Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

Oumuamua - courtesy NASA

Oumuamua is the strange cigar-shaped interstellar interloper that Harvard University professors think may be an alien probe sent to gather information on our Solar System. Slight changes in acceleration and direction have been given as reasons for this hypothesis. The theory is that it is the remnants of a “light sail” powered a now defunct alien probe. Oumuamua is Hawaiian for “scout”. 

SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak thinks Oumuamua is just another comet or asteroid from very far away, as in another star system. That explains its unusually large velocity and its path directly through the Solar System. Comets and asteroids are known to vent gas, which acts like a thruster on a space ship to change direction, speed up, or slow down. Other scientists are skeptical as well.

I agree with Seth. It would be highly unlikely for the first chunk of material we’ve spotted from outside our Solar System to be an alien probe. Although it is much more elongated than other asteroids, it should not be construed to be a derelict light sail. It should be pointed out how likely it is that an alien probe would take on the form of an asteroid because it may actually be a hollowed out asteroid. Why is that? Convenience. 

Use those plastic grocery bags again. Save Money. Save the world. Here's how.

Think about what our civilization is currently planning to do. We are going to mine the asteroids. So far, we are only thinking about mining the asteroids, but it will happen. We are running out of stuff on Earth, and there’s plenty of just about everything in space. The asteroid belt is a busted up planet, and it has the same materials we have here on Earth. 

A number of things are in collusion to boost asteroid mining. Nuclear fusion is about to happen. The helium-3 on the Moon will represent the outer space version of the gold rush for its ability to facilitate the fusion process. A NASA space station is currently planned for the Moon. As the helium-3 rush commences, a space elevator will be built on the Moon. Also, AI will come into its own, powering autonomous drones the asteroid mining industry will require to prospect and gut asteroids for a very fine profit. AI will also advance biomedical engineering and research, taking longevity in humans to biblical levels, making longer term projects more acceptable. 

All these things will come together in a very short time to initiate and accelerate asteroid mining. These mountains of minerals and metals orbit the Sun. Some of their orbits coincide with both Earth and Mars. Once these asteroids are mined, they can be outfitted with AI pilot navigators, living quarters, and science labs and used as comfortable, safe, fuel-free shuttles between here and Mars. They are safe because their mass protects against minor collisions and hard cosmic radiation. 

Want to go somewhere else? Stick a fusion drive on the asteroid powered by asteroid material and a little helium-3. Now, when it gets to Mars orbit, just keep going and explore the asteroid belt. If someone living in the asteroid belt were to see this spaceship, they would know it came from outside the belt because it is going a different direction and velocity than most everything else, just like we know Oumuamua came from outside the Solar System. It would seem a logical thing that this is what spacefaring races do when they get to a certain technological level. They mine asteroids and leave an outer shell to be converted to a spaceship, instead of hauling all that material out of some gravity well to build a ship.

This asteroid conversion scheme could be ramped up to hollow out big asteroids and turn them into large explorer vessels capable of going to nearby stars and checking out exoplanets for possible colonization. Fifty years ago Harvard’s paper on Oumuamua would be scoffed at as total science fiction created by hippy scientists smoking pot. With what we know is about to happen in this day and age, it still seems unlikely as a light sail but plausible as a probe. Fifty years from now, some researcher will run across that Harvard paper and laugh as he stubs out a joint in the recreation room of the Ceres Flyer, a converted asteroid riding a fusion flame to Alpha Centauri.

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A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic Asteroid Propulsion System

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We Will Live on the Moon: the How and Why

Asteroid Mining - How to Pick the Right Asteroid

Asteroids

There are about 17,000 near-Earth asteroids; asteroids that at some point in their orbit come close to Earth periodically. These are the asteroids mining companies deem feasible to exploit because they come so close to Earth. It is much cheaper to get there and back. Of those 17,000 only 10 are considered appropriate to investigate due to delta velocities and likelihood of enough precious metals to make it worthwhile. Here is a list of those asteroids courtesy of Wikipedia.

click image for larger view

Once small, exploratory drones locate the right asteroid, there are currently only so many options for bringing asteroid material back into the Earth economy. 

