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Envisioning the Desktop Fabricator
mkl writes "Yesterday I fantasized about a generator of matter. Not a laser plotter for carving 3d objects, but a device that will assemble any given object from its base, out of atoms. I was thinking about a device that can find its place under the roofs of all the people working on PCs all over the world. So I fantasize about it at work and what do I see in the Wired News newsletter? 'Any product, any shape, any size -- manufactured on your desktop! The future is the fabricator.' Heh."
Yesterday I fantasized about a generator of matter ... a device that will assemble any given object from its base, out of atoms.
I also fantasized about a generator of matter, one that was able to generate Natalie Portman right in front of me complete with a handbag full of a strange gritty substance. Ooooh yeah.
First post to mention The Diamond Age : Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book) by NEAL STEPHENSON. All about nano-tech and fabricators and stuff.
Test 1 2 3 4
.. what would you make ?
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Something similar (utilizing some kind of 3-d inkjet printer with hot, liquid plastics für ink) was presented in the mid-1990s at some trade fair I went to. Matter of fact, I think I have also seen these on TV, building evolving robots (not joking, cannot remember the context, thought)
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
Tea, Earl grey, Hot!
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
.... and you thought Lexmark ink was expensive!!
...once created, throw the entire world economy into chaos? Of course I am referring to not a simple fab as the article is talking about, but what it is insinuating at, a device capable of assemling things at the atomic level.
Think about it.. once you buy such a device, no matter *what* the initial cost, you could use it to make almost anything... including, other devices!
Such a device would make physical goods value-less. The only things of value any longer would be services and artistic creations.
Then again, this all sounds way too good to be true. We're not evolved enough as a sepcies to have that kind of tech - think also - everyone instantly has access to unlimited weapons. Great.
We would kill ourselves off as a species within days.
Then again maybe that's not a bad thing.
sigs, as if you care.
I saw a prototyping machine at a recent trade show, that could lay down ABS plastic. For a six cubic inch toy wheel, it was an overnight job. It wasn't neceessarily a desktop unit, it was still considerably larger in footprint than an HP LaserJet 4, and is floor standing, I think.
It also costed $25,000.
The machine type described are good for prototyping and custom parts, but there are usually better mass production methods. Laying down atom-by-atom will be slow for a loooong time and at best be of most consequence to nanomachines for that time.
Engines of Creation: http://www.foresight.org/EOC/
Not everyone thinks this is only a dream. Of course, many people think these people are crazy.
But one must reach a bit beyond the accepted if one is to achieve something greater than the norm.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
...Multipass!
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
http://www.bathsheba.com To start building a model from my 3D file, the design is built up, one layer at a time, from steel powder held in place by a laser-activated binder. ... This produces a porous steel part that is about 60% dense. ... The model is heated, the stems are dipped in a crucible of molten bronze, and capillary action causes the bronze to wick throughout the piece. Counterintuitive to say the least, but apparently it works very well.
at a speed of 1 billion atoms per second takes about 20 million years.
Slow, slow.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Calvin: "If you could have anything in the world right now, what would it be?"
Hobbes: "Hmm..."
Calvin: "Anything at all! Whatever you want!"
Hobbes: "A sandwich."
Calvin: "A SANDWICH?!? WHAT KIND OF STUPID WISH IS THAT?!"
Calvin: "Talk about a failure of imagination! I'd ask for a trillion billion dollars, my own space shuttle, and a private continent!"
Hobbes: (eating sandwich) "I got MY wish."
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
This would throw the world economy into chaos since any industry based on the manufacture of goods would suddenly be SOL.
Of course, corporations would try to "fix" this situation with DRM-encoded recipes. Anyone can make a shoe (with the help of open source), but if you want the new spectacular Nike shoe recipe you have to spend money...the recipe components are downloaded to your nanofactory and boom, you have the "cool" shoe.
What this would do would be to make branding more important that it already is. Emphasis will be placed on quality and style of the product instead of usability (which will be possible to gain for practically nothing). Stephenson thought that this would give rise to a whole new artisan class of the economy which I agree is possible.
