Gem-gum waste crisis
Gemstone based metamaterials have the potential to cause the biggest waste crisis ever (if the tech gets designed and regulated badly).
A huge potential existential risk that is largely overlooked as the technology is all too often mistaken as fantasy-magic making anything from anything.
No, gemstone based atomically precise manufacturing is not fantasy-magic making anything from anything. To the contrary.
A main point of gem based APM is that one needs to be capable of making only very few base materials to make many material properties.
The real magic of mechanical metamaterials. See: Gem-gum.
Plus only few base feed-stocks need to be processable.
Atomically precise disassembly of old gem-gum products is significantly more difficult than constructive mechanosynthesis.
Especially when the waste target to disassemble has heavily damaged nanostructures with largely unknown structure.
Also taking things apart to pretty much all it's individual atoms has notable energy losses from the high energy turnover.
If things are not …
- modularly designed for reuse and recycling at all the size scale along convergent assembly
- shared via an eventual global microcomponent redistribution system
- designed to avoid spill
… then diamondoid/gem-gum waste may pile up.
We may talking Earth crust deforming mountain ranges here. Painting an especially dire picture.
And pile up fast as the production method
– can be expected to be fast compared to say today's 3D printers and
– can operate at the scale of houses and well beyond.
Toxicity of eventual spill is another matter of concern.
