An open post
for Thewriterinblack, who has mad skilz, and who is SURE that heavy industry as we know it now is not needed and will change by some new magic laws of physics he has discovered.
Without rancor, and to avoid you having to go to Sarah Hoyts place and read through miles of comments, Sara posits that individuals have the power to do a great deal- that life will still be possible on a micro rather than a macro scale, that the social engineering Marxists want to do can not stop the individual from doing things on a “Cottage” level. (There is a lot more to the post, but this was my takeaway bit)
Anyway, I pointed out that there are still the products of heavy industry that require the ability of heavy industry- you can make a rifle, or a toaster, or a micrometer by yourself at home, assuming you have the tools and are able to acquire the knowledge, but there are things that require heavy industry, and will always require heavy industry. Several people have taken issue with this, and predictably, they are people who have no idea how the actual world works. I have invited them here to discuss this, but I expect crickets. Most of that specific type of troll will never get out from behind the safety of mama’s skirt.
31 comments Og | Uncategorized
You cannot, for example, build a modern diesel locomotive in a garage. Not a full-size one capable of hauling 100 cars full of coal over the Rocky Mountains, anyway.
Strawman! You insulted me! You said boat when you meant ship! besides I’m a physicist and I no moar than u!
(That, by the way, is what I was accused of, after having made the same point you just did)
Even the average auto is beyond even the brightest and most talented. A locomotive engine- or even a semi engine- will never be made by cottage industry. And that is just a tiny example- so much of what we depend on for daily life MUST be supplied by heavy industry, and that infrastructure is invisible to most, so they assume if they don’t see it, it’s not required.
Incidentally, I wrote my comment before I even got to Sarah’s blog in my blogroll and found your comments and answers there–so I don’t know what that means, but I think it might be scary.
You will have heavy industry. What you likely will NOT have — thanks to YOUR heavy industry — is dark satanic mills.
M
Indeed, Mark. the face of industry is changing all the time- but there are things that cannot change- not because I will it, but because there are physical limits.
One thing I did find interesting in what WiB said — almost in passing — is a bit of handwavium that I’m playing with in the Dolly stories — the notion that Drexler’s assemblers might arise (someday real soon now) and be able to build the 3,400lb casting atom-by-atom.
Well, I have them make a gun after a fashion (quelle ironique)(they actually make a linear accelerator and get a microscopic metal pellet moving really fast in the desired direction), but… you get the idea.
But it strikes me as a neat notion to play with, and a fun tweak to the sense of wonder, and not something to be taken all that seriously.
M
Indeed! Problem is, it still takes X amount of heat to cause molecules to bond. Dissipating that heat is a difficult endeavor, and while the idea of nanites constructing something large is interesting and might even be possible, how do you get rid of the heat quickly enough that the builders themselves aren’t consumed in the process?
A lot of parts are cast as powdered metal and sintered into solids. This is analagous to the process you posit, but you can’t make, for instance, a rifle barrel in that way. Forging or working of the material is required to align the grain of the material for strength. It’s the difference between particleboard and plywood, to illustrate the point more clearly.
Let’s take our engine block. Assuming you can make magic nanites that can miraculously deal with the temperatures involved and dissipate the heat properly,(a pretty damned big assumption) AND align the grain of the material for optimal strength, how do you machine it? it still takes huge machinery- far outside the range of even the wealthiest and most dedicated hobbyist- to machine. And once machined it has to be inspected, more huge machinery, has to be assembled, more huge machinery, etc. etc. etc.
I’m not really surprised by this, just annoyed. It’s something I have seen all my life, people who have never actually done anything telling everyone else how it can and should be done with zero grounding in reality. I spend my life cleaning up the messes of morons like that.
Oo! Heat. Hadn’t thought much about heat. At least not in the assembler context. Of course, if the assemblers become a part of the material…
Have to take that into consideration.
