Throw Your Dirty Dishes Away; You'll Just Make New Ones At Dinner
from the innovation-in-the-kitchen dept
We keep hearing about how 3D printers for rapid prototyping are getting closer and closer to going mainstream -- but they're still not there yet. While they're used in plenty of places, having them in more common usage could lead to quite a revolution in how people view the things that they own. Take, for example, some research being done to create recyclable dishes. The idea is that you have some raw material wafers in a machine, and you punch in what type and how many dishes you need (four place settings, please), and it makes the proper dishes on the spot. After you're done, you put them back into the machine and it deconstructs them back to the raw materials, which can be used again for the next meal. In the process it also cleans the material. It's not there yet (it can't get out grease and it hasn't figured out how to trim the excess material from smaller items like cups), but it does give one simple example of where all of this could eventually go. Not that recyclable dishes are in huge demand -- but the concept of using some kind of rapid construction machine to build tangible goods on demand has plenty of potential.
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Broken Dishes
This would be an interesting way to do things, and the machine doesn't even have to be too small. As long as it is about the size of a dishwasher your good to go.
What do you do if you break one of these "recycle dishes"? Just toss all the peices in the machine and make another? Because that is a pretty handy feature.
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Matter compiler
Very interesting stuff.
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More energy?
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Re: More energy?
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Re: More energy?
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Re: More energy?
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Instant replication is teleportation!
More useful is the ability to make dishes (or whatever) out of raw materials on the spot instead of making the dishes out of raw materials in a factory, trucking them out to retail stores, and taking them home from there.
In short, more entropy is generated by centralized construction and redistribution, than by distributed construction. But, cleaning probably generates more entropy than reconstruction.
Just imagine the handwringing that will go on when people can download their tools for free! And when organic substances can be downloaded too, you can be sure the food industry will try to sue you for sharing food!
Now if only I could send myself across the Internet instead of walking around. But, have you ever noticed that it takes a lot less time to carry disks around in your pocket than it does to send the same amount of information across the Internet? I wonder when the bandwidth of the Internet will exceed the bandwidth of feet.
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Re: Instant replication is teleportation!
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Re: Instant replication is teleportation!
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