Reasons for APM

In a world with advanced atomically precise technology no one (no matter how remote) needs to run around without shoes anymore. On a sunny day anybody can create oneself a pair in a few hours out of nothing but molecules from the air (or out of prefabricated microcomponents from a public outlet, in case one is near to such infrastructure). To get one of these pocket sized production devices one goes to ones local community (or friends/family). They will (with little effort) use their production devices to make one for you. If one is located in a remote place without power supply and the production process progresses too slow, then one just makes some more solar cell foil first. The data for fulfilling basic needs and more can become free, open source, or ad-supported. Beyond that one will still need to pay some form of money for some proprietary luxury products (or truly massive things).

The prospective products of AP technology are a chance to solve the global problems of human civilization and to preserve and further enrich our world.

Reasons vs Actions

Despite the aforementioned reasons for APM public interest is declining (number of searches; newsgroup activity). Also in wide parts of the world the mere existence of APM is as good as unknown to the general public.

The reason for that development could be:

• In the first attempt to get things going the front of the technology dependence graph may have not been advanced enough. So the funds accredited where annexed by strongly unrelated technologies now dubbed "Nanotechnology" (See: The five kinds of Nanotechnology). The rapid increase of non atomically precise technology ("nanotechnology") was drawing all attention away. Mangled with a politoeconomical conflict. See history.
• A lack of a place where (1) the importance of AP Technology is explained, (2) exciting (but not so near term) motivational examples are given and at the same time (3) grounded technical aspects are shown.
  (This wiki you are reading right here is an attempt to create such a place.)

Some specific reasons for why we need advanced APM

Advanced APM (gem-gum technology) has inherent properties that can
quite directly help solving some of the most severe and fundamental problems of our time. Including:

• aversion of resource scarcity
• efficient conversion of energy to and from chemical energy – (allowing long term energy storage for renewables)
• efficient transportation of goods – (reducing energy expenditure)
• efficient avoidance of creation and spill of waste

Of course there are are more related to water, food, shelter, clothing, ...
but these are less directly derived and here omitted for the sake of brevity.
Check out the page "Opportunities" for more details.

New materials => alleviation of resource scarcity

Gem-gum technology will work against resource scarcity by emulating material properties that otherwise would need scarce elements whichs attainment involves environmentally destructive mining. A good example might be the plans to mine ancient manganese nodules from the seafloor. A good part for alloying the manganese into car frames. Future car-frames made with gem-gum technology (possibly made from a mechanical metamaterial on stishovite basis) will not need any manganese and still massively outperform the alloys that we use today.

As a side-note: For the little manganese that will still be needed for other more exotic purposes:

• gem-gum technology may enable much less destructive mining (picking nodules out without great disturbance of sediments)
• gem-gum technology will allow mining other today even less accessible places where less delicate and vulnerable complex macroscale life is present

Unnatural chemistry => alleviation of resource scarcity & improvement on energy conversion capability

Chemical energy storage no longer hampered by inefficient energy conversion

Long term storage of large quantities of energy today (2021) is a huge problem for renewable energies.
A (if not the) major problem is inefficiency in conversion of energy into and out of a chemical form.

Gem-gum technology will allow us to do such back and forth conversions with very high efficiency (>99%) by means of
chemomechanical converters (which are closely related to piezochemical mechanosynthesis).

(Almost) no need for rare catalyst elements anymore

Also today for energy conversion to and from chemical energy very often rare noble elements are needed in significant quantities as catalysts: Chemomechanical converters (and piezochemical mechanosynthesis) employ high localized and directed pressure on chemical bonds which can circumvent the need of rare element catalysts. Even if rare element catalysts are used much lower quantities are needed. Meaning there will be less environmentally destructive mining for noble metals.

One especially big Noble metal mine is the Grassberg-mine in Western Neuguinea (copper, silver, gold).
There's a big poisonous wastewater destruction trail that is well visible in satellite images.

• on google Earth

The end of electrical energy transport?!

As an odd (and currently 2021 grossly overlooked) side effect of this such efficient conversion of energy to and from chemical energy makes transport of energy via electrical means economically more unattractive than chemical transport.

Advantages of chemical transport are:

• Lower losses – no fundamental ohmic resistive losses in the cables – (well, nothing beats superconductors though)
• less danger since no high voltages are involved – (no high amplitude low frequency electric stray fields either)
• less vulnerable to weather extremes like ice, snow, falling trees, and storms carried debris – (since not necessarily high up on on overland lines)
• completely invulnerable to solar storm activity

And that is even with conventional gas lines. With gemstone metamaterial technology solid state chemical energy transmission lines would be possible that not even have losses from gas viscosity because superlubricating stratified shear bearings reduce mechanical friction by several orders of magnitude.

Related:

• energy transmission
• Global scale energy management and energy conversion

Ultra fast recycling => Less waste and more efficient transport

Waste, its transport, and the transport of raw materials put a significant load on our environment as is stands today (2021).
Gemstone metamaterial technology features ultra fast recomposable microcomponmenst and it could enable something like a ultra-efficient "global pipeline network for things" that transports these microcomponents.
This would massively improve on transport and enable more recycling. See:

• Global microcomponent redistribution system
• Microcomponent recomposer

Non-degradable and non-burnable gem-gum waste may actually turn into a significant new problem
if such a global microcomponent redistribution system won't be built.
If done "correctly" though we might have much less problems with waste than we have today.

Combine resource and energy transport system into one?

Just like for energy transport systems friction in resource transport systems
will be extremely low due to superlubricating stratified shear bearings.
In how far energy transport and resource transport systems will be combined is as of yet unclear.
Increasing specialization for the specific quite different tasks speaks for separate systems.

Related

Some essays about why you should care.

• Opportunities and Dangers