Oh, of course. Nanomachines. So basically we should celebrate this contemporary not-really-an-innovation because some future speculative innovation might make

Oh, of course. Nanomachines. So basically we should celebrate this contemporary not-really-an-innovation because some future speculative innovation might make it useful... and ignore the fact that it's much more likely that the future speculative innovation would make it entirely redundant. I love it that your future sees us pulling CO2 directly from the atmosphere with nanomachines, but still driving around in cars that run on blocks of aluminium taken from aluminium oxide through smelting. If I use your logic then I can just say "There's no issue with everyone running their cars on diesel". After all, one day we'll have nanomachines which can pull the soot, sulphur dioxide, CO2 and water vapour from the atmosphere and convert it all back into diesel again for a squeaky clean closed loop system running off the clean energy technology I have also implemented at massive scale. I don't know why we're even bothering with clean diesel. Or any pollution controls at all for that matter. Nanomachines will sort that right out! How're they coming along by the way? Oh, they're not ready? In the meantime then we should probably stick with assessing merit based on near term available technology, rather than saying "this thing is great, because I will solve all the things you don't like about it with my nanotech magic wand which I'm sure I'll have access to on a suitable timeframe".