The meme about "you wouldn't download a car" is about to get real, as "hardware ecologies" become automated and open sourced. 3D printers typically print one or a few types of materials, as do CNC and other industrial machines. So any single one of them can't make all it's own parts. A group of them, however, can make all or most of each others parts, similar to how natural ecologies are a complete cycle. So given an open sourced starter set of such machines, and downloadable plans, they can copy themselves as well as produce end items like a car. This does to hardware what has already happened to software and digital media. If you think the mainstream media howling about copying things is loud, wait till it happens to the hardware side of things.
Real horses are quieter, self-fueling, self-reproducing, and a lot cheaper. I fail to see the advantage of this robot version. And before someone says you can kill horses with a bullet, if you put a bullet through the sensors or generator of this robot, it's not going anywhere either.
So in Star Trek miracle land, a KW or two is quite possible off a typical roof. Of course in Star Trek miracle land, you'd have 47% efficient cells thus generating about 40 KW.
We are very close to Star Trek miracle land, then, since the highest efficiency to date is 43.5%:
My personal use of stamps is down about 50%, as more of my bills are paid electronically. As more and more data replaces first class letters, postage stamps will soon be a relic. So what can replace them as a way to publicly commemorate an event? I recognize the Post Office will not vanish entirely, since we still need to deliver physical items sometimes, but those rarely use regular stamps.
Traveling by vehicle is so 21st century. This is how it will likely get done:
Send a robotic probe to the destination star, at whatever speed you can manage. Have it build a receiving station out of local materials Scan human at atomic resolution, send atom by atom description by laser. Receiving station assembles human at far end. Apparent travel time to human = 0. Bonus points if you have machine intelligence or humans have been uploaded to sentient software, then you can skip the scanning/rebuilding of flesh.
The reason it will get done this way is it takes a million times less energy to send a description (even an atom by atom one), than to send those same atoms at relativistic velocity. That is a heck of an incentive to work out the technical problems. I fully realize we don't know how scan humans non-destructively, but we also don't know how to build relativistic starships. So given a choice, work on the one that is easier to do.
If technology is progressing, you expect to build faster ships over time. So up to the point the rate of progress = 1/trip time in years, it makes sense to wait, because a later, faster ship will arrive sooner.
Property does not expire, but copyrights do. They are a time limited monopoly granted by us, the people, as an encouragement to make more. The ultimate owners of all creative works is society as a whole. We deferred our rights temporarily, just like with patents, on the theory by doing that, more will get created and end up in society's hands in the end. Copyright holders have tried to tilt the deal more and more in their favor, and some of us feel that they have gone too far.
IIf at some point in the future some genius invents a device that allows us to make copies of things for free, I would support people's right to do just that.
We are working on it ( http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set ), but it will not be a single device, at least not in the near term. It will be an "ecology" of devices that will make parts for each other. That is because ceramics, metals, plastic, wood, etc. generally need different processing techniques, and it's not easy to put that all into one device. But nothing stops you from having a large workshop with various machines, and then a robot does the assembly at the end, and have it all driven by a single 3D object file.
As a practical matter, there will always be some parts you have to buy. For example, you won't be replicating what intel does in it's factories any time soon. But you can place bought parts on storage shelves for the assembly robot to grab when it needs them. What needs doing is lots of grunt level design and programming to make the "ecology" as closed-loop as possible and minimize the bought items.
unless they are planning on a class action law suit, otherwise i bet all the uploaders & downloders of Megaupload have moved on to using other services that basically do the same thing,
Building a Moon base/colony without a sustainable infrastructure to support it would be wildly expensive and wasteful. We need low cost transportation to space, and to learn how to "live off the land" (extract energy and materials in space).
The Moon is big and obvious in the night sky, but it is not the closest place in in terms of fuel to reach. Some near Earth objects have lower delta-V to get to, and all of that delta-V can use efficient electric thrusters instead of inefficient chemical ones for Lunar lander rockets. The first thing you want to extract from NEOs is fuel, but you can get 98% of everything you need to support yourself in space by mining and chemical extraction. The remaining 2% comes from Earth, but combined with launch costs that are not measured in their weight in precious metals, then you can afford a Lunar base, not before.
Do the big search engines really want to take advice from an industry that is out-competed in distribution by *amateurs*? Most people sharing files don't make money off it.
