Fork 7.31

Reprap Guy, or Fork 7.31

 

By John Taylor; September 3, 2005

 

 

 

Yesterday we discussed how an organized society might apply modular housing units and a standard human diet derived from local growing to allow for a more flexible and painless response to challenges like rising sea levels around the world. Today I want to look at another technical possibility, the universal constructor or, as it is being called now, the reprap machine.

 

John von Neumann was one of the great geniuses of the twentieth Century. He invented game theory and put forward the fundamentals of computer science. He proposed in the 1950's what he called a Universal Constructor, a self-replicating machine that would function more like genes in a cell reproducing themselves than any mere inorganic tool. This constructor would collect resources until it automatically makes another constructor, they both then would make another until the growth becomes exponential.

 

It has been proposed that we colonize the moon this way, by "seeding" it with just one universal constructor loaded onto one rocket. The UC would leave the moon lander and start into that barren landscape by collecting and mining sufficient minerals to make one more UC and they both would repeat the process until finally the moon is covered with busy UC's,. At that point they could be reprogrammed to perform virtually any other construction or manufacture required for human colonization.

 

A Baha'i may be reminded of Bill Sear's "each one teach one" idea, and a cynic might think of the specious logic of pyramid schemes. But the reason such scams are so persuasive is that people are well aware that nature works this way all of the time. Everything living -- from a protein to a cell to a person -- is capable of reproducing itself to the extent of available resources, the only downers being inevitable pruning by predation, disease, famine and other limiters.

 

In this sense the universal constructor is hardly new. We already have machines capable of replicating themselves, metal lathes for instance. One such lathe can produce all the parts to make up another metal lathe, if it is carefully coaxed along by a highly skilled craftsperson doing most of the work. Neumann's Universal Constructor, however, is the next level up, a closed loop, it is computerized lathes making new computerized lathes autonomously.

 

The difference here is decisive. Neumann, the inventor of what we now call software, knew that digitally run information processes are immortal, infinitely reproducible without loss. He knew this long before record companies began writing this ability down as a loss on their balance sheets. Like God's virtues, justice, love, compassion, they are not strained, they drop like gentle drops from heaven upon the place beneath. The cells in my body wear out every seven years or so but I survive longer than that because they constantly divide and replace themselves. The genome is the soul of the bodily machine; it gives all the orders and it is closer to being me than the mass of protoplasm surrounding its nucleus. And so it will be with all machines in the near future, they will not be physical dead ends but programs, autonomic information processes, and their only limiter will be processing speed and the expanding bounds of data storage.

 

Now scientists like Adrian Bowyer are on the verge of making the universal constructor a day-to-day reality. I will include an article explaining Boyer's exciting plan for an open software approach to constructing this miraculous machine that he calls a "reprap." A reprap would be about the size of a refrigerator and would manufacture on the spot all the smaller tools, decorations and other items in a household.

 

I see this device -- which Buckminster Fuller called a "black box" -- as the most important appliance in the containerized dwelling unit that we discussed yesterday. This manufactured, transportable housing unit would be built into every house and apartment, and could be rapidly evacuated along with the inhabitants in the event of a natural disaster or other emergency. The unit would be like the nucleus in a cell, it would have enough space to make the average person completely mobile, able to move house and home at short notice to any point on the planet. Since each unit would have reprap, a mini-factory, built in if I move to Timbuktu and I find that they do not have the type of fork that I am used to I would simply punch my request into my reprap. Needless to say, I would want mine to look just like the replicator on Star Trek (a more radical application of Neumann's proposal working at the nano-level) and punch in fork, and out would come the latest and most effective design of fork known to the human race. I would hold in my hand Fork 7.3, and if I got tired of it tomorrow I would churn out Fork 7.31.

 

Reprap Machines Would Turn Homes into Factories

 

(from: http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=4286755)

 

By John von Radowitz, Science Correspondent

 

A revolutionary British development could one day change the face of manufacturing by turning every home into a factory. Engineers are working on a machine capable of churning out a host of household items and gadgets, including kitchenware, cameras and even small musical instruments. Not only would the machine make things out of plastic and metal, it would also fabricate its own component parts.

 

The self-replicating rapid prototyper, or RepRap, will be about the size of a refrigerator. It could become a reality within four years and the aim is to make it a universal feature of the home. RepRap machines could in future render many forms of traditional manufacturing obsolete, according to project leader Dr Adrian Bowyer.

 

Four hundred years ago almost every human being was employed in agriculture, and now its only a couple of per cent, said Dr Bowyer, from the University of Baths Centre for Biomimetics. I suspect the same thing is going to happen to manufacturing. Computer controlled machines already exist which mass-produce plastic components for industry, such as vehicle parts. These conventional machines cost about #25,000. Dr Bowyers idea is initially to use these machines to make the component parts for his RepRap machine.

 

These machines can then be programmed to make further copies of themselves. People buying them would then be able to make more copies to sell on. As the number of RepRap machines grows, their cost is expected to tumble to only a few hundred pounds or less. Dr Bowyer plans to make the 3D designs and computer code needed for an existing machine to make one of his devices freely available on the internet. He is not taking out a patent and will not charge a licence fee.

 

The most interesting part of this is that we're going to give it away, he said. At the moment an industrial company consists of hundreds of people building and making things. If these machines take off, it will give individual people the chance to do this themselves. And we are talking about making a lot of our consumer goods. The effect this has on industry and society could be dramatic. Rapid prototype machines work by fusing together layers of plastic according to a blueprint fed into the computer. Dr Bowyers machine would also be able to incorporate simple metal components and circuits out of an alloy that melts at low temperatures.

 

The machines could, for instance, make complete sets of coloured and decorated plastic plates, dishes and bowels. The objects they produce would measure no more than 12 inches in length, width and height. But larger items could be made by simply clipping together smaller manufactured parts. Glass items, complex parts such as microchips, and anything exposed to intense heat such as a toaster could not be directly assembled. Components the machine is unable to make could easily be added. A basic digital camera could be made with the lens and computer chip bought separately and slotted in later.

 

Dr Bowyer said the devices would effectively be a form of Universal Constructor, the theoretical self-replicating machine first proposed by mathematician John von Neumann in the 1950s. He and colleague Ed Sells have already built a simple demonstration robot with an electrical circuit using the technology. They are now looking for funding for the next stages of development, leading to a programme for making the component parts of a RepRap machine in about four years. Transforming the whole basis of manufacturing might take as long as 20 years, if it ever happened, said Dr Bowyer. He admitted there was an anarchistic element to what he was doing. Employment will increase, because its not employment that creates wealth, its wealth that creates employment, he said.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com