And there’s no way I’m ever going to educate morons like Thewriterinblack,(Known herafter as Tinkerbell, because only “Believing” is meaningful to him) who persists in hiding behind Sarah Hoyt’s skirts because he’s not man enough to come here and take his medicine, and possibly have a fact or two jammed into his thick skull.

On the other hand, there may be people that are legitimately ignorant, and for those people it’s worth having this conversation. Plus a couple of people have come along- people like Scipio Americanus who is, of course, actually working in industry, and unlike Tinkerbell, has some idea what heavy industry is.

But first, like I spoke about my cellphone before, I want to talk about something else. In this case, Dermestid beetles.

The dermestid beetle is a pretty good model on which to base nanites. They are fairly efficient little critters, they can easily be raised in the home, and they can be called upon to do a very specific type of a job that we need done. Here’s a video of that. Warning, not for the weak of stomach.

Dermestid beetles are very efficient- if you don’t want to follow the link- at removing flesh, cartilage- in fact any non-hard organic material, and are used by professionals to clean animal bones for taxidermy or scientific study. They need to be kept healthy, of course, and they need to be fed, and they require care if they are to do their jobs. You have to care for them all the time, even when they’re not working for you. You have to keep them clean and keep them fed and it’s not easy.

The same, of course, would be true of Nanites. Since they would exist at a molecular level, they would be much more difficult to maintain, you would need the most incredible machinery just to see them, and if one or two managed to get their instructions mixed up you could come home tomorrow to find a giant pile of rust where your car used to be. Assuming you could afford to own them privately, which you probably could not. A technology capable of assembling something at a molecular level, in quantities of billions you’d need for any of it to be effective, or even remotely useful, would be prohibitively expensive and require expensive and complex equipment to maintain.

So far the discussion centered on that sort of thing, because that was my initial example- you cannot make a locomotive engine block in a garage. Of course Tinkerbell took exception to that, because apparently he loves being wrong- I don’t know. What I do know, is that my original comment on the subject was clear: heavy industry will always remain with us, and if we’re not doing it in our country, someone else will be.

Let’s look at a very few permanent and unchangeable examples.

Oil and gas. Oil and gas exist where they exist, and do not exist where they do not exist. In order to separate them from the planet which contains them, expensive, large, and heavy equipment is required.

It is possible for an individual to drill for oil himself, on a personal basis, and there are people who do, to this day. I myself have helped set up one of these rigs. Still, you cannot get oil out of the ground, where no oil exists.

So: Oil and gas. Oil and gas are two heavy industries that are heavy industries, and will always remain heavy industries. Heavy equipment will always be required to extract oil and gas, and that equipment can only be made by heavy industry.

Is it possible that alternative energy sources will arise that make natural gas and crude oil unnecessary? Possibly, but nothing that moves runs without bearings and/or some lubrication and both the plastics in “Dry” bearings and the grease in normal bearings is made from crude oil, so that will never go away so long as mechanisms of any kind exist. Oh, and the lions share of plastics of all kinds? Crude oil. So your ipad, your phone, almost eveyrthing you see in your car, a lot of cloth, a number of home furnishings, and a powerful lot of adhesives, too, all those things don’t happen without the oil coming out of the ground, and it has to come out of the ground where it is, and not in your backyard. Unless your backyard happens to be an oilfield that is, and even then, heavy equipment.

Another related heavy industry is mining. In the quantities raw materials are required, they cannot and never will be a ctottage industry, even if there were deposits of coppper, nickel, coal, and uranium under your carport. Mining is a heavy industry, and can and will never be anything but a heavy industry, because of the nature of mining. Is it possible that at some point some other method of obtaining those materials will present itself? Absolutely. It could begin raining particles of copper on demand, or we could develop a way to turn lead into any other element. Which would make gold pretty worthless.

No, there is no substitute, when you need large amounts of ore or coal or salt or- or hell, anything that comes out of the ground, you have two invariables: You must take them out of the ground where they are in the ground, and you must have heavy equipment to extract them and heavy equipment to transport them to where they are needed. And then most of the time you need heavy equipment to turn that ore into refined material, or that coal/oil/gas into electricity or plastics or even motive power.

Once you have established that the heavy industries provide nearly everything from which nearly everything is made, once you understand that only heavy equipment can do- quite literally- the heavy lifting, you understand that there are a lot of things that cottage industry will and can replace, but heavy industry will always be with us. And all of this is even before- in fact way before- you ever even begin to discuss the practical and logisticalimpossibility of making engine blocks any other way than the way they are now, which is only a miniscule part of the equation.

Don’t try telling that to tinkerbell. he knows if he believes hard enough his wishes will all come true.

Edited to add: Silicon greybeard is talking about this as well, you should go read. Ill add a link when i get home.