To those who ask "how will creators get paid?", there are plenty of people who will willingly pay for things at a reasonable price, as demonstrated by iTunes, NetFlix, Steam, and even for books, where Baen free library *increased* sales by exposing readers to new authors. I have 100+ DVDs that I got for about $6 each on average over the last decade. I got them used from the video store, and to me that was a reasonable price. $20 new is just too much for me, so I have nearly never bought new ones.
When we studied manned Mars missions at Boeing, and ate samples of the long term food, we placed the "storm shelter" in the middle of the food storage lockers. Food contains water and carbohydrates which contain hydrogen, which is good shielding. If you have a once-through food system, the waste goes back in the same lockers, and maintains the shielding. If you have a regenerative life support, with a greenhouse, the storm shelter goes in the middle of the growing area/water tanks/food storage. Even with a greenhouse there will be some stored food.
For sustainable development, you want to hijack materials from an asteroid between Earth and Mars, and install a habitat surrounded by rock shielding. Placed in a transfer orbit between the two planets, you ride it most of the way, only exposing the crew at the ends of the trip. The habitat spends most of it's time growing food and extracting materials and fuel, which get forwarded to other locations by electric tugs. A sustainable supply chain is necessary if you ever want much more than a "flags and footprints" mission.
The article assumes more jobs are a good thing. That is a last century concept. How many people actually want to work all day? Most people do it to get the things they really want: food, a decent home, etc. The job itself is a necessary evil, and if they could get the things they wanted without it, they would. We should aim for productivity so insanely high that people don't *have* to work for a living, just like the rich do now. Then the people who actually enjoy doing whatever it takes can take care of the remaining work.
This is the direction society has been heading in since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and obviously still has a way to go to reach that goal. Once places like India and China get developed enough, corporations will inevitably look for cheap labor elsewhere. These days that is mostly Africa, and a few other spots. Once *those* get developed, there will be no cheap labor left, and corporations will inevitably pursue automation. Who will buy their stuff then, when people get put out of work by automation? Either prices will fall due to competition, or governments will tax the remaining workers and businesses enough to pay basic subsistence for everyone else.
The alternate route is "home fabrication". Your robot gardener grows the food, the garage machine shop builds "stuff" based on downloaded plans. You still have to do a little work that can't be automated, but can otherwise goof off. It beats commuting and sitting in an office for 10 hours a day. I hope one of the above futures arrives sooner rather than later.
It's not beyond the realm of possibility to have a "kitchen machine", which has a refrigerator and storage racks at one end, mixing bowls etc in the middle, and a stove/oven heater at the end, and runs on recipes which are data files. Existing kitchens have all the same parts except a human does all the mechanical steps. We already have a primitive version in "bread machines" that do most of the steps in making fresh bread for you.
It's not new, it's just a new category for the Pirate Bay's stuff. Audio (music) files end up driving speakers. Video files end up driving your video card. 3D files end up driving some kind of 3D machine (rep-rap plastic extruder, CNC milling machine, etc). It's a useful category to put things in to help you find them. What is significant is that a popular site like TPB thinks it's time for a category like that.
Aside from Stark living in a comic book universe and being impossibly smart, what he was doing is no different than a million other people with a home workshop in their garage. He just has a nicer workshop.
I doubt people will be fabricating farm equipment or trucks, but it is not unreasonable to think that people might fabricate a small car for city driving.
Farm tractor is one of the first things Open Source Ecology built because the founder had a farm and a broken tractor. Eventually they will have a full range of machines. It's an ecology rather than a 3D printer because you need different machines for different tasks and materials. But the outputs from one machine feed into building the others in a network.
I've made a drill press, and am starting on modular construction (because you need a place for the workshop), to be followed by a sawmill and other woodworking machines, to cover the whole tree --> finished wood products chain. The main OSE group is doing the metalworking and hydraulics side of things at the moment.
I've done blacksmithing. What you need to melt iron is a crucible, coal, firebricks, and a hair dryer. You can get fancier, that that will work. Hair dryer forces air into the coal bed to get it hot enough to melt the iron. Firebricks keep everything else from catching fire. The whole furnace can be built in a hole in the ground with a metal pipe leading to the bottom to feed air in.
"specialized equipment" didn't exist thousands of years ago (iron age, bronze age) when people started casting metals. It can all be done with pretty primitive stuff by modern standards.
