So I know that I haven’t been posting anything programming related for a while, and that’s mostly because I’ve been working on boring projects, so instead you get a random thought.

So anyway, It occurred to me that with the coming widespread use of nanotechnology to create and replicate things that the value of the original item for being an original is moot. For example if you can use nanotechnology to recreate a famous painting atom by atom then the original painting cannot be differentiated from the copies. they would be in essence perfect copies. More so, since you are creating the copy atom by atom then you can also defeat methods such as carbon dating, which works be determining the proportion of carbon isotopes to each other in a sample. However if your building something from individual atoms you can control this ration by doping the construction materials with the appropriate levels of isotopes. At that point every crack in the painting (craquelure), the carbon dating age and the appearance of the copy would be the exact same. and since the copy and the original are Identical to each other down to the atomic makeup there would be no way to tell them apart. thus nanotechnology will destroy the antiquities market by making it impossible to determine if what your paying millions for is an original Rembrandt or merely a nanoforged copy…