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I'll no doubt be relegated to the looney bin for bringing it up but I have a sneaky suspicion that the key to successful and thriving colony on Mars will be technology like nanoassemblers that can create basic items out of a stock of elemental chemicals. I was scrounging around at the Forsight Institute's webpage and they have a number of articles on this sort of thing. Maybe it won't happen in our lifetimes but it would be neat to just shovel some Mars dirt into a nanotech machine and have useful stuff come out of it!
:;):
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Nanotech could be interesting, but one must note that nanotech can't merely create ?anything.? And even then, the intellegence involved in nanotech necessarily uses up energy, so a bunch of nanotech making some interesting device could prove more costly than that device being created via more broken down processes.
Okay, let's give an example.
Say we want to make a small palm-type device. We need the shell, which would be made of plastic.
Normal processes would have us create the shell using a die process, all we do is pour hardening plastic into the die, let it dry via whatever means (UV light, natural hardening, etc), and there ya go. Depending on the process, very little heat (energy) is necessary.
Nanotech would have us drop nanobots into a little bowl or whatever, and the little guys would get to work creating this amazing structure at the molecular level. First we have to power the little guys (perhaps the bowl has chemicals they thrive on, or perhaps we beem it to them via microwaves), and then we have to have them work together with some sort of collective intelligence (unlike nanobots in a body, they can't merely go and repair a DNA strand or whatever, they have to be able to work together to design a mold of something).
We could go on about the parts to a palm-type device, but I think we'd see that whatever environment we have now for a certain process would necessarily have to be replicated so that the nanotech could do its job. A CPU couldn't be created in a non-totally clean environment, so where is the advantage to nanotech in this instance? We'd be using the same kind of environment, and probably the same kinds of basic chemical actions, just at a smaller level.
I think it's an interesting concept, but perhaps flawed in practice. Nanotechnology is best suited doing things on a small level. Nanotechnology doesn't scale up well. I can't say for sure that nanotechnology working on a batch of stuff would be more energy consuming than basic methods we have now (or in the future), but I think that there is evidence to suggest that.
Some useful links while MER are active. [url=http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html]Offical site[/url] [url=http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/MM_NTV_Web.html]NASA TV[/url] [url=http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mer2004/]JPL MER2004[/url] [url=http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/statustextonly.html]Text feed[/url]
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The amount of solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth totals some 3.9 million exajoules a year.
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Let me point out that the idea you're suggesting isn't that far fetched, in reality. It just needs to be broken down a little bit. Sure, we throw some regolith into a machine, but that regolith isn't being manipulated directly, we're just mixing it up, seperating the useful chemicals into their little pods, and recombining them via whatever process to make whatever we want.
I think organics are going to play a bigger roal in this than say, nanotechnology. A plant can already make, efficiently, chemicals that we find useful, using sunlight, no less. I think the benefits of nanotechnology are more in the field of longevity and health than anything.
Some useful links while MER are active. [url=http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html]Offical site[/url] [url=http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/MM_NTV_Web.html]NASA TV[/url] [url=http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mer2004/]JPL MER2004[/url] [url=http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/statustextonly.html]Text feed[/url]
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The amount of solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth totals some 3.9 million exajoules a year.
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no wonder drexlerian nanotech is going to come . . . .
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