Gemstone metamaterial on chip factory
Contents
Up: Advanced productive nanosystem
Atomically precise small scale factories (or gem gum factories for short) are the main topic of this wiki.
A survey of alternative names that where used or are newly proposed can be found >>here<<.
- For a more general overview please go to the main page.
- For a more technical overview about gem gum factories check out: Design of advanced nanofactories.
What it is and what it does
The personal gem gum factory is:
The personal gem gum factory makes:
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Self replication
Self replication in the bootstrapping process
Highly compact self replication at the nanoscale (as it is present in the obsolete concept of molecular assemblers) is not (!!) a prerequisite for the bootstrapping of advanced nanofactories. For details about how the bootstrapping process could be performed check out the main article: "Bootstrapping".
Self replication in normal usage
Beside a sheer infinity of useful products a gem-gum factory can quickly produce copies of itself. It does not need any special fancy raw materials for this. The necessary raw materials are abundant and everywhere available. Heck even the air you breath works if nothing else is available.
So when you have a pants-pockets gem-gum factory then you can make more gem-gum factories for all of your friends. Anywhere and anytime. And they can make more copies for all of their friends. Since everyone is linked to every other person on earth through a low number of acquaintanceships, see: wikipedia: six degrees of separation (which btw is not entirely true), you can imagine how fast this can spread. We know it from software. Actually the limiting factor may very well be the the time it will take us to develop these devices.
Specialization pushes self replicative capabilities into the macroscale
A main defining feature a gem-gum nanofactory (if not one of the most important ones) is that while the whole system is general purpose all its various subsystems are highly specialized. Much like what you find in a general purpose computer (moterboard, CPU, main bus, …). There's no magic general purpouse computronium inside.
This makes it:
- much more efficient than the old and now obsolete molecular assembler concept
- not possess highly compact self replicative capabilities as the molecular assembler concept
Specialized one-task-only pick and place mechanisms (like molecular mills) can be smaller and faster than general purpose ones. Just as this is the case in macroscale factories.
When every standard part needs it's own production line then a system capable of self replication that needs many part types naturally becomes quite big.
Quite big meaning well visible for human eyes. As a wild guess think thumbnail size.
Resillient backup
Strewing out thumbnail sized gem-gum factory save point chips at strategic and random locations over the whole earth that are specially designed for being able to bootstrap gem-gum technology from nothing but the device itself could serve as a worst case backup plan for human technology and civilization.
Stage vs step table
You may meander through this table in two ways:
- size wise column by column including all the repeating processing steps (including the assembly levels) and/or
- type wise row by row showing how the chosen aspect of the processing chain changes with scale
Matching to the basic assembly levels there are corresponding design levels.
The assembly levels are about the size and character of the intermediary convergent assembly steps both the assembly systems (assembly chambers, assembly manipulators, ...) and the general character of the product-fragments assembled inside. The design levels are about product design software that matches these levels.
Assembly levels are mostly static and will likely only change significantly when the nanofactory itself receives an upgrade. The design levels are about software tools for actual concrete product design which may change on every production run (with the exception of hard coded assembly in the initial convergent assembly steps).
Caracteristics | Level 0 | Level I | Level II | Level III (and up) |
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Type of Components | Molecular fragments wanted: versatile abundant and nontoxic elements |
Crystolecules wanted: standard building blocks (mass produced "nuts and bolts") |
Microcomponents wanted: reusable units (possibly indivisible) |
Product fragments wanted: composable metamaterials |
Examples for typical Components | Fragments of simple compounds CH4, CO2, ... including at least some basic elements: C,H,Si,Ge,... |
Crystolecules:
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Microcomponents:
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Comprehensible size comparison model scale 500.000:1 | Model atoms have the diameter of an average human hair (0.1mm) | Model crystolecules are from the size of a grain of salt to the size of a playing dice (1mm-16mm) | Model microcomponents are the size of a big plant pot (~50cm) | Model product-fragments are the size of a house (~16m). A 50m wide soccer court scaled down 1:500.000 is visible by eye - it has the width of a human hair. |
Physical Properties (strength, wear, friction and more) | atoms are eternally wear free (for all practical purpouses) |
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inheriting toughness | emulated properties via metamaterials |
Methods for Connection (Physical interfaces) |
covalent bonds |
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advanced auto-align mechanisms |
Character of Manipulators | fast mass production/preparation in stiff molecular mills (employing 3 tip tricks) |
conveyor belt assembly | stiff manipulators with parallel mechanics akin to steward platform | conventional factory robot arms with serial mechanics. Even further up at macroscale: Highly dexterous tentacle robotics. Megascale: sparse cranes. |
Internal distribution / logistics | Moiety routing: Note: even for basic hydrocarbon handling this is quite complex | Major rail routing station: Note: Redundancy requires fail safe producers and consumers | Minor rail routing station. For microcomponent recomposition (Streaming?) |
No routing. (?) Possibly general purpose robotic pick and place. (Macroscale: Streaming parts through tentacle robotics?) |
Airlocks and clean keeping | All mechanosynthesis happens under practically perfect vacuum. No airlocks at this scale. | Possibly early vacuum lockout of passivated crystolecules. | Main vacuum lockout step. Passivated microcomponents can be assembled and disassembled in air. | Possibly early clean-room lockout. Bigger product fragments can handle dust and dirt - to a degree. |
(TODO: add miniature images and links to table)
Nanofactory control
- hardware hierarchy of processing logic
- software decompression chain
Block diagram of a nanofactory
(TODO: include this broad image overview here)
Alternate names
Existing names
- Nanofactory – quite problematic (see below)
- Personal nanofactory (PN) – in analogy to Personal Computer (PC) – Introduced here: http://crnano.org/bootstrap.htm
Nanofactories could be seaport size and not privately owned. So this term is too restrictive.
These lines author deems the widely used term nanofactory as quite problematic.
Both the "nano" part and the "factory" can be very misleading.
The problems:
- Neither the factory itself nor the products of it are around nanoscale sized. Only the machinery inside is nanoscale.
- The term nanotechnology is mostly used for anyting but atomically precise gemstone metamaterial technology.
- The term factory hints towards building sized complexes that are not owned by private individuals.
Both of these assumptions often will be very wrong.
Names introduced in this wiki
- Gemstone metamaterial on chip factory – It is not a factory that is only making chips. So the on in the name can't be ditched.
- Gem-gum factory chip – That would refer just to the chip at the very core. It seems too restrictive.
- Gem-gum factory – in analogy to gem-gum technology – "factory" may be a bit misleading
- gem-gum-fac – in analogy to gem-gum-tec which it is made out of and which it makes
- Atomically precise small scale factory – not so good because: What exactly does small scale mean?
Related
- Up to a more general concept: Advanced productive nanosystems
- Pants-pockets gemstone-gum factories are both part of and origin of in-vacuum gem-gum technology.
If that sounds paradox it's because of the chicken egg problem of bootstrapping such factories.
- Design of advanced nanofactories
- Gemstone metamaterial technology aka "advanced high throughput atomically precise manufacturing"
- Convergent assembly
- Assembly levels mapped to Assembly layers
- Discussion of proposed nanofactory designs
External links
- [todo: add the main ones]
- Preliminary rendering from the "productive nanosystems" concept video: [2]
some details are different than in the final versions. - Complete molecular manufacturing systems will have many subsystems, designed to meet many constraints (2014-04 on K. Eric Drexlers website)