1. Send robot drones that can extract metals and water and store them for a return journey. 

2. Send robot drones that can haul the asteroid back to a Lagrange point near Earth and extract materials at leisure. 

3. Send robot drones that will break off chunks to be hauled back to Earth or Moon orbit for processing. 

All of these options require a higher degree of technology than what we currently possess, and they may very well be the wrong options. There is another way. Here is how it might work.

A group of autonomous drones rendezvous with the near Earth asteroid of choice, one selected by the explorer drone. For talking purpose, we will assume it is the asteroid Ryugu which swings through Earth and Mars orbits and has a period of 474 days. They secure themselves to the asteroid. One group of drones are the extractor drones, and the other are the prospector drones. They all get busy. The prospector drones quickly show the extractor drones where to dig, then they go dormant, hanging on for the ride. 

Ryugu's orbit takes it to Earth and Mars and inner part of asteroid belt.

The extractor drones are solar powered. While the asteroid is relatively close to the Sun (inside the orbit of Mars), these drones will dig and process metal and water, packing it away for towing back. 

Saving the world one plastic grocery bag at a time. Recycling genius. 

When the shuttle asteroid reaches the orbit of Mars, the prospector drones awaken and have breakfast, the flow of current from their re-activated nuclear power packs. Unlike the extractor drones, these are not dependent on solar energy, and that is a good thing. A telescope and spectrometer starts analyzing data from nearby asteroids to determine which ones are worth visiting by the drones. The prospector drones now break away from Ryugu and begin checking out asteroids in the belt where the sunlight is dim. They have stocked up on rocket fuel in the form of water provided by the extractor drones. Their nuclear power packs will last for 14 years. 

Ryugu is close to Earth again and a deep space tug is waiting there to tow back the loot extracted by the extractor drones and to drop off any spare parts or software updates needed for the drones. 

Extractor drones keep working as Ryugu once again approaches Mars’ orbit. Any prospector drones that have found significant asteroids now come back to Ryugu with the coordinates. The prospector drone switches power supplies with the extractor drone, and it goes after the asteroid picked by the prospector drone to extract what it can. It will meet up with Ryugu in about 2 1/2 years to ride back with a sack of goodies. This will be the process until the drones start to break down or run out of power, at which time they will meet up with Ryugu for the final ride back to Earth. 

Use those plastic grocery bags again. Save money. Save the world. Here’s how. 

A variation would be that all the drones have multiple capabilities, both extraction and prospecting. They would also run off of either solar or nuclear. That way, mining could continue unabated on the shuttle asteroid if needed, and a drone could start extracting material on a choice asteroid in the belt as soon as it was located. One drone design is also cheaper. How many drones are involved? It could start out with as few as two, with the only limit to the upside being depth of pockets of the company. The only problem with this scheme is one it shares with the first three enumerated above. We don't have the technology to do this yet.

The asteroid mining industry is still waiting on three major technologies to propel it to the forefront of shaping our future civilization - artificial intelligence, nuclear fusion, and human longevity. There is one minor, but important, technology which also needs to be solved. That is miniature ore extraction technologies that work over several metallurgies in vacuum with no gravity. You thermal and chemical process engineers out there need to get cracking. If there is no way to do this, we go back to hauling big chunks of asteroid back to Earth or Moon orbit for processing.

Autonomous drones will require artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence will be required to run the autonomous drones. Although strategic management can be carried out over long distance, the day to day problems will need to be dealt with. I’m sure you’ve run across jobs at work where you are pretty sure your boss could not have dealt with it. That is the sort of things these drones will be dealing with. Its timeline is nebulous at this point but at least it is not touting civilization changing breakthroughs in the next 30 years every year like the companies working on nuclear fusion technology. AI seems to be growing incrementally but there is nothing yet that can carry out complex mechanical tasks on its own. 

Nuclear fusion will be needed for when the drone gets so far into the asteroid belt the Sun looks like only a bright star. Solar panels don’t work so well there, but you still need that energy to turn ice into water and water into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel. Even if nuclear fusion becomes a reality, small units may not be practical, but there is a work around for this. 

