Lúcio de Souza Coelho wrote:
If you have "strong", Drexler-like nanotech - i.e., assemblers and
disasemblers - this scare of upcoming shortage of resources becomes
moot, and the need of "ephemeralization" as you call it also tends to
disappear. Given strong nanotech it would be for instance very cheap
OK. But I wasn't hypothesizing strong nanotech, at least not
immediately. Osmotic filters that could process brines from
desalinization plants would address this problem. That's weak nanotech,
and assemblers/disassemblers in only a very limited form. I think this
may well be doable within 10-15 years. I expect strong nanotech to show
up eventually, but not at first.
to gather resources elsewhere in the Solar System - asteroid mining
seems specially promising. Indeed, even exploration of untapped
Check your energetics. Asteroid mining is promising for space-based
construction. Otherwise you'd better at least have controllable fusion
rockets.
resources here on Earth, like the possibility ocean mining that you
mention, would likely increase available resources by an order of
magnitude or so - and that likely requires just "weak" nanotech.
(Which I call "materials science on steroids". :)
Mining the ocean would increase the availability of most materials
sufficiently that they would no longer be the limiting characteristic of
the environment. There are a few that just basically aren't very
soluble, and for those it might be necessary to disassemble granite or
basalt. Making this economic is probably 5 years after ocean mining
becomes profitable. (This is a wild guess!)
Personally my attitude toward the cyclical alerts of "OMG! This or
that resource is running short! The world is doomed! We are all gonna
die!" tends to be skeptical. Basically because this has happened
several times in history and what usually happens is, once this or
that resource gets more expensive, the pressure for finding
alternatives also increases - and so far they were found.
You are ignoring the stress that civilization went through before the
alternatives were found. And sometimes they weren't found, and we had
to adapt to the results. One method of adapting is altering the devices
so that they don't use as much of the scarce resource. Thus, as I
proposed, wearable monitors. If you consider cellphones, we've already
made a start in that direction...but the screen would need to improve
it's resolution until it could display, say, 1200X10000 pixels, be light
enough to wear, draw little enough power to run off batteries, etc. It
would also help if the screen had an adjustable transparency, but that's
probably not necessary. (Still, one way of doing this would be as a
projection TV style device (or devices...possibly several per eye.)
Note that this would, almost as a side effect, allow for true 3-D
visualization. So there are lots of grounds on which it could be
sold...but one important feature would be that because it didn't use
large quantities of expensive resources it could be cheap to make.
Note that this is the kind of device that acts as a force multiplier.
Once you build it, 3-D becomes cheap. Once 3-D becomes cheap, 3-D
visualization becomes cheap. So does primitive virtual reality. But
the force multiplier comes in when you hook it up to a CAD system.
Especially one that being used to design electronics or nano-machinery.
Or to control them.
On 6/13/07, Charles D Hixson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
(...)
Unless there are some replacements for certain rare
elements...probably not.
Ephemeralization is about to become NECESSARY, as the pool of available
material resources is shrinking FAST!!
(This statement is based on one article, but I found it utterly
convincing, as I was expecting that this result would be discovered as
soon as someone looked.)
So I think the next necessary area of development is MEMs and
nano-tech. Assemblers and disassemblers are going to be needed within
20 years. For some elements even sooner. Screens will need to start
shrinking rather than growing...plausibly being worn as glasses are now
until a direct neural feed becomes available.
One good place to start might be solar powered desalinization...and then
material recovery from the brine. That's one's difficult, as there's
already lots of competition. OTOH, there's an *immense* market if you
can get the price down.
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