Jed,
It seems your forecast maybe slightly off.
See /3D printing with metal: The final frontier of additive manufacturing/
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143552-3d-printing-with-metal-the-final-frontier-of-additive-manufacturing.
I see no intrinsic problem with using other materials and much higher
resolutions either.
Adrian Ashfield
On 2/25/2013 6:34 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
I wrote:
It seems unlikely to me that anyone will be able to fabricate a
cold fusion device at home, using 3-D printers or what-have-you.
Not for the next thousand years or so, until those machines evolve
into Clarke's universal replicators.
Maybe 1,000 years is too much, but it will be a long while.
There has been a lot of enthusiastic talk about these 3-D printer
replicator things. I am all for them! I think they are great. But I
think some naive commentators fail to recognize some crucial
limitations to today's versions:
1. They use only material. Plastic. They cannot be used to fabricate
metal, wood, silicon or nickel. You cannot make a NiCad battery or a
cold fusion device with that.
2. Resolution is limited. You could not make a computer chip, even if
the devices could lay down silicon and metal. I do not think
resolution is fine enough for a cold fusion device. Certainly not
nanoparticle devices.
Despite these limitations, I expect these things will become useful
for making parts in the lab such as the fitting that holds the cathode
and anode in place.
In the distant future, the capabilities of these machines may
gradually expand, until they can lay down any element in any
configuration. Such as, for example: a fried egg, the Hope Diamond, a
copy of the Mona Lisa correct down to the molecule, or a thermonuclear
bomb. That is what Clarke predicted. By the time that happens we can
hope that the machines will have so much built-in intelligence, it
will refuse to fabricate a thermonuclear bomb. The process will be so
complicated that no human will be able to override the build-in
protections, or run the machine manually.
- Jed
