ethical design
I was thinking about fabbers. That is, the ultimate version of 3D printers.
input a design/template, feed in a bunch of whatever that contains the required elements, and it builds the desired object atom (or molecule) by atom. Unneeded stuff from the feedstock gets output as blocks of something convenient to use when you need more of X element or molecule.
I realized that if you are ethical, a primary design criterion would be that *every* part of a fabber of a given size needs to be such that you can "print" it with that size fabber. this may make designing parts of it (like the outer shell) a bit more complicated, but it means that you can us a fabber to make a backup for itself.
Yeah, that tends to cost repeat sales, but in a society with fabbers, there aren't going to be a lot of sale anyway. mostly of templates and raw materials.
Which brings up another point. The starting set of templates should include ones for all the parts of the fabber.
If neither of these are true, you've got a nasty little monopoly there.
This sort of fabber (with the "dump whatever in" input) makes recycling fairly trivial. Just dump in the "junk" and have it output it as blocks of convenient compounds.
For some things (a lot of metals) just output blocks of the metal of a convenient size. For others, pick some reasonable inert compound, and output blocks of that. For some, you'll want a shell of something to encase them to protect them (like blocks of salt will need protection from water).
I'd advise not breaking down organic molecules unless there's a *very* good reason.
Gonna have a rather different sort of "cheap as dirt" things in a society with fabbers. Silicon and quartz will be that cheap. Aluminum and sapphire will be almost as cheap.
I won't bother listing what else would be that cheap. Just looking at a list of common minerals (and common things that go into dumps) will let you figure it out on your own.
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input a design/template, feed in a bunch of whatever that contains the required elements, and it builds the desired object atom (or molecule) by atom. Unneeded stuff from the feedstock gets output as blocks of something convenient to use when you need more of X element or molecule.
I realized that if you are ethical, a primary design criterion would be that *every* part of a fabber of a given size needs to be such that you can "print" it with that size fabber. this may make designing parts of it (like the outer shell) a bit more complicated, but it means that you can us a fabber to make a backup for itself.
Yeah, that tends to cost repeat sales, but in a society with fabbers, there aren't going to be a lot of sale anyway. mostly of templates and raw materials.
Which brings up another point. The starting set of templates should include ones for all the parts of the fabber.
If neither of these are true, you've got a nasty little monopoly there.
This sort of fabber (with the "dump whatever in" input) makes recycling fairly trivial. Just dump in the "junk" and have it output it as blocks of convenient compounds.
For some things (a lot of metals) just output blocks of the metal of a convenient size. For others, pick some reasonable inert compound, and output blocks of that. For some, you'll want a shell of something to encase them to protect them (like blocks of salt will need protection from water).
I'd advise not breaking down organic molecules unless there's a *very* good reason.
Gonna have a rather different sort of "cheap as dirt" things in a society with fabbers. Silicon and quartz will be that cheap. Aluminum and sapphire will be almost as cheap.
I won't bother listing what else would be that cheap. Just looking at a list of common minerals (and common things that go into dumps) will let you figure it out on your own.
This entry was originally posted at https://kengr.dreamwidth.org/1153045.html. Please comment there using OpenID.