Is it possible, since we’re building atom-by-atom, to set the atoms down in a lattice arrangment (assuming the molecular bonds of the elements we’re working with will allow that)? To maybe make the resulting material lighter? Does reduced mass affect the ability to dissipate heat? Or is that more a matter of the surrounding medium (air vs water vs a colloid or something)?
M
Before I chime in, let me say that I have read your blog for two years and have immense respect for you and your writing.
And this is simply an exercise in theory.
Mark Alger –
I believe there were people who might have said the same thing about the Wright brothers – about flying as a neat notion to play with…..and not something to be taken all that seriously.
Well, since this is a heavy theory argument, farriers of 150 years ago would have sworn the same thing about horses.
Now since we are arguing about technologies that don’t yet exist or have not developed to the point that they will bring about the changes we are talking about, we would HAVE to make some assumptions to have a debate.
I second the Drexler’s assemblers comments.
Imagine Drexler’s assemblers being able to create electrical cable in place in the earth without trenching and transporting their own fabrication materials via small scale piping that is created where it is needed and then reverse assembled when no longer necessary. Basically once you have a small set of assemblers you could in theory have them assemble others of whatever type you might need. And since they operate on nanoscale, they could build molecules up into larger structures with a purity and a precision that we only dream about today. As far as power, how much electricity could be generated by leaves moving in all of the trees in a forest? All of the blades of grass in a field?
Imagine molecular fibers conducting small amounts of electricity to capacitors built up by nanobots 24 hours a day. Eventually you will have gigajoules of energy.
How much electricity could be generated if every oil deposit could be exploited by Drexler assemblers?
How much easier would nuclear power be to harness if nanobots would handle construction of the facility and shielding and even transport of miniscule amounts of Plutonium through more of those magic pipelines underground? These devices work without tiring until they break, and then the components can be remanufactured into more assemblers.
Just for fun, imagine Drexler’s assemblers fabricating those crystals that react to flexion by generating electricity. Imagine those piezo crystals being formed at the base of every stem of every leaf in a tree. Imagine the amount of electricity that could be gathered by carbon fiber conductive threads connecting those crystals to capacitors among the roots of the trees. Imagine a roadway generated molecule by molecule and then kept in repair by these nanobots.
Imagine that roadway having conductive carbon nanotube pathways embedded beneath the hard surface that would conduct electricity to wherever it is needed.
Imagine Drexler’s assemblers desalinating seawater and harvesting gold and platinum and other metals from the process. Imagine those magic pipelines being assembled under the roadways and moving water and minerals under the earth…..
Imagine being able to create a living space with a handful of powder that contains some assemblers. The assemblers would gather the materials they need from the local environment and assemble those materials into the type of construction you desire.
Go back in time 300 years and tell those people that people will routinely fly through the air in metal tubes and they might have burned you at the stake.
You sort of have no choice but to assemble in a lattice. Problem is, the lattice has to be ‘Warped”, so to speak, to induce the sort of deformation that in most metals means strength. And your nanite isn’t going to do that. But lets say they can, somehow, cause the kind of plastic deformation that results in the flow of material to create strength, a la forging. That requires power. You have- lets say- half a billion nanites welding the structure of an item together, atom by atom. Where does that power come from? How do you get it from wherever it is to the nanites? you either have a vast power source, or you teach the nanites to consume something- lets say, twinkies- for energy. Now you lose production each time a nanite has to stop welding it’s one atom at a time and go to the twinkie room to eat. You could bathe the entire thing in twinkie fluid, but the nutrient would probably adversely affect the final product. So some other source of power has to be found. And then you have to deliver that power to the nanites, who use it to weld all those molecules together. And then you have to dissipate that heat. And no, you can’t use the heat to power the nanites, because the overhead required to turn heat into energy would make the nanites less efficient. You could have heat gathering nanites and welding nanites, but you return to the twinkie issue again. Sure, all those issues could eventually be overcome. The tech required and the intensity of the r&d required would make the space program look like a high school science project hastily thrown together the weekend before competition.
