1. Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully.
2. Marry a man/woman you love to talk to As you get older, their conversational skills will be as important as any other.
3. Don’t believe all you hear, spend all you have or sleep all you want.
4. When you say, ‘I love you,’ mean it.
5. When you say, ‘I’m sorry,’ look the person in the eye.
6. Be engaged at least six months before you get married.
7. Believe in love at first sight.
8. Never laugh at anyone’s dreams. People who don’t have dreams
   don’t have much.
9. Love deeply and passionately. You might get hurt but it’s the only way to live life completely.
10. In disagreements, fight fairly. No name calling.
11. Don’t judge people by their relatives.
12. Talk slowly but think quickly.
13. When someone asks you a question you don’t want to answer,
    smile and ask, ‘Why do you want to know?’
14. Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
15. Say ‘bless you’ when you hear someone sneeze.
16. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
17. Remember the three R’s: Respect for self; Respect for
    others; and Responsibility for all your actions.
18. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
19. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
20. Smile when picking up the phone. The caller will hear it in your voice
21. Spend some time alone.

Technology is all about making things smaller, and to that end, right now they’re working on making the smallest things possible. Nanotechnology is the science of making robots that aren’t much bigger than a molecule, and there are lots of reasons for doing it, the biggest being because we fucking can.

Imagine sending a million microscopic machines into a person’s bloodstream programmed to attack a tumor, or shoot the AIDS virus with tiny little phasers. Imagine swarms of little cleaning droids mopping up the pollution in our rivers, or tiny manufacturing droids that can build anything we want, in seconds, molecule-by-molecule.

The big problem is, of course, how you actually build trillions of these little bastards. Simple: you teach them to replicate like cells, using materials from the environment.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

K. Eric Drexler, one of the founding fathers of the whole nanotechnology concept, came up with a number of spine-chillingly plausible doomsday scenarios. The problem is our nanobots would be like cellular terminators, much more advanced than any of the pansy-ass creations nature invented. They could out-compete organic life overnight, obliterating it in a frenzy of Darwinism.

Taken to its extreme, we have the scenario affectionately known as the gray goo problem, which speculates the machines would simply start replicating out of control until everything in existence is just a mass of tiny, scuttling robots, which scientists imagine would look like a pile of gray slop floating through the void.

So, Basically It’s Like…

Imagine you meet a magical leprechaun. For a bargain price, he offers to fix up the your house and add an extra room. So you take him home, and he proceeds to eat your house and shit out a hundred and forty more leprechans, which promptly murder you.

How Long Have We Got?

Scientists excitedly assure us that we will have a fully operational murderous death-swarm within twenty years, maybe even as soon as 2010. Right now they’re trying to build something called a fabricator, which from our reading is some kind of indestructible robot swarm-queen built out of diamond, who will give birth to trillions of nanomachines and command them to consume all in their path.

Risk Level: 10

Basically the only thing that will save us from getting transformed into globulets of grey goo in a few years will be if the Large Hadron Collider kills us first.