Open Source Ecology is developing a "construction set" of machines, including ones that can build parts for other machines. It's an "ecology" rather than a "3D printer", because a single device can't do everything yet. So you need a different machine to make plastic extrusions than to machine metal, for example.
I've made an early version of a drill press, and am starting to document it. Other people can take my design and improve on it, like with open source software. Eventually all the key machines will be programmable, so that you can hit "print" from a set of downloaded plans, and the various machines will start spitting out parts, which a robot will assemble. There will always be some parts you can't make, like CPU chips, with a reasonable set of machines. Those you go buy, but 90% self-made and 10% bought beats 100% bought.
Short term: Live on a rotating habitat at one G in lunar orbit (a rotating space elevator would work, but smaller habitats also). Only make short trips to the Lunar surface to repair things. Do all the other stuff by remote control. You are close enough at Lunar orbit that remote control does not have lag from speed of light.
Long term: Find an appropriately sized crater. Build a roof over it and cover roof with 1-3 meters of lunar soil for radiation shielding (you forgot about that part). Build centrifuge in the space between. It can be centrally supported on a pivot, externally supported like the rails you suggest, or both. Start with just two opposed modules, and build up to a full ring. Dig down in the crater and add more rings if you need more living space.
Re-read the sequence in my previous article. Mining and ore processing are done by robots. Then you build a habitat once you have stockpiled materials. Your minimal robot assisted construction crew can survive for at least 6 months in zero-g, that's how long the Space Station tours of duty are. The habitat itself is rotating to make artificial gravity, so that problem is solved.
What has terrestrial mining in Afghanistan got to do with this discussion? This is mining in space TO USE IN SPACE. The reason to do that is to avoid the high cost of launching stuff from Earth. Cost of mining on Earth is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
The meme about "you wouldn't download a car" is about to get real, as "hardware ecologies" become automated and open sourced. 3D printers typically print one or a few types of materials, as do CNC and other industrial machines. So any single one of them can't make all it's own parts. A group of them, however, can make all or most of each others parts, similar to how natural ecologies are a complete cycle. So given an open sourced starter set of such machines, and downloadable plans, they can copy themselves as well as produce end items like a car. This does to hardware what has already happened to software and digital media. If you think the mainstream media howling about copying things is loud, wait till it happens to the hardware side of things.
His dad owns the copyright on fish, so he probably had permission
Real horses are quieter, self-fueling, self-reproducing, and a lot cheaper. I fail to see the advantage of this robot version. And before someone says you can kill horses with a bullet, if you put a bullet through the sensors or generator of this robot, it's not going anywhere either.
When walking around the Graphene Institute. The halls are dark and slippery.
So in Star Trek miracle land, a KW or two is quite possible off a typical roof. Of course in Star Trek miracle land, you'd have 47% efficient cells thus generating about 40 KW.
We are very close to Star Trek miracle land, then, since the highest efficiency to date is 43.5%:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/PVeff(rev111103).jpg
My personal use of stamps is down about 50%, as more of my bills are paid electronically. As more and more data replaces first class letters, postage stamps will soon be a relic. So what can replace them as a way to publicly commemorate an event? I recognize the Post Office will not vanish entirely, since we still need to deliver physical items sometimes, but those rarely use regular stamps.
Traveling by vehicle is so 21st century. This is how it will likely get done:
Send a robotic probe to the destination star, at whatever speed you can manage.
Have it build a receiving station out of local materials
Scan human at atomic resolution, send atom by atom description by laser.
Receiving station assembles human at far end. Apparent travel time to human = 0.
Bonus points if you have machine intelligence or humans have been uploaded to sentient software, then you can skip the scanning/rebuilding of flesh.
The reason it will get done this way is it takes a million times less energy to send a description (even an atom by atom one), than to send those same atoms at relativistic velocity. That is a heck of an incentive to work out the technical problems. I fully realize we don't know how scan humans non-destructively, but we also don't know how to build relativistic starships. So given a choice, work on the one that is easier to do.
If technology is progressing, you expect to build faster ships over time. So up to the point the rate of progress = 1/trip time in years, it makes sense to wait, because a later, faster ship will arrive sooner.
Property does not expire, but copyrights do. They are a time limited monopoly granted by us, the people, as an encouragement to make more. The ultimate owners of all creative works is society as a whole. We deferred our rights temporarily, just like with patents, on the theory by doing that, more will get created and end up in society's hands in the end. Copyright holders have tried to tilt the deal more and more in their favor, and some of us feel that they have gone too far.
