Economics, advanced manufacturing techniques and space settlements

--- In spacesettlers@y..., Ian Woollard wrote:
> Ok thought experiment time.
>
> Suppose you are parked next door to an asteroid,
> energy is plentiful because of sunlight; a tonne or
> two of raw material is probably worth a few pennies
> each which is hardly going to be a problem. Assume
> that the asteroid has enough of every element.
>
> Further, assume for the sake of argument that you have
> an advanced fabrication technology: a 3D printer.
>
> (A 3D printer is a device for building up an object
> layer by layer, in principle you can build any
> machine using a 3D printer, but current printers
> are much more restricted than this. However it seems
> likely that these problems can be overcome- if
> all else fails a robotic arm can undertake drilling,
> milling and other operations necessary to build
> objects automatically, with designs downloaded
> from the Internet.)
>
> Ok I'm taking these as axioms, the only
> assumption that is arguable is the 3D printer,
> but let's take that as read (if you find it
> implausible, I argue that something like that
> will make it early into space as launch mass
> is at a premium, therefore any technique
> can minimise this, such as self assembly,
> will be a fairly natural choice.)
>
> Ok. So, on to economics. The book Future shock
> once argued that advanced manufacturing would mean
> that people would get put out of work, in a large
> scale way. However that doesn't seem to have
> happened.
>
> The question is: will the effective zero cost
> of machines built with 3D printers have that
> effect?
>
> I claim that it won't but what does everyone
> else think?

Well, it depends on the scale you are talking about. If your 3d
printer works at the nanoscale, then what you have is a
nanoassembler; capable of building ANYTHING atom by atom given the
raw material (ie dirt) and sufficient energy. Something like that
would also be able to build other nanoassemblers.

Poof! there goes the whole world economic system; no more famine, no
more shortages of any physical items - anything with a design stored
in memory somewhere on the internet could then be built, assuming
adequate raw materials and energy.

On the macroscale, this idea makes sense for implementing a Big
Moving Job. Send a small probe to the target asteroid, containing
communications equipment, small solar panels, 3d printer, and maybe
an autonomous rover or two (BTW, I am working on an autonomous
snakebot right now for just such a purpose). Once landed, the rovers
acquire raw material for the 3d printer, and it produces things like
large solar panels, large communication antennae, a mass driver, etc:
all the heavy, simply-made stuff that can be built on-site. It would
certainly reduce the overall cost of the mission.

:) ed