There will be economic restabilization, and that's going to mean a lot of death and suffering for a lot of people. Since people kill each other over resources anything that creates a massive alteration in how resources (and thus people) are controlled will result in war, whether they can produce the weapons from nanofacotries or not . But you just wait, this is only a precursor to the real suffering.
The real danger of this, at least for me, isn't economic restabilization, but population control. With such a device food will be possible to create even more easily. No need for crops, cattle or any other "source" of food. All food can be manufactured for the simple cost of energy needed to combine the appropriate atoms.
Any ecologist will tell you that the one thing that limits a population is food. (lots of people debate this and say humans are different. That we control our population at will, however since the "invention" of agriculture the world's human population has done nothing but go up. When the world's population starts decreasing because of self-imposed limits, then I'll listening to how we determine our own carrying capacity). World hunger is a constant issue now, but if everyone in the world can eat, I assure you that the world's next generation will be even bigger. And if all of them can eat...well you see where I'm going.
The only thing limiting (and I use that word loosely) global population is the manufacture and distribution of food. If those limitations are taking away the world is soon going to be a very cramped and unlivable place.
It strikes me that although we may have mass consumer 3-d plotter type stuff that can create objects out of certain substances, or maybe a combination of a few materials, atom-by-atom assembly is going to be a long way off, if ever. At the very least it will require very advanced nanobots.
But what is more likely is biological printers that grow stuff out of cells. It will be much easier to let the cells do the work of reproducing and just induce specialization into a lattice of pre-grown tissue through chemical infusion.
This wouldn't be home genetic engineering, just creation of specialized tissue from a batch of pre-cooked cells of a fixed genome. It could be some other organism's genome, plant or animal or something specially designed for object replication, or even, your own...
So in 50 years or so, you or a doctor may be "printing" out a new patch of skin for your tatoo removal or a new seed for a lost tooth, or high follical count skin for your balding head. Or a tentacle to help you type faster. Or, well, I don't really want to even get into where elective plastic surgery is likely to go in the next decade with reguard to certain less seemly "self-enhancements" people might be inclined to make, nevermind the concept of "home bio-generation kits."
It's truly scary stuff -- let's just say tomorrow's anime conventions may not require costumes for the truly devoted fans.
Someone had to do it.
Go read Drexler's "Engines of Creation" for the classic "nanoassembler" hype. The idea of pushing atoms together is neat, but it's hard to do. Free-floating nanoassemblers are still a fantasy. I expect to see nanoassemblers, but they'll probably be more like scanning tunneling microscopes made on an IC substrate and used to read and write DNA. Making big hunks of solid materials that way is too slow. Look at how long it takes to make a tree, or a coral reef, or a pearl. (Admittedly biology is power-limited. In a manufacturing environment, you can run external power into the nanomachines and remove that limitation. But that won't work for the free-floating nanomachine concept.)
If you have a good milling machine, you can make almost any solid shape you want. I know four people with milling machines at home. Two of them have good computer-controlled mills with all the necessary software. Yet they don't actually make all that much. One of them is building a steam engine, and he's been at that for years.
Then there are stereolithography machines. The newer ones work fine. You can now make things out of ABS and nylon, which are tough enough to be useful. This is a big improvement over the early models, which made only soft wax models nice to look at but useless.
It's a very slow way to make stuff. In the real world, almost all consumer products, with the notable exception of wood and fabric products, are made by some kind of cheap moulding process. There are dozens of such processes, from die casting to injection moulding to progressive stamping, but they all involve forcing material into a mould. This is an incredibly cheap process in quantity, and is why manufactured goods are so cheap. Very few consumer items are made by machining down a solid hunk of material.
Even ICs aren't made by direct writing. It's quite possible to make ICs with direct-writing electron beam machines. This eliminates the need for masks, and every IC can be different. Works fine. Useful ICs have been prototyped that way for years. Too slow to be commercially feasible.