Materials for free stuff, a bit off-topic
Bryan Bishop
http://p2pfoundation.net/Towards_a_Free_Matter_Economy
.. and I'm not going to bother linking to all of the other similar
ideas out there on the internet, but instead I thought I'd post an
update about some methods that we might come across these materials
and energy.
First, I've been in contact with a few individuals from India
interested in an open source algae bioreactor for biodiesel
production. With an organically scaleable backbone that scales with
the growth rates of the algae (maybe), this could get interesting. The
energy would be used for open source projects -- transportation
networks and such. The land issue hasn't been solved, but there are
technicalities that I am presently exploring in a commercial venture
for other reasons at the moment. Using giant tanks in the ocean is one
idea.
Secondly, for material sourcing, besides random recycling and hoping
that materials can be taken in that manner, there are many abandoned
mines because they are either depleted or structurally unstable. There
are a few databases that list the geo coords of these abandoned mines.
It is possible to have robots mining away. And if they get crushed,
who cares? Local fabrication facilities that make updates based off of
acquired knowledge. This is doable via the open manufacturing
simulations that were being planned from Open Virgle plus some physics
simulation framework backbone. The bots would be open source and
deployed at sites where people are partial to these initiatives, I'm
sure many people have old abandoned mines on their large plots of
land. No immediate possibility for human harm. etc.
Thoughts? Also, let's hope businesses in the mean time are willing to
be friendly with B2B protocols and letting small-timers cache
materials for their design projects.
- Bryan
albanetcsr
> be friendly with B2B protocols and letting small-timers cache
> materials for their design projects.
material extraction, a bunch of space ventures will want to send these
robots to moon and NEOs. Probably DoD will want to talk to you as
well ;) I guess the end result is a robot or set of robots that seek
out specific kind of rocks and process them using Sun as energy source
and then somehow replicate. There was a big paper describing this
concept back in the 80's called automation for space missions or
something like that.
Bryan Bishop
Yep, "NASA's Advanced Automation for Space Missions":
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
Freitas also wrote the book on KSRMs:
http://www.molecularassembler.com/KSRM.htm
In particular I urge you to read the sections on closure engineering.
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASM53.html#536
http://www.molecularassembler.com/KSRM/5.6.htm
The original intent in SKDB was this idea of having the computer
automatically search the space for possible designs of
self-replicating machines via making sure that their recipes can make
their own recipes. In other words, you're not going to be able to
include injection molding without maybe the castes that would be
needed to make the injection apparatus, and so on.
RepRap is hardly self-replicating, for various objections, but I don't
want to talk about it because it gets me quite upset. Fab@home also
doesn't (nor does it claim to want to). Fab@home is done by Hod Lipson
over at Carnegie Mellon .What he does is work on automated search
algorithms of robotic designs. He has this program much like my
'supermetal' that simulates possible robots in an environment and
shows them using genetic algorithms to come up with wacky movement
mechanisms. Then, he prints them out with selective laser sintering or
freeform fabrication methodologies, basically 3D printing, plus some
hand-selected motors and actuators. His goal is various robot
ecologies that explore their environments, evolve their own controller
software for movements given whatever their own design is, and then
continue their missions in their environment: movement. Hod gave a
talk here at UT Austin a few weeks ago. I liked. The specific
application of mining is a small twist on his overall architectures,
and not quite towards the full-blown SKDB/OSCOMAK stuff, but it still
contributes in the same sort of way.
Paul D. Fernhout
from CMU many years ago), we could worldwide have had almost completely
robotic mining everywhere even ten years ago (some automated, some by
teleoperation), but the mining unions and other social forces are against
it. Every time I read about miners trapped in collapsed mines I think about
that. That also gets back to the "Triple Revolution" point of the broken
link these days between income and jobs because of automation, and how
advanced manufacturing is being held back by outdated economic and political
ideas of linking access to the fruits of automation for the non-wealthy to
manual (or intellectual) labor.
And yes, people could use automation to do their own mining. However, there
are environmental laws and environmental risks associated with any mining
and subsequent processing (often groundwater pollution), and both the mining
and processing take a lot of energy (beyond the cost of the machines or
rights to the land).
Seawater extraction has a lot going for it IMHO, if you can adapt structures
to the ration of elements found in seawater, because, as Eric Hunting
outlines, you can get a lot of power from the sea - either by wind, waves,
solar, or OTEC. Of course ocean operations have their own hazards from
storms and corrosion and encrustation.
--Paul Fernhout
Paul D. Fernhout
NASA summer study, conducted in 1980 by request of newly-elected President
Jimmy Carter at a cost of 11.7 million dollars. The result of the study was
a realistic proposal for a self-replicating automated lunar factory system,
capable of exponentially increasing productive capacity and, in the long
run, exploration of the entire galaxy within a reasonable timeframe.
Unfortunately, the proposal was quietly declined with barely a ripple in the
press. What was once concievable with 1980's technology is now even more
practical today. Even if you're just skimming through this document, the
potential of this proposed system is undeniable. Please enjoy. "
I bought a copy from the National Technical Information Service in the
1980s, it got swiped (or lost), so I bought another one. :-) But it is nice
that someone put it online.
It is not as detailed as one might hope, but it is a place to start. And I'm
glad to be reminded of it, since presumably the text and images is in the
public domain and could be used to populate a database (maybe not from that
site, but certainly from the original).
