Imagine a machine capable of building anything at all one atom at a time. Food, clothing, electronics anything you can think of.
With personal computing power set to increase by 1000 times within the next 7 years scientists are saying this machine called a personal fabricator
could be in wide scale commercial use within 20 years.
But now the very people in the best position to know how CPU performance will grow (such as Shekhar) are cautioning us that our CPUs will be
performing ANOTHER ONE-THOUSAND-TIMES FASTER, at One-Million-MIPS (that's 1,000 BIPS, or 1 TIPS (Trillions of Instructions Per Second)), JUST SEVEN
YEARS FROM NOW!
www.theharrowgroup.com...
Stereolithography is a process that turns computer generated models of anything in to the real life matter of your desired object.
Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Center for Bits & Atoms in an
article
published by Edge states:
I've even been taking my twins, now 6, in to use MIT's workshops; they talk about going to MIT to make things they think of rather than going to
a toy store to buy what someone else has designed." ...
"I had an epiphany last summer: that for about ten thousand dollars on a desktop, [they could, within limits, do this today!]
What makes this possible is that space and time have become cheap. For a few thousand dollars a little tabletop milling machine can measure its
position down to microns, a fraction of the size of a hair, and so you can fabricate the structures of modern technology such as circuit boards for
components in advanced packages. And a little 50-cent microcontroller can resolve time down below a microsecond, which is faster than just about
anything you might want to measure in the macroscopic world. Together these capabilities can be used to emulate the functionality of what will
eventually be integrated into a personal fabricator."
www.theharrowgroup.com...
We are really not far off having a vending machine sized personal fabricator in your own home. Imagine how that could change the world. Its an amazing
thought. And to think it might just be a possibility in our lifetimes.
Here is something else Neil said in this article that made me laugh:
I have a student working on this project who can graduate when his thesis walks out of the printer, meaning that he can output the document along
with the functionality for it to get up and walk away
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The article i am referring to for this information can be accessed by the relevant links above. And this link below:
www.theharrowgroup.com...
And if you prefer to watch instead of read then you can also watch a documentary with Michio Kaku that goes into this matter in some detail here:
video.google.co.uk...
So what does everyone think?