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Years ago I thought that if we could find away to break items down to their atoms and then separate the atoms by type, garbage dumps would become valuable resources. Imagine taking a pile of garbage, running it through a machine that separates it by the atom type. The end result would be no garbage and an containers full of pure elements.
Similar techniques and tools would work for mining and processing Moon, Asteroid, Mars or Mercury material.
I thought it would be decades before this could be a reality, but it may come sooner, and this research might help;
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/material … -04zg.html
"Run for it? Running's not a plan! Running's what you do, once a plan fails!" -Earl Bassett
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Hmmm. Great!
But not *directly* for what you propose, although *indirectly* it is very interesting for 'nanomachines' one of the stumbling blocks to the theory of parralel manufacturing of these things is to actually feed the 'factories' with precicely quantified 'buildingblocks', fast. This looks like a good possible solution. And once you have your nanobots, you can use them to chew away at the dumps...
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I am pretty sure that we have had the technology necessary to break garbage into its constituent elements for a long time. However, this would require a great deal of energy, and that makes it too expensive to compete with readily available resources.
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If you have self replicating machines it is about as expensive as farming.
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