The Telenanopresence Manifesto

Imagine being able to shrink and grow at will and operate as a human being across different scales. Then take this old movie idea and combine it with the emerging technology of telepresence. What you get is the ability of being present, and interact with your surroundings, in a distant location, in a different spatial scale. Realising a telepresence robot in the 1-meter scale is within our grasp, with many such machines being built around the world. What we want to propose here is that Telenanopresence technology, i.e. the ability to make telepresence robots in all different spatial scales, with a focus in the milli-micro scale, will be crucial for the miniaturisation of many industrial processes, and surely a fantastic way for exploring our creativity in the microcosmos. Feynman, in his seminal talk “There’s plenty of room at the bottom” [1] exposed the world to the reality of the vast difference in scale between the atoms and us, and how much space for innovation exists in between. He proposed the beautiful idea of recursively exploring this scale-space, by designing and operating a set of tools that is able to make the same set of tools but all somewhat smaller. By this process he wanted to make humanity able, in the end, to manipulate individual atoms, and by combining our fabrication ability across all scales in between, make us master fabricators. It is our contention that his dream was not followed in earnest in the decades since. Marvelous microfabrication techniques like photolithography are changing the world around us but have made shortcuts to the microcosmos that do not allow for the creativity of everyday humans to unfold in each scale in between.