the MEM Meme

Technological expansion is a multi-dimensional cloud spreading in all directions. Not only through time, but forward and back, up and down, very large and very small. Very small as in Nanotech. Intrinsically, nanotechnology must be composed of something, that something is a type nanomechanics called MEMS.

Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) is the technology of the very small, and merges at the nanoscale into "Nanoelectromechanical" Systems (NEMS) and Nanotechnology.

MEMS are also referred to as micromechanics, micro machines, or Micro Systems Technology (MST). MEMS are separate and distinct from the hypothetical vision of Molecular nanotechnology or Molecular Electronics.

MEMS generally range in size from a micrometer (a millionth of a meter) to a millimeter (thousandth of a meter). At these size scales, the standard constructs of classical physics do not always hold true. Due to MEMS' large surface area to volume ratio, surface effects such as electrostatics and wetting dominate volume effects such as inertia or thermal mass.

But we can now go even one better than that. If MEMS are too large and cumbersome, we can drop down to NEMS.

So the future for human advancement then, appears to be very small.

From Wikipedia.