We have the technology for small nuclear fission power generators that last for decades. They are radioisotope thermoelectric generators - RTGs. They’ve been around for 50 years and have powered 25 U.S. spacecraft so far, but a newer technology is available. A version of the Stirling radioisotope generator, SRG, will generate four times the power of RTGs. It is the advanced Stirling radioisotope generator, or ASRG. It will last for fourteen years. NASA has some work to do on it. It was scheduled to fly to Titan on NASA’s Titan Mare Explorer, but that mission was never funded. A serious asteroid mining company should consider leasing this technology from NASA for its own purposes.

Cutaway of ASRG - courtesy Wikipedia

Longevity for the human species is currently at a plateau that maxes out at about 105. If you make it to there, chances stabilize at about 50/50 for making it another year. There are scientists that claim there is a limit to human longevity and some that say we don’t know yet. I’m going with that latter group because humans need to live longer. I’m talking about living to 120 with the same mental and physical stamina you have when you are 50. The current life expectancy for an American male is about 79. We need this longevity for better planning for the future of the human race. Rapacious, predatory capitalism is not so appealing when you’re going to live to see the results of a ruined environment and society. The mining industry needs this technology because some of these projects are so long term, only a long-lived person would be willing to take them on.

The gist is that autonomous drones can use the asteroid they are mining as a shuttle to the asteroid belt where they can find and mine other asteroids. Then they can hook back up with that shuttle asteroid when their mission is complete and hitch a ride back home. Now, go lease that reactor tech from NASA and badger Alphabet for that AI technology you know they’re holding back on. It’s a big place, the asteroid belt, with a 150 million asteroids. Someone’s going to find the motherlode. Might as well be you, especially if you are in grade school and you get started right now. 

Other articles you may enjoy:

Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

Cryptocurrency Is Going Into Space

Going Back To the Moon Is Not Just for Governments Anymore

Why It Is a Certainty We Will Become a Space-Based Civilization

Recycling Asteroids For Fun and Profit

Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic Asteroid Propulsion System

Sticking the Landing On Your Billion Dollar Asteroid

Artificial Intelligence and Asteroid Mining Will Be a (Necessary) Match Made In the Heavens

The Weapon of Mass Destruction Nobody Is Talking About

How We Can Diminish the Possibility of Water Wars

There's An Asteroid Out There With All of Our Names On It

What Will Be the Most Common Currency In a Future Space-Based Society?

Workers In Space Will Live In Igloos

How We Will Get Asteroid Material Back To Earth

The Military Values High Ground - Space Is the Highest

Very Large Scale 3D Printing In Space

Energy and Space; Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum

China’s Strategy for the Future Is Scary Smart

We Will Live on the Moon: the How and Why

A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic, Asteroid Propulsion System

Image courtesy Wikipedia

You’ve found the asteroid of your dreams. Ryugu, the asteroid recently visited by the Japanese probe Hayabusa2 has yielded up a hefty portion of its $83 billion dollar evaluation. Autonomous drones have harvested the low hanging fruit, stashed it in giant carbon nanotube nets, and are waiting for the asteroid to come near Earth again. They will then head back, towing the billions of dollars worth of palladium, cobalt, water, and some nickel and iron home to a safe orbit around the Earth or Moon. The drones are leaving a lot on the table, though. There is a mountain of iron, nickel, and cobalt left on the asteroid worth even more. 

The asteroid Ryugu

Surface of Ryugu

What if there was a relatively cheap way to get that as well? You could use mined water to make hydrogen and oxygen to burn in a rocket mounted to the surface of the asteroid. That, however, is expensive because water is one of the most valuable things in space in the early future history of asteroid mining. Instead, use the asteroid’s iron mass as a propellant to change the asteroid’s orbit so that it eventually is captured by Earth’s gravity and then slowed and parked in a Lagrange point. Here’s how it would work.

Plastic grocery bags prefer this as their second career.

One of the mining machines, specifically one that chews up elemental iron or anything else into small chips for hauling off is left on the asteroid along with some of the mined water and a few large packages representing a propulsion kit and automated delivery systems. Several general purpose assembly drones are also left on Ryugu with a special task assigned to them. 

They will take the propulsion kit, which includes an auto-controller and override, and assemble it into a coil gun mounted on the surface of the asteroid pointed in the general opposite direction of where the asteroid needs to go. It will be assumed that the rotation of the asteroid has been eliminated. There is a manual remote override for the propulsion system because some people on Earth are squeamish about machines guiding asteroids and have trust issues. 

