Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley
 Scientists at HP have been working in nanotech for the last 13 years |
The man leading this ambitious project is Dr Stan Williams who runs HP's Information and Quantum Systems Laboratory.
"The motivation for this work is realising and understanding the planet is sick and the disease is us," he told BBC News.
"As information technology people, we are not going to be the ones who proscribe and administer the cure but we should be the people who provide the information required to do proper diagnosis and treatment."
Unprecedented
And just as a doctor would use a barrage of tests to find out what ails a patient, so Dr Williams believes he and HP can do the same in finding out what is going wrong with our environment and offering solutions to problems before they turn into disasters.
Dr Williams suggested that, instead of wielding a stethoscope, HP would use trillions of sensors to monitor the health of the Earth and use the information to head off natural calamities such as large scale flooding or wildfires.
 Wildfires in California burned 1,528 square miles across the state this year |
The ubiquitous sensors would mimic human senses such as touch, smell, hearing, sight and taste.
"We are working with physics here so we can go beyond those normal human systems and we can sense them at an extraordinary level which is literally unprecedented," said Dr Williams, an HP senior fellow and a pioneer in nanotechnology.
These sensors will be so sensitive they can detect and measure anything and everything from viruses to bacteria, from the chemical composition of molecules to sounds and moisture levels.
BY-BBC NEWS
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