Manufacturing Upheaval

Our look at CRN's thirty essential studies is now in the final section, covering "Policies and Policymaking". Recommended studies in this section assume the existence of a general-purpose molecular manufacturing system. All preliminary answers in this section are based on diamondoid nanofactory technology.

Today we'll examine study #19: "What impact will the system have on production and distribution?"

Determine how diamondoid nanofactory molecular manufacturing will change the way products are made and delivered.

Subquestion A: How close can the factory be placed to place and time of product use?

Preliminary answer: The factory should be able to be placed almost anywhere and might even be suitable for use as a home appliance. Products could be built in a few hours. High functional density implies that most of a product will be inert, so basic functional nanoblocks could be pre-built and simply rearranged into the final product; this would take only a few seconds.

Subquestion B: How easily can new products be designed?

Preliminary answer: With CAD-to-prototype costing very little in time or money, new product development should be comparable to digital graphic arts combined with software engineering. In other words, simple products could be designed in a day. Without the need to retool factories or stock a supply chain, market testing of new products could involve much lower commercial risk.

Subquestion C: For what products will this out-compete traditional systems by an order of magnitude or more?

Preliminary answer: With a suitable palette of appearance and functional units, almost any manufactured product could be built with this system. Manufacturing cost should be significantly lower. Transportation and storage costs should be near zero. Design costs may be higher at first but will drop rapidly.

Provisional conclusion: Diamondoid nanofactory molecular manufacturing will give serious competition to, and probably displace, a large fraction of extraction, manufacturing, transport, and storage.

Our initial basic findings (preliminary answers and provisional conclusions) for all thirty studies should be verified as rapidly as possible. Because our understanding points to a crisis, a parallel process of conducting these studies is strongly preferred.

We are actively looking for researchers who have an interest in performing or assisting with this work. Please contact CRN Research Director Chris Phoenix if you would like more information or if you have comments on the proposed studies.

Comments

[John B]

Subquestion B is an interesting one. How can you design a set of generic, available and flexible 'utilities' ('nanoblocks' is the term I recall being used in the nanofactory description section of CRNano) such that no combination of nanoblocks can generate nonstandard nanoblocks?

For instance, do the 'engine' nanoblocks know what they're being used to move, and are they able to shut down if unapproved configurations are attemtped?

If not, if every block doesn't monitor how it's being used, you're giving out general assemblers under a veneer of safety.

In my opinion, of course.
-John B

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

John, you're at least half right. I don't know if you're all the way right--it depends on how flexible the nanoblocks are, what measures are taken at other stages to prevent unwanted designs (e.g. building only approved blueprints), etc. One could probably build a pretty high-performance scanning probe microscope out of nanoblocks, but would that be enough to build a general assembler? I don't know; it would at least be difficult and cost a lot of time.

Or did you mean that products built of nanoblocks could do so many things that a nanoblock design wouldn't be much of a limitation? I kind-of agree there too.

Chris