Although the coil gun will be fixed, there will be conventional thrusters burning hydrogen and oxygen on a fixed boom (for leverage) that can rotate the asteroid (and the coil gun) to any point in the heavens. 

For simplicity we are going to base the coil gun on U.S. Navy experiments in constructing large coil gun weapons. They used a 15 meter long barrel with a 17 kg sabot shoving a 78 kg shell down a 30 cm inside diameter coil barrel. They used a 30 meter long barrel as well, but I’m sticking with the short barrel to cut down on heat generated. You’ll see why in a bit. The results show a velocity of 2.55 km/s. With just the sabot (the iron slug) alone and no non-magnetic payload, it should be a much greater velocity. By mass alone it should be 5 times faster. The ratio of magnetic material to nonmagnetic also goes from about 20 percent to 100 percent so the coils are acting on the entire load. That should be good for another factor of 3 with a commiserate scaling up of electrical energy. The velocity could be around 38.25 km/s. But let’s say we’re off by 50 percent to the up side. We’ll bring the velocity down to 19.125 km/s.

Use those plastic grocery bags again. Save money. Save the world. Here’s how. 

We are going to use a ball of iron chips about 250 mm in diameter for coil gun ammunition. The chips are put into a spherical mold, water is injected to fill the cavities, the whole thing is allowed to freeze and become a 180 kg ice ball of iron. The Navy rig back in 1993 was capable of firing 6 rounds per minute. Due to advances in technology, let’s make that 12 rounds per minute. Twelve rounds at 180 kg = 2160 kg. Divided by 60 seconds, that’s an average of 36 kg per second. Although water is a valuable commodity in space, the little amount used to glue the iron chips together is such an elegant solution to packaging, it makes it worthwhile. Now you see why generated heat is important. We don’t want this snowball to melt before it’s thrown. 

Force (thrust) = mass x velocity. Mass = 36 kg. Velocity = 19,125 m/s. Thrust = 688,500 N or approximately 155,000 lbs., which is twenty percent more than the largest commercial jet engine, the GE90 which set a world record of 127,900 lbs. of thrust. 

This may seem a minuscule engine compared to the estimated 450 million ton mass of Ryugu until you consider the gas tank contains upward of 400 million tons - about 1600 years worth. You would run out of water before iron. 

To reiterate, an automated breech delivery system gathers iron chips, injects them with water and freezes them into icy cannon balls. It delivers these via tubes or other conveyor system to the breech mechanism of the coil gun which fires these every five seconds into the void for propulsion. There is some history that verifies the validity of such a system. In the mid-1990s NASA did a study on a maglev launch system, StarTram, to launch unmanned craft into orbit. Its cost and feasibility was validated by Sandia National Laboratory, but it was, obviously, never implemented. It would have made the cost of getting things into orbit 100 times cheaper. 

Packbot 7, an ancestor of asteroid mining robots - NASA

This propulsion system could also have applications for turning an asteroid into a transit system going from near Earth to near Mars or the Asteroid Belt or other parts of the Solar System. As the iron chipping robots tunnel out more and more fuel, the habitat portion of the asteroid could become quite expansive. All or most of the interior of an asteroid devoted to habitation will have sufficient wall thickness between it and the exterior to block even the most severe galactic cosmic radiation. The mining robots could also be programmed to tunnel in geometric patterns amenable to being rotated about a central axis, providing the artificial gravity human travelers will find necessary to keep their bone density from becoming too low. 

Other articles you may enjoy:

Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

Cryptocurrency Is Going Into Space

Going Back To the Moon Is Not Just for Governments Anymore

Why It Is a Certainty We Will Become a Space-Based Civilization

Asteroid Mining - How to Pick the Right Asteroid

Recycling Asteroids For Fun and Profit

Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

Sticking the Landing On Your Billion Dollar Asteroid

Artificial Intelligence and Asteroid Mining Will Be a (Necessary) Match Made In the Heavens

The Weapon of Mass Destruction Nobody Is Talking About

How We Can Diminish the Possibility of Water Wars

There's An Asteroid Out There With All of Our Names On It

What Will Be the Most Common Currency In a Future Space-Based Society?

