Difference between revisions of "Housing in the gem-gum era"

Latest revision as of 13:21, 24 June 2021

Picture skyscrapers silently extruding out of what seems like the ground and 
equally silently vanishing back into the ground once no longer needed

Well not quite. Cranes do make sense.
But fully automated and fully reversible assembly of building will look very different to what we have today.
Cranes are basically part of the manipulator system at the last and biggest automated assembly level of an advanced productive nanosystem.
Also the cranes need to be automatedly erected. That might well be done in the form of an extrusion.

Avoiding cranes alltogether though might be a result of safety considerations.
See further down.

A basic assumption here is that transports via superlube tubes will be much more efficient and much cheaper than transport on street rails or anything else we have today.

The idea would be to "pipe in" (or out) the raw material for buildings from a global microcomponent redistribution system.
The raw material would be preferrably be in the form from recycled microcomponents. Because that is much more energy efficient.
That obviously only works once a certain stock of gemstone metamaterial based building is accumulated.

Slower primary synthesis of microcomponents can be compensated by larger (off site) gem-gum factory volume, given enough power is available. It would be highly advisable to design and build sufficient final gemstone metamaterial waste treatment systems for dealing with unupgradeable and unrecyclable microcomponents of outdated version.

Cranes:

• will still have sparse trussworks
• will have more organic shapes
• will may get some aspects of gem-gum tentacle like manipulators

How safety considerations may influencing design choices

A design for very high safety would be very desirable and likely possible.

The easy way is just to make areas with active dangerous assembly (large masses moving fast) inacessible, but that is probe to bugs.

The harder way (maximizing safety as far as possible) is to avoid large masses moving fast on a level potentially dangerous to humans all together. E.g. adhering to a limit to lightweight fist-sized building-blocks that would at best give a human a light bruise when crashing into them at decently high speeds. Plus making the assembly robotic emulating elasticity and actively look out for humans with cameras (closed loop control is very possible at the human size-sacle) Assembly would need to be desiged such that at all times there never appears the possibilities for a dangerous drop. This ways everything is and remains openly accessible all the way throughout the assembly process. This at least would likely have educational value. Like a showcase gem gum factory. Worst thing that can happen ist that people deliberately walk in to deliberately and physically hinder the assembly process. But access can still be added just as in the case with truly dangerous internal operations.

Avoiding large fast moving masses for the sake of increased safety would actually be an argument for going less far up the convergent assembly hierarchy. Meaning no cranes as big as the buildings but at mots muman sized gem gum tentacle robotics A bit more in place assembly character of the assembly.

Why the erection (and more so the teardown) of buildings will likely be quite silent

• There will be no need to mix concrete
• There will be no irreversibly fused together to large monolithic chunks of rebar reinforced concrete that need to be jack-hammered and sawed out

Similar things hold for gemstone metamaterial street infrastructure.

Making ground comactification silent seems like an interesting challenge.

• Digging exactly to measure might be an approach.
• Sorting space filling compactified soild polyhedrons into excess space might be another

Why cranes and macroscale manipulators?

See main article: Convergent assembly

During assembly

In place assembly has its limitation (e.g. overhangs)

During disassembly

Wrench in the gears materials non gem-gum materials: A lot of stuff that amasses in building will always be natural material or material produced by thermodynamic means.
Think about a half eaten pack of chips, a flower pot, a stack of paper (then ancient technology), metal coins, ...
Basically all organic natural stuff and all the remnant stuff from today's era (2021...).

All this material needs to be moved out of the way sufficiently well, such that it not acts like a wrench in gears and
does not hinders the retraction/disassembly of the gemstone metamaterial that constitutes the basic frame of the building

Lost and found: Gem-gum stuff that was forgotten by former inhabitants may or may not be disassembled along with the building. It's just a policy question.
Degree of detectable unrecoverable customization that are present might be one factor of many playing a role in that decision.
If the found item is not disassembled then it must go either to the owner in its macroscopic undisassembled state or to a temporary storage facility for macroscopic objects (a classical warehouse). If the found item is disassembled then (securely!) storing some data would it seems be a human friendly software design. Think e.g. about forgotten compuglasses. Relevant data:

• what type of object was found
• what kind of (recoverable) customization where found (sensitive data)
• where was the thing found (eventually down to the exact position and angle aka pose)

Dealing with our beautiful human chaos: Most of the stuff in human use is not in machine phase.
Unless on a space station without gravity humans do typically not keep everything locked to the environmental frame (at a hopefully remembered spot).
To tidy up a chaotic mess created by human activity in an automated way there needs to be closed-loop-control.
That entails cameras and AI software for object-type recognition and 3D-geometry recognition.
(All luxury that is not available at the nanoscale.)

Why not just use utility fog

Why not use a "magic" cloud of utility fog to assemble buildings?
Because utility fog is not specialized and thus expectable to be rather inefficient
Not to say that it would not work, it would just likely not be very practical compared to other more specialized approaches.

Utility fog will be more like:

• interactive multifunctional volumetric display clay for artists or
• a versatile emergency tool for adventurers or
• ...