As far as heat dissipation, your assemblers have virtually the entire world full of resources that could be used to dissipate the heat. There are even materials that can be assembled into structures that translate heat into electricity, so the heat could be used to power the next set of assemblers…….
Imagine a set of ants disassembling a moose. They don’t move forty pounds of meat at a time, but they could eventually get that creature stripped down far further than your or I could without chemical or thermal assistance.
Imagine the same type of industrious activity on a nanoscale. The 3400 pound engine block might not be assembled as quickly as casting it, but you could build it to the exact form you want and eliminate machining costs. And you could have hundreds being assembled at the same time *onsite* where they are to be used. So less distribution and delivery costs. The assemblers themselves would generate their own pipelines for distribution of materials and then harvest those pipelines when they are no longer needed.
Sin: Imagine the technology required to make that happen, and the scale on which it must take place simply to get the technology together to do something as simple as make a spoon.
Who is working on it now? What progress have they made? What limits their development? If this is even remotely possible- which, right now, it is not- but if it were, just making the spoon would make the spoon cost more than the aforementioned space program. And you want to do this with car engines? truck engines? CNC mills? jet engines? How can this ever work?
This is absolutely nothing like saying “Oh, in 200 years you’ll fly through the air in metal tubes” Rather, it’s like saying “Oh, in 200 years you’ll be able to eat nails and shit hammers” So long as it is possible to do something cheaply one way, it will never be done another way. How much oil shale development existed when gasoline was 53 cents a gallon? When will people be interested in buying a three billion dollar spoon when you can get one made in the ordinary way for a buck?
We are talking about robots the size of molecules. I would hazard the easiest material to fabricate the nanobots out of would be carbon. Carbon has many properties that would make it ideal for this.
Is it possible that case hardening as a technique on the molecular level would give you enough of the same properties as forging and plastic deformation on the end product?
Sorry, Sin. You really do have no idea how heavy manufacturing works. And what you are positing is a pipe dream that will never happen. Ants tend not to disassemble mooses, but let’s look at flies. Disassembling a moose is not their intent, reproduction is. It happens that it uses the substance of the moose to do so. The nanites you posit, the ones we are talking about- got any handy? What company is making them?
In oither words, no. Nothing is happening in that direction, and if and when it does, nobody will use that method to make an engine block, because you simply will not be able to do the things building atom by atom that you can do by casting, which will of course remain orders of magnitude cheaper. It is one thing to have thought experiments, and write science fiction; a powerful lot of things from science fiction became science fact. A FAR GREATER number of things in science fiction remained science fiction, and then became simply ludicrous
Horses were cheaper than cars when cars first came about.
The technology improved.
Rocket engines for extra atmosphere travel were immensely expensive and complicated for commercial use in the 1960s. Now we have multiple companies developing reusable spacecraft as a commercial venture.
And I would not say the nanobots would be developed for fabrication. But for cancer treatment, or prevention of some of the symptoms of disease or old age?
I firmly believe that this will start as a medical development and then spread into other areas.
Nanobots would be ideal for removing some of the small scale tumors that certain diseases cause without having to slice a person’s body into ribbons. And think about the ways these devices could handle bullet wounds and explosion trauma.
These devices will be developed for medical and military use and then move out into other uses.
I swear it.
Is it possible that case hardening as a technique on the molecular level would give you enough of the same properties as forging and plastic deformation on the end product?
No. Forging and case hardening require a forge, or a lot of heat. Is it possible that there might be other things that the nanites could do?Sure. Got any nanites?
http://news.ufl.edu/2012/07/16/nanobot/
University of Florida researchers have developed a programmable bot.
http://news.ufl.edu/2012/07/16/nanobot/
University of Florida researchers have developed a programmable bot.
