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Living off-grid can be a challenge. When energy
and supplies no longer arrive through installed infrastructure,
they must be collected and stored locally, or done without.
Today this is done with lead-acid batteries, expensive water-handling
systems, and so on. All these systems have limited capacities.
Conversely, living on-grid creates a distance between production
and consumption that makes it easy to ignore the implications
of excessive resource usage. Molecular manufacturing can make
off-grid living more practical, with clean local production
and easy managing of local resources.
For this
essay, I will assume a molecular manufacturing technology
based on mechanosynthesis of carbon lattice. A bio-inspired
nanotechnology would share many of the same advantages. Carbon
lattice (including diamond) is about 100 times as strong as
steel per volume, and carbon is one-sixth as dense. This implies
that a structure made of carbon would weigh at most 1% of
the weight of a steel structure. This is important for several
reasons, including cost and portability. However, in most
things made of steel, much of the material is resisting compression,
which requires far more bulk than resisting the same amount
of tension. (It's easier to crumple a steel bar than to pull
it apart.) When construction in fine detail doesn't cost any
extra, it's possible to convert compressive stress to tensile
stress by using trusses or pressurized tanks. So it'll often
be safe to divide current product weight by 1,000. The cost
of molecular-manufactured carbon lattice might be $20 per
kg ($10 per pound) at today's electricity prices, and drop
rapidly as nanofactories are improved and nano-manufactured
solar cells are deployed. This makes it very competitive with
steel as a structural material.
A two or three order of magnitude improvement
in material properties, and a six order of magnitude improvement
in cost per feature and compactness of motors and computers,
allows the design of completely new kinds of products. For
example, a large tent or a small inflatable boat may weigh
10 kilograms. But building with advanced materials, this is
equal to 1,000 or even 10,000 kilograms: a house or a yacht.
Likewise, a small airplane or seaplane might weigh 1,000 kg
today. A 10 kg full-sized collapsible airplane is not implausible;
today's hang gliders weigh only 30-40 kg, and they're built
out of aluminum and nylon. Such an airplane would be easy
to store and cheap to build, and could of course be powered
by solar-generated fuel.
Today, equipment and structures must be maintained
and their surfaces protected. This generates a lot of waste
and uses a lot of paint and labor. But as the saying goes,
diamonds are forever. This is because in a diamond, all the
atoms are strongly bonded to each other, and oxygen (even
with the help of salt) can't pull one loose to start a chemical
reaction. Ultraviolet light can be blocked by a thin surface
coating molecularly bonded to the structure during construction.
So diamondoid structures would require no maintenance to prevent
corrosion. Also, due to the strongly bonded surfaces, it appears
that nanoscale machines will be immune to ordinary wear. A
machine could be designed to run without maintenance for a
century.
Can molecular
manufacturing build all the needed equipment? It appears so;
carbon is an extremely versatile atom. It can be a conductor,
semiconductor, or insulator; opaque or transparent; it can
make inorganic (and indigestible) substances like diamond
and graphite, but with a few other readily available atoms,
it can make incredibly complex and diverse organic chemicals.
And don't forget that a complete self-contained molecular
manufacturing system can be quite small. So any needed equipment
or products could be made on the spot, out of chemicals readily
available from the local environment. A self-contained factory
sufficient to supply a family could be the size of a microwave
oven.
When a product is no longer wanted, it can be burned cleanly,
being made entirely of light atoms. It is worth noting that
extraction of rare minerals from ecologically or politically
sensitive areas would become largely unnecessary.
Power collection and storage would require
a lot fewer resources. A solar cell only has to be a few microns
thick. Lightweight expandable or inflatable structures would
make installation easy and potentially temporary. Energy could
be stored as hydrogen. The solar cells and the storage equipment
could be built by the on-site nanofactory. The same goes for
solar water distillers, and tanks and greenhouses for growing
fish, seaweed, algae, or hydroponic gardening. Water can also
be purified electrically and recovered from greenhouse air,
and direct chemical food production using cheap microfluidics
will probably be an early post-nanofactory development. With
food, fuel, and equipment all available locally, there would
be very little need to ship supplies from centralized production
facilities, and water use per person could be much less than
with open-air agriculture and today's problems with handling
wastewater.
The developed
nations today have a massive and probably unsustainable ecological
footprint. Because production is so decentralized, it is hard
to observe the impact of consumer choices. And because only
a few areas of land are convenient for transportation or ideal
for agriculture, unhealthy patterns of land use have developed.
Economies of scale encourage large infrastructures. But nano-built
equipment benefits from other economies, so off-site production
and distribution will become less efficient than local productivity.
Someone living off-grid will be able literally to see their
own ecological footprint, simply by looking at the land area
they have covered with solar cells and greenhouses.
Cheap sensors will allow monitoring of any unintentional pollution--though
there will be fewer pollution sources with clean manufacturing
of maintenance-free products.
Cheap high-bandwidth communication without
wires would require a new infrastructure, but it would not
be hard to build one. Simply sending up small airplanes with
wireless networking equipment would allow wireless communication
for hundreds of miles.
Incentive for theft might decrease, since
people could more quickly and easily build what they want
for themselves rather than stealing other people's homemade
goods.
Molecular manufacturing should make it very
easy to disconnect from today's industrial grid. Even with
relatively primitive (early) molecular manufacturing, people
could have far better quality of life off-grid than in today's
slums, while doing significantly less ecological damage. Areas
that are difficult to live in today could become viable living
space. Although this would increase the spread of humans over
the globe, it would reduce the use of intensive agriculture,
centralized energy production, and transportation; the ecological
tradeoffs appear favorable. (With careful monitoring of waste
streams, this argument may even apply to ocean living.)
Everything written here also could apply to
displaced persons. Instead of refugee camps where barely adequate
supplies are delivered from outside and crowding leads to
increased health problems, relatively small amounts of land
would allow each family (or larger social group) to be self-sufficient.
This would not mitigate the tragedy of losing their homes,
but would avoid compounding the tragedy by imposing the substandard
or even life-threatening living conditions of today's refugee
camps.
Of course, this essay has only considered
the technical aspects of off-grid living. The practical feasibility
depends on a variety of social and political issues. Many
people enjoy living close to neighbors. Various commercial
interests may not welcome the prospect of people withdrawing
from the current consumer lifestyle. Owners of nanofactory
technology may charge licensing fees too high to permit disconnection
from the money system. Some environmental groups may be unwilling
to see large-scale settlement of new land areas or the ocean,
even if the overall ecological tradeoff were positive. But
the possibility of self-sufficient off-grid living would take
some destructive pressure off of a variety of overpopulated
and over-consuming societies. Although it is not a perfect
alternative, it appears to be preferable in many instances
to today's ways of living and using resources.
The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology(TM) (CRN) is
an affiliate of World Care(R), an international, non-profit,
501(c)3 organization. All donations to CRN are handled through
World Care. The opinions expressed by CRN do not necessarily
reflect those of World Care
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