The Replicator - A Key Component to a Better Future for All Humankind

I believe one of Gene Roddenbury's greatest gifts to the world was the idea of the replicator, a machine capable of creating objects from templates.

If we are to ever truly create the best of all possible futures for humanity, the basic necessities of life must be provided to all of humankind. If we are to provide those basic necessities while avoiding: theft, taxes, taking from one to give to another, socialism, communism; I believe it will require the design (preferably open source) and production of replicators.

Come with me and go back to 2005, 275,000 homes have just been destroyed in the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina disaster leaving hundreds of thousands of refugees with no place to live, no place to go. Re-imagine the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina disaster in a world with the replicator:


Industrial replicators capable of making 1 sky scraper apt building (500 units 2000 square foot a piece) and 1 industrial replicator a month are tasked to create new homes for the refugees.

Starting with just 10 industrial replicators:
After 1 month - 5000 apts are available for the refugees
After 2 months - 15000 apts are available for the refugees
After 3 months - 35000 apts are available for the refugees
After 4 months - 75000 apts are available for the refugees
After 5 months - 155000 apts are available for the refugees
After 6 months - 315000 apts are available for the refugees

Starting with just 50 industrial replicators:
After 1 month - 25000 apts are available for the refugees
After 2 months - 75000 apts are available for the refugees
After 3 months - 175000 apts are available for the refugees
After 4 months - 375000 apts are available for the refugees


This is the power of exponential growth, something only machines and automated systems are capable of. Any manufacturing process that requires more humans to manufacture more of the same good is fundamentally flawed.

With such a machine we could easily house the entire populace of the planet in a relatively short amount of time, by my estimates 2 - 3 years after the successful design and construction of the first replicator.

Our current economic systems do not scale well, they do not deal with increases in efficiency well, as more and more blue collar manual labor jobs become automated, the middle class erodes away further and further, the ability of the public to buy new goods diminishes as middle class jobs diminish, the economy slows down due to lack of consumption, people end up getting laid off due to lack of work, progress decreases due to lack of revenue and profits.

The analogy I find best, yet may be simplistic, is likening the present world economy to a basketball spinning on a finger. It is stable at it's optimum conditions but as soon as those conditions start to change the basketball becomes more and more unstable making it more and more difficult to keep the basketball spinning on the finger.

With the replicator that instability goes away.


The Federal Reserve, an institution recognized if for nothing else: the modern greed of humankind, conducted a comprehensive study to try to understand what motivates the human being, to try to understand what incentives can motivate people to perform at their best.

This was covered in Dan Pink's talk "Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" at the RSA. It is only about 10 minutes long, I would encourage everyone to watch it, it is available here:
www.youtube.com...

As long as the task required mechanical skill, manual labor, repetitive behavior, wrote memory and recitation, that sort of thing, they found the higher the monetary reward, the higher the performance.

However if the task required even just rudimentary cognitive skill, creative thinking, outside the box thinking, solving new problems, coming up with new solutions, that sort of thing, they found the higher the monetary reward, the poorer the performance.

This Federal Reserve sponsored study showed truths about humankind and human nature that they did not at all expect.

These results have been replicated over and over and over again.

For simple, straight forward tasks: higher the number of ditches dug, higher the reward; higher the stock portfolios of your clients do, the higher your bonus; the higher the number of mortgages you sell, the higher your bonuses; if then rewards; the higher the monetary reward, the better the performance seen. Money as a reward for these types of tasks is outstanding.


For tasks involving creativity and rudimentary cognitive skill, money is a motivator only in that people need to feel they are being payed enough.

If people are compensated enough to the point of taking the issue of money off the table (something that the replicator and providing basic necessities to all humankind would accomplish) there end up being 3 factors that lead to higher performance and personal satisfaction in tasks involving rudimentary cognitive skill, creative thinking, outside the box thinking, solving new problems, and coming up with new solutions; the kinds of tasks that create true progress in this world.


Autonomy - Our desire to be self directed, to be free to direct our own lives
Mastery - Our desire to get better at things we find fun
Purpose - Our desire to make a contribution, as Tony Stark said in Iron Man 2, "legacy, what we leave behind"


When the profit motive gets unhinged from the purpose motive you get bad products, bad services, and bad ethics.

When organizations and companies take and support those 3 factors, they get better workers who are more satisfied with their jobs and who make better products and services.

What we see today in government and in industry run by monopolies or oligopolies are bad solutions to our present problems and an inability to generate new better solutions to present and future problems. Slow broadband speeds, slow transportation systems, costly energy consumption, poor educational results in public schools that educate groups instead of individuals, food production that requires more land to produce more food, space exploration programs that are idling instead of moving along at warp speeds.


Crafting systems and then trying to mash humans into them does not work.

What we need in economic and governmental systems if we are to truly accelerate the progress of civilization are systems that are based on human nature, that work with humankind's fundamental desires, our 3 primary motivations: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

By designing our systems around those 3 primary motivators we will maximize human performance and satisfaction. The farther we move away from supporting those 3 primary motivators, the lower the performance and satisfaction we will get from humankind.

Fortunately or unfortunately it is human nature.

I read about something similar, where you would have these 'nano factories', and you would basically put the key chemicals needed to make something into these 'nano factories' then nano-bots would create what you desired.

Although it was only an idea, I think something like this could be so beneficial to mankind if we were able to create it.

reply to post by splittheatom


I agree, a nano-factory replicator would be incredibly beneficial for humankind. I did not have anything so complicated in mind as of yet, I was more thinking replicator version alpha, the first version ever made. Over time the templates it could make and sophistication of the materials it could use would increase.

Initially I was just thinking geopolymer concrete building panels and the odds and ends to put them together into a complete building. The moon is literally covered with alumino-silicates, the raw material used in making geopolymer concrete.

If you want a good idea of what a world would be like with that tech (a real world, not a Roddenberry one) you could do worse than The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.

en.wikipedia.org...