Up to this point in time, the closest thing to a purely mechanical nanorobot that has ever been created was the work of U.C. Berkeley affiliate Kris Pister. He invented a solar-powered robot that measures only 8.5 millimeters and can walk slowly on two “legs†like humans do. True to form, Pister composed his robot primarily of tiny silicon pieces called transducers which are capable of taking the energy generated by the robot’s solar cell and turning it into mechanical power. Although extremely tiny, technically the robot that Pister created is macroscopic. But it does represent a valuable step in the scaling-down process of traditional electromechanical robots.
Read more: http://nanogloss.com/nanobots/what-nanobots-are-made-out-of/#ixzz2i8UknYZb
University of Florida researchers have developed a programmable bot.
Up to this point in time, the closest thing to a purely mechanical nanorobot that has ever been created was the work of U.C. Berkeley affiliate Kris Pister. He invented a solar-powered robot that measures only 8.5 millimeters and can walk slowly on two “legs†like humans do. True to form, Pister composed his robot primarily of tiny silicon pieces called transducers which are capable of taking the energy generated by the robot’s solar cell and turning it into mechanical power. Although extremely tiny, technically the robot that Pister created is macroscopic. But it does represent a valuable step in the scaling-down process of traditional electromechanical robots.
Read more: http://nanogloss.com/nanobots/what-nanobots-are-made-out-of/#ixzz2i8UknYZb
University of Florida researchers have developed a programmable bot.
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — University of Florida researchers have moved a step closer to treating diseases on a cellular level by creating a tiny particle that can be programmed to shut down the genetic production line that cranks out disease-related proteins.
In laboratory tests, these newly created “nanorobots†all but eradicated hepatitis C virus infection. The programmable nature of the particle makes it potentially useful against diseases such as cancer and other viral infections.
Up to this point in time, the closest thing to a purely mechanical nanorobot that has ever been created was the work of U.C. Berkeley affiliate Kris Pister. He invented a solar-powered robot that measures only 8.5 millimeters and can walk slowly on two “legs†like humans do. True to form, Pister composed his robot primarily of tiny silicon pieces called transducers which are capable of taking the energy generated by the robot’s solar cell and turning it into mechanical power. Although extremely tiny, technically the robot that Pister created is macroscopic. But it does represent a valuable step in the scaling-down process of traditional electromechanical robots.
I would put the links but your spam filter doesn’t seem to like them.
Let’s talk about nanites for a moment, just because.
First, i want to talk about my phone. I despise my phone because I hate the leash it is. But it has so much processing power it is mind boggling. Now, that has happened because of miniaturization. Miniturization is, in that respect, awesome.
But there are still minimum requirements. A mechanisn- a nanite, if you will- must be small. It must be able- if it is, for instance- making an engine block- be able to generate enough energy to attach the molecules at a literal molecular level. It has to also know where to attach the next molecule, and when that happens it has to know where to attach the next one, and so on. And it has to keep doing that for the whole project, AND know when to stop. So it will need to have a blueprint of the whole project onboard. It will have to be able to understand where to acquire energy, and how to use it. Do I think that miniaturization will ever allow nanites to be built that can do all those things? I would imagine there is a minimum practical size, just as there is a minimum practical jet engine size.
More likely is a machine that will be able to “Hypnotize” molecules, and direct them to the place where they are supposed to be. Imagine a stereolithograph that just tells the materials where to go, and they go there. THis is dramatically more feasable, but one way or another, a certain amount of heat will be generated,and a certain amount of power will be required, and even if you make the very best casting a new semi could ever want, you still need a six million dollar machine to turn it from a casting into a part.
Sorry, I have no idea why this is going to spam, I retrieved the comments.
On any of the links given, do any of the nanites made have anything like the capabilities required to make- say, our spoon, let alone the engine block for the semi?
And I have to go to bed. I have to get up early and program a robot- that is, after all- what I do for a living, so I know a thing or two about robots and how they work. So yap all you want, I probably won’t be able to respond until late saturday or maybe sunday.