--Paul Fernhout
Paul D. Fernhout
injection molding without maybe the *castes* that would be needed to make
the injection apparatus, and so on." [My emphasis]
I thought this typo for casts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste
was funny (sorry) both because it makes logical sense as a sentence, and
because it gets at one big difference between a more open society (with open
manufacturing) and a more closed one (with proprietary manufacturing).
"Castes are hereditary systems of occupation, endogamy, social culture,
social class, and political power., the assignment of individuals to places
in the social hierarchy is determined by social group and cultural heritage.
Although India is often now associated with the word "caste", it was first
used by the Portuguese to describe inherited class status in their own
European society."
See also the Morlocks in "The Time Machine".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morlock
--Paul Fernhout
Bryan Bishop
> And yes, people could use automation to do their own mining. However, there
> are environmental laws and environmental risks associated with any mining
> and subsequent processing (often groundwater pollution), and both the mining
> and processing take a lot of energy (beyond the cost of the machines or
> rights to the land).
Yep, but robotic mining would be easy to get in as a (big) research
project. A fleet of two or three robots for crawling around in caves
with teleoperative debug modes, strong and sturdy supports for
drilling through rock, just half a meter would be enough for further
research. So this has the opportunity to be legitimate and go through
the proper channels to have access and permissions to experiment with
abandoned mines. As for the energy requirements, that's why I'm
thinking it would be great to have on site energy production and
harvesting, or that network of algae-sourced biofuels. But those
volumes that people "in the know" are currently talking about are
hardly prepared to run huge generators 24/7.
> Seawater extraction has a lot going for it IMHO, if you can adapt structures
> to the ration of elements found in seawater, because, as Eric Hunting
> outlines, you can get a lot of power from the sea - either by wind, waves,
> solar, or OTEC. Of course ocean operations have their own hazards from
> storms and corrosion and encrustation.
There's some stuff about this on the seasteading.org site as well:
http://seasteading.org/seastead.org/book_beta/full_book_beta.html
Paul D. Fernhout
nothing personal meant by this post and the previous one. :-)
Hod Lipson is at Cornell, actually:
http://www.mae.cornell.edu/Lipson/
Unless he recently moved?
But lots of people seem to make that substitution:
"A 3D Printer On Every Desktop?"
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/09/2239206
""Two Cornell researchers have designed an open source 3D printer that costs
just $2,400. The self-assembly kit is part of what they call the Fab@Home
project — they hope it will spark development of rapid prototyping for the
consumer market in the same way the Altair 8800 did for personal computing
in seventies." ...
http://web.mae.cornell.edu/ccsl/temp/EvanMalone/FabAtHome/SqueezeBulbDemoMovie.wmv
Update: 01/10 04:02 GMT by KD : The developers of this kit are at Cornell,
not Carnegie Mellon University as the original post erroneously stated. "
I was actually surprised twenty years ago or so ago how little stuff CMU had
on advanced manufacturing (don't know about now) given they have both a
school of arts and design and lots of robotics work (so, the two extremes,
but little in the middle). Does the Carnegie affiliation somehow hold them
back? :-) Some of what they have now:
"The Center for Integrated Manufacturing Decision Systems"
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/mws/ftp/www/cimds-home.html
That's not to say they don't have many people there interested in materials
science as a separate topic. Example:
http://www.chem.cmu.edu/groups/maty/center/
I'm not saying that all reflects the faculty's interests either -- it more
reflects the fact that it has been easier to get money for defense related
robotics than defense related sustainable distributed manufacturing (one is
new and has the promise of getting rid of the qualms of human soldiers in
suppressing their own populace,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_robot
one competes with political donors to Congress who own centralized
industries, like Carnegie did).
"Officials Defend Bailout; Auto Industry Wants A Share"
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/bulletin/bulletin_081119.htm
See for example:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue8.htm
"Take Andrew Carnegie, the bobbin boy, who would certainly have been as
appalled as the rest of us at the order to fire on strikers at his Homestead
plant. But the system he helped to create was committed to pushing men until
they reacted violently or dropped dead. It was called "the Iron Law of
Wages." Once his colleagues were interested in the principles of the Iron
Law, they could only see the courage and defiance of the Homestead strikers
as an opportunity to provoke a crisis which would allow the steel union to
be broken with state militia and public funds. Crushing opposition is the
obligatory scene in the industrial drama, whatever it takes, and no matter
how much individual industrial leaders like Carnegie might be reluctant to
do so."
Cornell, on the other hand, gives us GMOs:
"GMO Eggplants With Built-in Pesticide [from Cornell]"
http://io9.com/308862/gmo-eggplants-with-built+in-pesticide
"Confirmed: GMO Maize Causes Lower Fertility"
http://www.javno.com/en/lifestyle/clanak.php?id=202806
and, as the only "agricultural land grant' Ivy League institution, the
destruction of the family farm. :-(
"Family Farmers Warn of Dangers of Genetically Engineered Crops"
http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/genet1.html
"There is collusion across the United States between USDA, our land grant
university systems and the Monsanto's of the world to facilitate this new
world order which will bring about the globalization and industrialization
of agriculture."
Personally, if feel an emphasis on "agricultural robotics", or
cross-breeding the best of CMU and Cornell, would be a good idea for both
institutions, since organic agriculture is an information intensive
business, and agricultural robots could do precision farming and minimize
pesticide use and water use and fertilizer use in various ways (including
just picking insects off the plants). But instead we may well get the worst
of the both -- killer robots that enforce the spread GMOs? :-(
--Paul Fernhout