Opportunities

This page is about the opportunity advanced APM technology will give us to solve the most severe civilization problems of our current time (2017). Without advanced APM many of those problems that may not be solvable fast enough or may not be solvable at all.

Problems that will be not too hard to solve with AP Technology are:

Energy related

• removal of carbon dioxide to stop and reverse climate change (mobile carbon dioxide collector buyos, mobile carbon dioxide collector balloons, geoengineering)
• resolving energy storage problems with energy storage cells and chemomechanical converters
• beside radical improvements in storing energy also significant improvements in gaining energy and efficient usage of energy
• ending energy scarcity e.g. via solar street pavings using diamondoid solar cells & other energy harvesting methods like e.g. geothermal energy via improved deep drilling capabilities.
• near 100% reduction of the enegry necessary for heating indoor living spaces through highly effective thermal isolation metamaterials (architectural engineering)

Material related

• stopping dependence on scarce elements via usage of metamaterials based upon diamondoids comprised out of abundant elements. (no more mining the deep sea)
• better alternatives to PET drinking bottles and plastic shopping bags - spill
• avoidance of release of toxic chemicals into the environment (e.g. metamaterial rubbers do not need plasticizers)
• avoidance of poison leaching food packaging (possible source of allergies)

Environment related

• Ending the clear-cutting & giving back agricultural area to nature. To some extent reducing the excessive space usage of agriculture (cheap glass houses)
• capture of seaborne plastic waste: great pacific garbage patch
• repair of dead zones (wikipedia) in our oceans by removing excessive nutrients and adding oxygen. (geoengineering)

Society related

• stopping population boom via rising and equilibrating global wealth.
• better accommodation for the homeless (AP suit, minimal temporary housing)
• mending the lack of good global freshwater supply due to cheap energy easy desalination and improved transport (filters)
• making our advanced civilization a great deal more disaster proof - for recovery from when things gone horribly wrong

Infrastructure related

• major improvement of public transport and general transport infrastructure (upgraded street infrastructure)
• fast silent and dust free big scale construction zones without cranes
• replacement of concrete and asphalt - Architectural engineering
• material delivery possibly through a global microcomponent redistribution system akin to a high-tech tube mail
• much safer gas pipes - solid state micro encapsulated - no more gas leaks - no more explosion accidents
• prevention of failure of large scale structures (e.g. bridges) through interspersion of materials with sensing elements - exactly defined breakage pattern in the worst case
• protection against some of the natural disasters that are easier to handle
• alleviating traffic congestions
• better access to space and the deep sea

Luxury related

• richer and more colorful environment - (e.g. techno plants)
• cumulative fashion design - clothing, jewelry

Problems that will be hard to tackle even with AP Technology:

These fall mostly under category of issues with waste:

• cleanup of highly dispersed radioactive contaminations in the ground
• cleanup of old landfills that are remnants of today's technology
• dealing with the new dangers of AP technology e.g. waste management (and avoidance of landfills or similar)
• cleaning up of space debris (maybe?)

Others are:

• social and financial stability and well being in the time of most rapid change and thereafter
• protection against some natural disasters that are more difficult to handle (e.g. volcanoes & earthquakes)

The worst of all maybe:

• General software issues. Referring more to fundamentally broken legacy software architecture than to malicious software. Who wants round softwood wheels when one can incrementally improve the square hardwood wheels to square steel wheels? That's the situation in an ultra-compressed over-caricatured allegory.
  (Note: the similarity of this allegory with the incremental material stiffness improvement in the incremental path is totally accidental. The path towards advanced APM, being it direct or incremental, is actually one of the rare cases where we actually move towards a more "round wheel".)

Further Notes

More concrete applications can be found on the "Products of advanced atomically precise manufacturing" page.

[TODO: add explanatory chapters for each of them]

Related

• Global civilization problems and how gem based APM can help solving them.
• Reasons for APM
• Dangers

External links

• Foresight institutes challenges