I saw the idea in a Dilbert cartoon (February 7, 1999 on the desk calendar that I had). But I think it's a very interesting one worth pondering.

First, if we assume that the human race will survive the enormous societal changes and dangers that will be introduced by nanotechnology, then the rate of advancement and development will increase radically. There's always the idea of the technology singularity here, though whether or not it occurs is not exactly relevant.

Nanotechnology won't be the limit on what will be attempted. After it's well developed, the quest for knowledge and technology will give cause to push onward, leading to the possibility of picotechnology, manipulation below the atomic level, leading to things we can't even imagine now.

As long as humans are alive, they'll keep pushing the sphere of knowledge farther and farther. Maybe someday they'll (or WE will, depending on what happens in the near future) understand things so well as to be able to manipulate the fabric of space-time, create new universes, or things that seem ridiculous now.

And in the process, we may evolve ourselves into something unrecognizable, something working together as one like the cells of the body create a single organism, something that has mastery of the universe in was that could be called a god.

Who knows? Maybe time is different, or doesn't exist outside of this universe, and somehow this so-called god crafted the universe we live in in such a way as to cause it's own creation. Though I guess that would make this god both past and future... Anyways, I hope I get to live to participate in it, if it occurs...

To take a popular quote and twist it a bit: Any being that is sufficiently powerful is indistinguishable from a god.
Original quote: Any technology that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.
So you have your all-Everything god concept, and then you have everyone else that ranges from just powerful enough to be indistinguishable from a god, to almost all-everything. Indistinguishable is relative, true, but it is still relevant. I think we will get there, wherever there is, eventually - just not in one lifetime.

See Babylon 5 (as in go watch the show, don't just read the node) and Contact (read the book too) for ideas that involve this concept. Arthur C. Clarke is the source of the origional quote.

Scientific qualm with above node:
Anything at or below the atomic level has to deal with the problem of quantum uncertainty, rendering any 'picotechnology' preemptively useless until and unless problems related to tunneling and the like are solved, which they can't be unless the postulates of quantum mechanics are horribly wrong. They don't seem to be, as we get astonishingly good results from them. There are practical limits to miniaturization. Advances in technology post-nanotech will not come from miniaturization; that's just about run its course. Then again, it was said in 1899 that everything useful had been invented. Still, though, let's try to keep the 'science' in the science fiction.