Will we ever have Poké Balls in real life? How fast could they be at storing and retrieving animals? Requirements:
Made of atoms, no teleportation or fantasy physics.
Small enough to be easily thrown, say under 5 inches diameter
Must be able to disassemble and reconstruct an animal as large as an elephant in a reasonable amount of time, say 5 minutes, and store its pattern digitally
Must reconstruct the animal to enough fidelity that its memories are intact and it’s physically identical for most purposes, though maybe not quite to the cellular level
No external power source
Works basically wherever you throw it, though it might be slower to print the animal if it only has air to use as feedstock mass or can’t spread out to dissipate heat
Should not destroy nearby buildings when used
Animals must feel no pain during the process
It feels pretty likely to me that we’ll be able to print complex animals eventually using nanotech/biotech, but the speed requirements here might be pushing the limits of what’s possible. In particular heat dissipation seems like a huge challenge; assuming that 0.2 kcal/g of waste heat is created while assembling the elephant, which is well below what elephants need to build their tissues, you would need to dissipate about 5 GJ of heat, which would take even a full-sized nuclear power plant cooling tower a few seconds. Power might be another challenge. Drexler claims you can eat fuel and oxidizer, turn all the mass into basically any lower-energy state, and come out easily net positive on energy. But if there is none available you would need a nuclear reactor.
All we need to create is a Ditto. A blob of nanotech wouldn’t need 5 seconds to take the shape of the surface of an elephant and start mimicing its behavior; is it good enough to optionally do the infilling later if it’s convenient?
Will we ever have Poké Balls in real life? How fast could they be at storing and retrieving animals? Requirements:
Made of atoms, no teleportation or fantasy physics.
Small enough to be easily thrown, say under 5 inches diameter
Must be able to disassemble and reconstruct an animal as large as an elephant in a reasonable amount of time, say 5 minutes, and store its pattern digitally
Must reconstruct the animal to enough fidelity that its memories are intact and it’s physically identical for most purposes, though maybe not quite to the cellular level
No external power source
Works basically wherever you throw it, though it might be slower to print the animal if it only has air to use as feedstock mass or can’t spread out to dissipate heat
Should not destroy nearby buildings when used
Animals must feel no pain during the process
It feels pretty likely to me that we’ll be able to print complex animals eventually using nanotech/biotech, but the speed requirements here might be pushing the limits of what’s possible. In particular heat dissipation seems like a huge challenge; assuming that 0.2 kcal/g of waste heat is created while assembling the elephant, which is well below what elephants need to build their tissues, you would need to dissipate about 5 GJ of heat, which would take even a full-sized nuclear power plant cooling tower a few seconds. Power might be another challenge. Drexler claims you can eat fuel and oxidizer, turn all the mass into basically any lower-energy state, and come out easily net positive on energy. But if there is none available you would need a nuclear reactor.
All we need to create is a Ditto. A blob of nanotech wouldn’t need 5 seconds to take the shape of the surface of an elephant and start mimicing its behavior; is it good enough to optionally do the infilling later if it’s convenient?