Workers In Space Will Live In Igloos

How We Will Get Asteroid Material Back To Earth

The Military Values High Ground - Space Is the Highest

Very Large Scale 3D Printing In Space

Energy and Space; Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum

China’s Strategy for the Future Is Scary Smart

We Will Live on the Moon: the How and Why

What Will Be the Most Common Currency In a Future Space-Based Society?

Courtesy NASA

Gold coins? Platinum pellets? Grains of cobalt? I predict water will be the preferred currency in outer space. You can drink it, bathe in it, breathe it (oxygen), burn it in rocket engines (oxygen and hydrogen), grow things (hydroponics), and protect yourself from radiation. 

Water is easily stored, shaped, and divided up for transactions. It can be flash frozen and quickly thawed with the deep cold of space and the intense radiation of the Sun.

Paper bags take 5 X the water to make and 7 X the fuel to transport than plastic bags 

The current method of water storage in space looks like duffel bags with a spout as this picture reveals. This astronaut is obviously reveling in the fortune of water surrounding him. That water is worth $83,400 per gallon based on the current cost of $10,000 to put a pound of something into orbit. Hopefully, it is Evian or Fuji.

Water storage aboard ISS - Courtesy NASA

Or one could build a palace of ice in outer space. There is that much water available on some asteroids. Just make sure the seal between the ice and the airlock stays frozen solid. 

Small entrepreneurs will make their first fortunes by seeking out chunks of ice in the asteroid belt or simply mining close-flying asteroids for the liquid gold. Planetary Resources, an actual asteroid mining company, has recently stated that it will concentrate on water instead of precious metals as its first acquisition. 

Water globule floating on ISS - courtesy NASA

The companies that first acquire water in space will be like the merchants that made fortunes selling picks and shovels to the forty-niners in the California gold rush. 

The importance and value of water will demand that water recycling and reclamation units aboard space vehicles and habitats be ubiquitous and efficient. Even if someone dies in space, the water in their body will be reclaimed before burial in space or transportation back to Earth. This will be part of a signed agreement when someone goes to work in space. Their immediate kin will get some portion of the value of that water in space, even if they are on Earth. 

Saving the world one bag at a time. Recycling genius.  

Security will be a concern as well. When a worker’s contract ends, what’s to keep him from filling flexible bags of water and hiding them about his body and carry-all? When he gets back to the orbiting end of the Lunar Space Elevator or a space station near Earth, he turns his water in for some Earth-based currency like gold or platinum before going back to the planet. 

The biggest non-recoverable expenditure of water in space will be for rocket fuel. The biggest recoverable use for water in space will likely be radiation shielding. It is efficient over a spectrum of radiation including cosmic and gamma rays. In fact, radiation shielding may be designed to not only protect against radiation but to be a reserve source of fuel as well. 

It is possible a water-based currency, both physical and digital, will be established in a space-based culture of dozens of companies and thousands of workers. Since water melts so readily, the gold coins, platinum pellets, or grains of cobalt mentioned before might actually be used; and they will represent some predetermined amount of water. That amount will most likely be decided by some committee with all of the space-based companies represented. The value of water will fluctuate as discoveries are made on asteroids being mined and unrecoverable expenditures of water such as rocket fuel are used up. There may one day be a cryptocurrency based on water - H20coin, of course. 

The actual water will be kept in some safe place, a giant chunk of ice hidden, or well-guarded, or both. As a matter of course, owners of large quantities of water in space will, at some point, have that water melted and mixed with some small amount of radioactive isotope to “brand” it. It won't be enough to affect health, but it will be easy to track if it is stolen. 

There is probably more water in asteroids than on Earth. Its value in space comes from the difficulty and expense of finding and securing it. Those who do this first will be the future lords and princes of outer space. They will control the lifeblood of space.

Other articles you may enjoy:

Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

Cryptocurrency Is Going Into Space

Going Back To the Moon Is Not Just for Governments Anymore

Why It Is a Certainty We Will Become a Space-Based Civilization

Asteroid Mining - How to Pick the Right Asteroid

Recycling Asteroids For Fun and Profit

Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic Asteroid Propulsion System

Sticking the Landing On Your Billion Dollar Asteroid

Artificial Intelligence and Asteroid Mining Will Be a (Necessary) Match Made In the Heavens

The Weapon of Mass Destruction Nobody Is Talking About

How We Can Diminish the Possibility of Water Wars

There's An Asteroid Out There With All of Our Names On It

Workers In Space Will Live In Igloos

How We Will Get Asteroid Material Back To Earth

The Military Values High Ground - Space Is the Highest

Very Large Scale 3D Printing In Space

Energy and Space; Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum

China’s Strategy for the Future Is Scary Smart

We Will Live on the Moon: the How and Why

Replicator - Fact or Fiction?