Well! That was fun.
Sin. Thanks for all the food for thought. I’m a science fiction writer and a lifelong reader in the literature of ideas. As such, I think I know not to make unwarranted assumptions about what is possible and what is not.
However, a good many fields have been promising an awful lot for a very long time and haven’t delivered. Not to say that what they promise will never eventuate, but… when? Trying to figure the time scale out is part of the fun.
But you have to be wary of enthusiasms. Especially — and here’s the dark side — when rent-seeking technologists warp the abusive power of government to take by force what they can’t earn the marketplace and badly misdirect resources to projects and technologies which are flat-out not ready for prime time. I give you Solyndra, and the Tesla electric car.
After all, if da Vinci had published from his notebooks, people might have been persuaded that a flying machine was just around the corner. There was a plan all drawn out on paper right there!
But it remained a fun toy for the imagination until Sikorsky. 1942. What? Something on the order of 500 years?
M
Nice work that man!
Well here is one physicist (and professional disruptive technology analyst) who agrees with you, Og. The proponents of new technologies are often unable to see the world as anything but a series of nails to be pounded down with their preferred hammer. The key is to understand that even if a given technology can do something, it is not guaranteed to do it cheaper or better than pre-existing means. See the many confident predictions that by the year 2000 we would all have private airplanes flying from our garages. Even though aerospace engineering has come light years since the time those predictions were made, it is still safer and cheaper to drive a car.
Nanoassemblers are a fascinating idea but, as you point out, the thermodynamics of molecularly assembling macroscopic objects are nigh insurmountable. Instead of trying to figure out how to coordinate and cool millions of tiny robots as they make a (relatively) crude steel part like an engine block, imagine what they can do if working on the scale appropriate to them. Metamaterials, materials whose tailored microstructures give them properties wildly different than those of the substance they are constructed from, are one obvious area to explore and could revolutionize many industries. If you need a big steel bar, though, you’re probably still going to make it at a foundry. Of course, the new technology might make that foundry far more efficient.
One already existing technology I’ve seen this confusion about is 3D printing. I don’t want this post to turn into a book, so I’ll direct anyone who’s interested to a free example white-paper I wrote for my company:
http://prokalkeo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Prokalkeo_2013_3d_Metal_Manufacturing.pdf
Precisely, Scipio. The fact is, that if you can build pseudointelligence into a nanobot, why would you waste it “Growing” an engine block, when you could be using it to unclog arteries, or fix damage caused by a stroke. Or maybe troubleshoot electronic systems or the complex electromechanicals in avionics?
“growing” an engine block is problematic for a great number of reasons, and the metallurgy you touch on is only a small part of the problem- the heat buildup from the assembly at the molecular level would occur in a linear but uneven fashion- one end would have cooled down while the leading edge would still be red hot, how do you control the warpage? 3d printing gives you a structure not unlike particleboard- not a particularly useful grain pattern for a lot of things.
I work with 3d lithography in metals and plastics all the time. It’s not the magic technology that everyone believes it to be.
Thanks for commenting. I hope to have more discussion on this subject- can I count on you to take part? A little extra sanity is always welcome.
Oh! Great white paper. I bet we know some of the same people. On my desk at work is a 3d solid metal part made on an Extrude Hone machine. An interesting plaything, and the future applications are very interesting.
GE is manufacturing their turbine blades with EBM machines now, at an enormous reduction in cost. The strength of SLS, EBM, and LENS output parts is roughly equivalent to forged parts, as far as my research was able to determine.
I will certainly be hanging about to add my 2 cents to this discussion as I am able to. My friend and I started our company because we love this stuff, after all!
Thanks, Scip. I have seen those! A very interesting process. As you say, though, its not a process that lends itself to making thirty thousand giant diesel crankshafts in a year. Thanks.