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3-D Printer Creates Buildings From Dust and Glue
An anonymous reader writes "D-Shape, an innovative new 3-D printer, builds solid structures like sculptures, furniture, even buildings from the ground up. The device relies on sand and magnesium glue to actually build structures layer by layer from solid stone. The designer, Enrico Dini, is even talking with various organizations about making the printer compatible with moon dust, paving the way for an instant moonbase!"
I want a Fred Flintstone house.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I, for one, say "neato!".
...sounds like a great choice as resources to use. As Sand is basically silicon and readily available, magnesium is also the 7th most abundant in th earths crust. It seems like this thing could go a long way towards very cheap mass production of all sorts of solid things very cheaply. There is also the RepRap project but they use plastics which I'm afraid are quite expensive as resource, although they kind of target a different area. I'm excited by this, I've been following these ideas for a while and it seems to be going somewhere, I guess we're getting closer to general purpose building machines.
...I'll finally be able to get that 10 foot statue of my butt that I've always wanted.
Can you say bad Idea?
Fiberglass particulate is just as nasty and it's in your home right now! *ominous look upwards* Oh, wait... it's sealed behind a wall. Nevermind. Same principle apples to "space dust". Build the structure, then coat the insides or attach walls to make it a happy fun place for all.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I know zilch about materials science, but I have to wonder how these structures would hold up as they get large. Will they be like concrete, or like sandstone? or like particle board...
I can say bad idea, but I do not think this is a bad idea.
Concrete dust has many of the properties of lunar dust. We know we will have to find a way to build with it if we are going to make a moon-base.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Maybe it prints money too?
meep
while this is certainly super-sized, this technology has been around for over a decade.
z-corp comes to mind (www.zcorp.com)
I saw them print out a rubber ball from elastic particles and flexible glue that actually bounced.
They kept the cost down early by using HP Deskjet hardware for the printing (just glue instead of ink).
cool stuff, but not new.
Yes, but is it a solution to the problem of people replying to junk posts to get higher page placement? Putting things in context is a highly efficient organizational skill.
Dust is cheap, why scale down?
The "scaffolding" is sand that hasn't been sprayed with glue. Imagine making a simple dome. You lay down a layer of sand. You glue the perimeter. The center stays unglued. Let the glue set, lay down another layer of sand, glue the perimeter. Repeat, making the perimeter smaller each time. The walls are supported by the unglued sand in the middle. When you close the top, you open the side, remove the unglued sand, and you have a dome.
This is how most of the stereolitho machines work now, save they use a support material that can be removed with a solvent that doesn't dissolve the plastic used for the parts you want to keep.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I always thought that we need robots to build a moonbase before we bother sending people up there again. Here's one robot that might help get the job done. Then again, it seems like a major piece of hardware that will be difficult to transport. But the idea of making stone from dust is a good one. Maybe we should half-inflate a giant balloon so its top is dome-shaped, cover it with layers of moon dirt which would be hardened with this magnesium fixative. Once the stone is thick enough, the dome will be self-supporting and a good radiation shield. The whole process might be done by a single remote-controlled backhoe with a spray-nozzle. This is the kind of cool shit that NASA should be doing.
Beyond 2000? How about a Star Trek replicator?
Has anyone thought about the social implications? A Star Trek replicator would make real, concrete objects as easy to duplicate as intellectual property is now. We'll be in for a fantastic social upheaval.
Free Martian Whores!
The original story is longer, with more pictures...
Not paying, PAVING.
God do you people even think about what you're typing or saying when you use phrases like this? Did it ever once occur to you to think about what you're saying and how much sense it makes?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Slashdot needs a rule preventing the posting of stories about stories.
Or at the very least, fucking preventing blogs about blogs about some story.
When did slashdot become a random blog aggregator instead of news for nerds?
If you get a submission from a user thats a link to a story about some other story, don't fucking post it. Make your own damn submission with the final site in it and stop giving out all the slashvertising and wasting our time.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I get your point that insulation in home construction is very different from construction with moon dust, however I do feel like I should make this one point:
in practice of construction, there will always be some holes in it.
If there is one group of people that ought to be very talented at building things that don't have holes, its astronauts.
I think that humans won't have too much trouble with it as far as inhaling goes - it'll get trapped in mucus as well as all the other dust we inhale.
Funny, you'd think the same thing about airborne silicon, and yet you'd be wrong:
Probably a bad ideas to drill holes in the walls -- but at least if they do, the dust from drilling will go outside rather than come inside (well, at least for a while, and by the time that's no longer true, no one inside will really care much anymore).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Regolith is the geological name for for dust covered Lunar surface. Dust is the name for the dust. (Kinda like a beach is made up of sand.)
Earth grit, which isn't exactly common outside of sandy or windblown areas, is abrasive. Earth dust, which like Lunar dust is ubiquitous, isn't. So to some extent you're comparing apples (ubiquitous non abrasive Earth dust) to oranges (ubiquitous abrasive Lunar dust.)
We have already found out that in the very short term (think hours) Lunar dust is highly damaging to moving parts. much more so than terrestrial dust. (It even damages things that you wouldn't normally think of as a moving part - like folds in clothing, or between the fingers of gloves.) We don't really have enough experience with long terms operations in Lunar dust, especially in and around operations that will disturb the dust.
But it's pretty clear that the dust is going to be a major problem for equipment like the machine described in TFA, as well as for mining machines associated with recovering lunar water.
Yeah, that's why we make people like miners, metal workers, woodworkers, and others who work around artificially produced (and thus still sharp) dust wear personal protective equipment.
The page you linked to contains the Trojan:JS/Gamburl.E. MSFT Security Essentials just flagged it and removed it from my browser cache.
That's only true for a replicator that is unlimited. If the replicator had imperfections, what you say is nonsense.
Maybe cost of energy would be the defining criterium for the cost of goods (that would be about the same situation as today, energy input is the most highly correlated property to the price of a good).
If it was only able to re-arrange atoms you would still need mines to get to the necessary minerals, and many things would remain rare (e.g. you wouldn't be able to make gold jewels any cheaper).
If it required at least the same mass as input to create an object, that too would create scarcity, requiring again an economy (though probably different than today's)
The world would hardly be different, and we'd still need the economy to supply us.