Stargate replicator? No, NASA robot.

Spider Robot NASA JSC Tweetup Sarah Worthy - Licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike.

The “replicator” from Star Trek was mostly shown rustling up grub, but we all know they were rearranging subatomic particles to make air, water, condoms, iPads...just about anything that struck their fancy. They could probably even make a replicator. That’s where Stargate took up the baton, having replicators do just that with reckless, and evilly calculated, abandon.

Paper or plastic? There are a lot of unexpected turns and twists to the correct answer. 

What a wonderful sci-fi indulgence of the imagination, right? It is no longer imaginary. You can not only buy the Replicator, but the Replicator 2 and the Replicator 2X from MakerBot. Right now. $2800. Check out what the MakerBot 3D printer looked like in August 2011 when I first did a post on 3D printing...

...and what it looks like now.

Okay, it doesn't make filet mignon or tomato soup like on Star Trek, but it could make a cover for your iPhone. Makerbot's Replicator 2 is far from being the last word in 3D printing. Here's one that can print out a candy bar. 3D printing not only prints out the fabric but the dress or pants of your choice while it's at it. If you want something more durable just have it printed in stainless steel. It is not, however, solid stainless. Most 3D printing of metal involves sintering, a process that involves lasers applying enough heat to a powder so that molecules of the substance migrate from one particle to the next, bonding them together. It's like mass spot welding. The end product can be porous and that can be a good thing or a bad thing. It's lighter but not as strong. You can fill those interstices with another substance, enhancing the original properties, or utilize the porous structure for filtering or for enhancing catalytic reactions.

If this had been around 15 years ago, the “paper or plastic” question would be pretty moot. 

Here is where we get into that light-headed area where it feels as though we're living in a science fiction movie. That's because we are, so get used to it. You can have honest-to-goodness solid stainless steel parts printed. How about titanium? High temp alloys? Yeah, it's all here. Things are moving faster than you can imagine. You may think Stratasys or 3D Systems has a leg up in this field, and they are big and know a lot, but they can't print in solid stainless or titanium. They may have high-powered lasers that glue these powders together, but they don't do what this company does. Arcam AB, a Swedish company now owned by GE, actually welds metals together layer after layer with an electron beam. They build parts for NASA and Boeing.

So what other things can you print with in 3D?

glass

human cells

sugar

ice

turkey

gold

concrete

So, it's all been done with 3D printing. It's a maxed-out technology. Not hardly.

In the future, you'll be able to donate a few stem cells that will be cultured to whatever quantity required to print you an organ. This may happen before we figure out the complexities of curing cancer, so if any type or amount of cancer is detected on any organ, out it comes. You get a new one.
UPDATE: Bam! It's already happening. Check out this article from Scientific American that describes using human skin stem cells to print organs.

It costs $4000 to recycle ton of plastic bags worth $500 on open market. Here's why.

Whole buildings will be printed out. What looks like an ATV with an umbilical will actually be a wheeled, motorized printhead that prints concrete, wiring and plumbing as it traces the path of the walls guided by GPS and the building's 3D file. There is nothing to prevent us from building a city-block-large printer attached to stanchions in the corners. As it prints, it will climb these columns to whatever the "blueprints" call for. It will allow incredibly complex structures to be economically fabricated in short periods of time - a new golden age of architecture.
UPDATE: Here it is! At least a model. It is being proposed to use it on the Moon to print the first colony there. Why not use it here on Earth?
UPDATE: And here it is being used right here on Earth.

Sky cranes will be a thing of the past.
Image courtesy of  FreeFoto.com

One of the more spectacular future applications will be out of this world. An array of printheads will orbit the globe like a satellite, printing out future habitats for mankind. Asteroids will be lassoed and brought into Earth's orbit. Chunks of them will be melted down and fed into an orbital printer kept hot by the concentrated rays of the Sun by orbital mirrors. Space habitats will become a reality.

