Blood Cells 2.0

Unlike many people fear that computers will overtake humans, Ray Kurzweil states that robots will merge with humans, robots the size of cells which can do the job way more efficient than our actual cells. An example on this are respirocytes; robots the size and functions of a red blood cell, but way more efficient (movie).

Respirocytes are able to store 1.51 billion oxygen molecules, 100% of which are accessible to the tissues. In contrast, our blood cells store about 1 billion of red blood cells and only 25% is accessible to the tissue. Replacing 10% of your actual red blood cells will enable you to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath or allows you to stay underwater for four hours.

In his TED-talk Kurzweil calls this 2020 technology. Many major steps have been made within the field of nanotechnology and Respirocytes are quite likely to be actually manufactured someday. Hence, we may anticipate some new doping scandals world records at the Olympics of 2020.

Related: Voyage of the bacteria bots, How biotech will drive our evolution, Craig Venter: catalyst of evolution, Build a better being.