IIf at some point in the future some genius invents a device that allows us to make copies of things for free, I would support people's right to do just that.
We are working on it ( http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set ), but it will not be a single device, at least not in the near term. It will be an "ecology" of devices that will make parts for each other. That is because ceramics, metals, plastic, wood, etc. generally need different processing techniques, and it's not easy to put that all into one device. But nothing stops you from having a large workshop with various machines, and then a robot does the assembly at the end, and have it all driven by a single 3D object file.
As a practical matter, there will always be some parts you have to buy. For example, you won't be replicating what intel does in it's factories any time soon. But you can place bought parts on storage shelves for the assembly robot to grab when it needs them. What needs doing is lots of grunt level design and programming to make the "ecology" as closed-loop as possible and minimize the bought items.
unless they are planning on a class action law suit, otherwise i bet all the uploaders & downloders of Megaupload have moved on to using other services that basically do the same thing,
Yes, they have:
http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=r&b=ffffff&n=666666&r=1m&u=megaupload.com&&u=thepiratebay.org&u=mediafire.com&u=rapidshare.com&u=turbobit.net&
Good list of denier arguments and the scientific response:
http://planetsave.com/2010/08/13/119-one-liners-to-respond-to-climate-science-myths/
Building a Moon base/colony without a sustainable infrastructure to support it would be wildly expensive and wasteful. We need low cost transportation to space, and to learn how to "live off the land" (extract energy and materials in space).
The Moon is big and obvious in the night sky, but it is not the closest place in in terms of fuel to reach. Some near Earth objects have lower delta-V to get to, and all of that delta-V can use efficient electric thrusters instead of inefficient chemical ones for Lunar lander rockets. The first thing you want to extract from NEOs is fuel, but you can get 98% of everything you need to support yourself in space by mining and chemical extraction. The remaining 2% comes from Earth, but combined with launch costs that are not measured in their weight in precious metals, then you can afford a Lunar base, not before.
Do the big search engines really want to take advice from an industry that is out-competed in distribution by *amateurs*? Most people sharing files don't make money off it.
To those who ask "how will creators get paid?", there are plenty of people who will willingly pay for things at a reasonable price, as demonstrated by iTunes, NetFlix, Steam, and even for books, where Baen free library *increased* sales by exposing readers to new authors. I have 100+ DVDs that I got for about $6 each on average over the last decade. I got them used from the video store, and to me that was a reasonable price. $20 new is just too much for me, so I have nearly never bought new ones.
When we studied manned Mars missions at Boeing, and ate samples of the long term food, we placed the "storm shelter" in the middle of the food storage lockers. Food contains water and carbohydrates which contain hydrogen, which is good shielding. If you have a once-through food system, the waste goes back in the same lockers, and maintains the shielding. If you have a regenerative life support, with a greenhouse, the storm shelter goes in the middle of the growing area/water tanks/food storage. Even with a greenhouse there will be some stored food.
For sustainable development, you want to hijack materials from an asteroid between Earth and Mars, and install a habitat surrounded by rock shielding. Placed in a transfer orbit between the two planets, you ride it most of the way, only exposing the crew at the ends of the trip. The habitat spends most of it's time growing food and extracting materials and fuel, which get forwarded to other locations by electric tugs. A sustainable supply chain is necessary if you ever want much more than a "flags and footprints" mission.
Look it up. Natural seawater contains 3 tons of Uranium per cubic kilometer (3 ppb). How much ocean is within 1 km of the Fukushima plant?
The article assumes more jobs are a good thing. That is a last century concept. How many people actually want to work all day? Most people do it to get the things they really want: food, a decent home, etc. The job itself is a necessary evil, and if they could get the things they wanted without it, they would. We should aim for productivity so insanely high that people don't *have* to work for a living, just like the rich do now. Then the people who actually enjoy doing whatever it takes can take care of the remaining work.
This is the direction society has been heading in since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and obviously still has a way to go to reach that goal. Once places like India and China get developed enough, corporations will inevitably look for cheap labor elsewhere. These days that is mostly Africa, and a few other spots. Once *those* get developed, there will be no cheap labor left, and corporations will inevitably pursue automation. Who will buy their stuff then, when people get put out of work by automation? Either prices will fall due to competition, or governments will tax the remaining workers and businesses enough to pay basic subsistence for everyone else.