But the truly amazing stuff is when the concept of 3D printing is combined with femtotechnology. Everyone has heard of nanotechnology. A sheet of paper is approximately 100,000 nanometers thick, give or take a few. The great physicist Richard Feynman introduced the concept in 1959. People winked and nudged each other and then it came to pass, just like Richard said. And it happened in a few decades. A femtometer is a million times smaller than the nanometer. Printer heads as small as atoms will combine subatomic particles into things we can only dream of. It will herald the beginning of a materials technology that will make nanotechnology look like curing hides around the campfire by comparison. This will probably take place within the next few decades.

The answer to the plastic bag problem is reuse. This new device makes it easy. 

We've come full circle. I started this with a discussion of the replicator from pop sci-fi and it's real world namesake that, while nifty, leaves us pining for the replicator of our televised fantasies. I've taken us on a tour of the current state of the art and a logical, if imaginative, extrapolation of 3D printing technology. And here we sit, finally, eating our filet mignon hot from the 3D printer that rearranged subatomic particles to make it. A printer that, to all intents and purposes, gives us what any self-respecting replicator should gives us: Whatever we want.

You're comments are always welcome.

Thanks,
Glen Hendrix, author Transmat World

For other blog posts on future technologies be sure to check out the following:

The Future of Wind Energy - An ocean of energy.

3D Printing Big Bang - It's gonna be big.

The Space Mirror Hack - Inexpensive, inflatable, orbital death ray.

Asteroid to Habitat: The Transformation Begins - The death ray combines with the asteroid to...

The Space Egg - Living, and thriving, in space.

Dramatic Changes Coming to the Airline Industry - Enjoy a hot tub on your $100 trip from LA to NY

When Nothing Means Something - Antigravity, but patentable.

A New Age of Exploration

© Copyright Douglas Maas and licensed for 

reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Who hasn’t seen one of the google camera cars rolling down some street? I’ve seen them several times. I haven’t been able to make out if there is a driver in the car or not, but the camera is the thing--360 degree views everywhere it goes. It heralds a new age of exploration by proxy. According to this article, Explore the Amazon With Google Street View, you can even explore the rivers and jungles of Brazil.

This technology is ripe for maximization, and by that I mean minimization. It won’t be long before this technology is shrunk to fit on your body. It can be be worn while extreme off-road biking, diving the Great Barrier Reef, spelunking, climbing Mount Everest, New Orleans at Mardis Gras, the Burning Man Festival, a walk through a local park, or a night out dancing at a local music venue. It will be a wonderful means for people that can’t experience these things to vicariously participate, enriching their lives. No modern explorer would be without one.

With the purchase of your groceries and this device, you get free trash bags for life.

It can be attached to remote-controlled, even autonomous, drones cruising beneath the sea, through sky or jungle. Attached to a balloon, it could climb 100,000 feet to the edge of space. It could be incorporated into a satellite making a tour of the Solar System or the Asteroid Belt. It will be attached to Moon crawlers, Mars rovers, or robot subs on Europa. It will be a new age of adventure; one that everyone can participate in. It will be a new connectedness with our planet, our solar system, and our culture. Someone needs to do this.

Someone is. You know for a fact Google is working on it. We already have Google Earth, Google Moon and Google Mars. Also, Roy Ragsdale is doing his part in developing the technology. He explains how he made his own, off-the-shelf, street-view camera in this article DIY Street-View Camera. He’s already got it down to something you can wear while walking around. It’s an amazing article. I see a future where links on Google Maps or Google Earth take you directly to 360 degree videos of that particular geographic location. These will be in addition to what Street View gives you now on Google Maps. And we'll see them start popping up on YouTube.

Thanks to LexnGer

Although it's hard to believe there can be entertainment as good as Racoon Nation or Radioactive Wolves to be generated by someone walking around with a camera strapped to their torso, perhaps we can at least have something better than daytime TV or "Angel from Hell" to look forward to in our voyeuristic future. It may even inspire someone to go do something in person. So get crackin' Google and/or Roy Ragsdale on the helmet or pocket version of this great device.


Glen Hendrix, author Transmat World