrunk now.

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