The alternate route is "home fabrication". Your robot gardener grows the food, the garage machine shop builds "stuff" based on downloaded plans. You still have to do a little work that can't be automated, but can otherwise goof off. It beats commuting and sitting in an office for 10 hours a day. I hope one of the above futures arrives sooner rather than later.
It's not beyond the realm of possibility to have a "kitchen machine", which has a refrigerator and storage racks at one end, mixing bowls etc in the middle, and a stove/oven heater at the end, and runs on recipes which are data files. Existing kitchens have all the same parts except a human does all the mechanical steps. We already have a primitive version in "bread machines" that do most of the steps in making fresh bread for you.
It's not new, it's just a new category for the Pirate Bay's stuff. Audio (music) files end up driving speakers. Video files end up driving your video card. 3D files end up driving some kind of 3D machine (rep-rap plastic extruder, CNC milling machine, etc). It's a useful category to put things in to help you find them. What is significant is that a popular site like TPB thinks it's time for a category like that.
Aside from Stark living in a comic book universe and being impossibly smart, what he was doing is no different than a million other people with a home workshop in their garage. He just has a nicer workshop.
I doubt people will be fabricating farm equipment or trucks, but it is not unreasonable to think that people might fabricate a small car for city driving.
Actually, they are fabricating farm equipment. You can download the plans at http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/LifeTrac
Farm tractor is one of the first things Open Source Ecology built because the founder had a farm and a broken tractor. Eventually they will have a full range of machines. It's an ecology rather than a 3D printer because you need different machines for different tasks and materials. But the outputs from one machine feed into building the others in a network.
I've made a drill press, and am starting on modular construction (because you need a place for the workshop), to be followed by a sawmill and other woodworking machines, to cover the whole tree --> finished wood products chain. The main OSE group is doing the metalworking and hydraulics side of things at the moment.
I've done blacksmithing. What you need to melt iron is a crucible, coal, firebricks, and a hair dryer. You can get fancier, that that will work. Hair dryer forces air into the coal bed to get it hot enough to melt the iron. Firebricks keep everything else from catching fire. The whole furnace can be built in a hole in the ground with a metal pipe leading to the bottom to feed air in.
"specialized equipment" didn't exist thousands of years ago (iron age, bronze age) when people started casting metals. It can all be done with pretty primitive stuff by modern standards.
Plans will be here when they finish them:
http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Open_Source_Car
Open Source Ecology is developing a "construction set" of machines, including ones that can build parts for other machines. It's an "ecology" rather than a "3D printer", because a single device can't do everything yet. So you need a different machine to make plastic extrusions than to machine metal, for example.
I've made an early version of a drill press, and am starting to document it. Other people can take my design and improve on it, like with open source software. Eventually all the key machines will be programmable, so that you can hit "print" from a set of downloaded plans, and the various machines will start spitting out parts, which a robot will assemble. There will always be some parts you can't make, like CPU chips, with a reasonable set of machines. Those you go buy, but 90% self-made and 10% bought beats 100% bought.
Short term: Live on a rotating habitat at one G in lunar orbit (a rotating space elevator would work, but smaller habitats also). Only make short trips to the Lunar surface to repair things. Do all the other stuff by remote control. You are close enough at Lunar orbit that remote control does not have lag from speed of light.
Long term: Find an appropriately sized crater. Build a roof over it and cover roof with 1-3 meters of lunar soil for radiation shielding (you forgot about that part). Build centrifuge in the space between. It can be centrally supported on a pivot, externally supported like the rails you suggest, or both. Start with just two opposed modules, and build up to a full ring. Dig down in the crater and add more rings if you need more living space.
Re-read the sequence in my previous article. Mining and ore processing are done by robots. Then you build a habitat once you have stockpiled materials. Your minimal robot assisted construction crew can survive for at least 6 months in zero-g, that's how long the Space Station tours of duty are. The habitat itself is rotating to make artificial gravity, so that problem is solved.
What has terrestrial mining in Afghanistan got to do with this discussion? This is mining in space TO USE IN SPACE. The reason to do that is to avoid the high cost of launching stuff from Earth. Cost of mining on Earth is irrelevant.
Best to keep the incriminating data completely offsite, or preferably, never saved in the first place.