If you can set up a loop − 3d fabrication devices, fabrication tools, damage sensors, passive and active, machines for dissassembling things into basic parts and melting them into scrap, robots for assembling them, some source of power, a database for tracking things, wifi or bluetooth to connect stuff, and made them all modular and redundant, with the robots also assigned to removing and replacing broken parts on each other and everything else—if you can get that to be self repairing in a sustaining way,, you can just add things into its loop in some way. So, hypothetically, you build a big pyramid vault somewhere with a lot of spare raw materials for what gets slowly lost in the recycling process, and you staff it with robots… it won’t last forever but it might last a long time. Maybe you’d even incorporate an organic phase—dump unsalvageable plastic parts into a pool of bacteria or a garden or something, harvest plants, make plastic… it shouldn’t even take nanotech to make a self repairing setup that could care for your cryonically stored brains.
We don’t have much experience in building tech that will last a long time without human interaction. Our society has been moving towards a “bring down the initial purchase price by sacrificing reliability, expect people to buy another when it wears out” for a long time. Even if you do your best to find only parts that are the highest quality and expected to last a long time, you’re not going to be able to avoid planning to use many parts for 10x longer than anyone has ever used them before.
Aside from component reliability, this sounds very complicated. Do difficult and expensive to make, and then issues of system reliability.
Agreed, but I think it’d be a worthwhile project to work towards. I can think of some ways to make it simpler. Recognition of modules could be aided by rfid tags or just plain old barcodes embedded in the objects that have some information about what part a robot is looking at and its orientation relative to the barcode stamp or rfid chip. There could be lines painted on the floors or walls and barcodes visible for navigation around the facility.
I guess a really hard part would be maintaining the pyramid or structure or whatever housing everything. You’d have to choose between building something you hope will last a long time and leaving it be—like a big stone pyramid or even a cave. Or you could build it all modular like the rest of it—like a lattice work or robot hive kind of thing. I’m kind of thinking something like these would be useful for city building, too… there was an article in Discover a long while back that referred to a paper by klaus lackner and wendt about their idea for auxons, I think it was- machines that would turn a big chunk of the desert into solar paneling. http://discovermagazine.com/1995/oct/robotbuildthysel569 <--- there. Their suggestion was to harvest raw materials from the desert topsoil using carbothermic separation. I’m thinking you could use something similar for recycling if everything else failed? I don’t know enough about the processes involved. I guess the idea has been a research area for a little bit—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanking_replicator … well anyways. The redundancy of the elements involved could overcome some reliability issues. There doesn’t have to be a crucial part of the chain where if one piece breaks down everything is broken. Problems could at least be relegated to disasters affecting whole classes of objects breaking down at once, like if all the robots were smashed at the same time by vault-robbers.
I should say I agree that we don’t have much experience in building tech that will last a long time and that the expense is definitely high. I don’t know that component reliability is as important as being able to replace components efficiently with as little waste as possible. Energy demand is a big concern. Having a fully automated power plant of some kind is a big concern, although maybe solar wouldn’t be so bad. I know you’d still desire to store the heat energy, say, as molten saline, to get steady output, and that could cause big difficulties in the long term. Maybe steady output isn’t necessary though, just frequent enough and high enough output to keep things repaired before too many break down.
There are probably good reasons I’m missing. My feeling though is once you get a clanking replicator, you can put more objects into its loop for it to maintain, and grow it up into cities and things that are (eventually) totally self repairing and post-scarcity. Kind of like a big matter-moving operating system. It might only be you know simple at the beginning, but there’d be huge upwards potential for growth and sophistication.
If you can set up a loop − 3d fabrication devices, fabrication tools, damage sensors, passive and active, machines for dissassembling things into basic parts and melting them into scrap, robots for assembling them, some source of power, a database for tracking things, wifi or bluetooth to connect stuff, and made them all modular and redundant, with the robots also assigned to removing and replacing broken parts on each other and everything else—if you can get that to be self repairing in a sustaining way,, you can just add things into its loop in some way. So, hypothetically, you build a big pyramid vault somewhere with a lot of spare raw materials for what gets slowly lost in the recycling process, and you staff it with robots… it won’t last forever but it might last a long time. Maybe you’d even incorporate an organic phase—dump unsalvageable plastic parts into a pool of bacteria or a garden or something, harvest plants, make plastic… it shouldn’t even take nanotech to make a self repairing setup that could care for your cryonically stored brains.
We don’t have much experience in building tech that will last a long time without human interaction. Our society has been moving towards a “bring down the initial purchase price by sacrificing reliability, expect people to buy another when it wears out” for a long time. Even if you do your best to find only parts that are the highest quality and expected to last a long time, you’re not going to be able to avoid planning to use many parts for 10x longer than anyone has ever used them before.
Aside from component reliability, this sounds very complicated. Do difficult and expensive to make, and then issues of system reliability.
Agreed, but I think it’d be a worthwhile project to work towards. I can think of some ways to make it simpler. Recognition of modules could be aided by rfid tags or just plain old barcodes embedded in the objects that have some information about what part a robot is looking at and its orientation relative to the barcode stamp or rfid chip. There could be lines painted on the floors or walls and barcodes visible for navigation around the facility. I guess a really hard part would be maintaining the pyramid or structure or whatever housing everything. You’d have to choose between building something you hope will last a long time and leaving it be—like a big stone pyramid or even a cave. Or you could build it all modular like the rest of it—like a lattice work or robot hive kind of thing. I’m kind of thinking something like these would be useful for city building, too… there was an article in Discover a long while back that referred to a paper by klaus lackner and wendt about their idea for auxons, I think it was- machines that would turn a big chunk of the desert into solar paneling. http://discovermagazine.com/1995/oct/robotbuildthysel569 <--- there. Their suggestion was to harvest raw materials from the desert topsoil using carbothermic separation. I’m thinking you could use something similar for recycling if everything else failed? I don’t know enough about the processes involved. I guess the idea has been a research area for a little bit—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanking_replicator … well anyways. The redundancy of the elements involved could overcome some reliability issues. There doesn’t have to be a crucial part of the chain where if one piece breaks down everything is broken. Problems could at least be relegated to disasters affecting whole classes of objects breaking down at once, like if all the robots were smashed at the same time by vault-robbers.
I should say I agree that we don’t have much experience in building tech that will last a long time and that the expense is definitely high. I don’t know that component reliability is as important as being able to replace components efficiently with as little waste as possible. Energy demand is a big concern. Having a fully automated power plant of some kind is a big concern, although maybe solar wouldn’t be so bad. I know you’d still desire to store the heat energy, say, as molten saline, to get steady output, and that could cause big difficulties in the long term. Maybe steady output isn’t necessary though, just frequent enough and high enough output to keep things repaired before too many break down.
At that point you can build self replicator seed and get it onto the moon. I’m not sure why there isn’t enough focus on this.
There are probably good reasons I’m missing. My feeling though is once you get a clanking replicator, you can put more objects into its loop for it to maintain, and grow it up into cities and things that are (eventually) totally self repairing and post-scarcity. Kind of like a big matter-moving operating system. It might only be you know simple at the beginning, but there’d be huge upwards potential for growth and sophistication.