@VDX The goal here is not going for cheap but finding ways for small-scale production with a high level of independency. Something I found was : Machinery Automation and Robotic solutions for the Mining Industry But those machines still look far too big to me. A machine like the HPC-30 is somewhat smaller, but is still far bigger than an ordinary 3D-printer.by CrazyIdea - General
3D-printing is all about smart small-scale production units. But how to small-scale produce the powder that goes inside a 3D-printer including mining, crushing, grinding and mineral-processing ? Will it be possible to do this all-in-one small-scale or is the best achievable to do this job still a battery of rather large machines ? Any ideas or examples of what has already been achieved in this fby CrazyIdea - General
DA, I wish you all the strength you may need.by CrazyIdea - General
QuoteDark AlchemistThe one thing I am always scared of with mining the moon (something I am 100% against but mining asteroids and comets I have no problems with) is that the surface of the moon will change. While you might not care I rather like the face of the moon and would hate to see it in my face each night looking like some of the mining operations on this planet. It isn't asteically pleasiby CrazyIdea - General
How about this one (as just an example) : Additive Manufacturing of Copper Components with Selective Laser Melting QuoteSelective Laser Melting The additive manufacturing process, Selective Laser Melting SLM enables the fabrication of complex components, which can, for example, have intricate internal structures. SLM uses laser radiation to process metals in powder form into components whose mby CrazyIdea - General
Interesting in this field is also : 3D-Printed Circuit Board QuoteThe goal of this project is to enable the personal manufacturing of simple electronics, especially for Open Source Hardware -- with nothing except a 3D printer, your hands or equivalent, and the basic high-technology electronic components (capacitors, motors, transistors, etc -- but will eventually encompass ICs, microcontrollersby CrazyIdea - General
Maybe the best we will able to achieve before 2022 is the creation of almost-self-replicating-machines (or almost-self-replicating-factories) that can be replicated with a little human aid and are small enough for interplanetary travel, although you'll never know into which the current technology may accelerate. So the question is : "At what technology acceleration level are we standing today?".by CrazyIdea - General
I see that there is a much broader interest in the subject on this forum than I originally thought. To get a wild idea for what has been realized already take a look at the thread I posted here : Building from Scratch But then it is about (a kind of) 3D printing on the planet Mars to which Mars One hopes to send humans in 2022 (to arrive on Mars in 2023). Also the thread self-replicating factorby CrazyIdea - General
@bobc : I can clearly see your point. Maybe this isn't the appropriate forum, although I think that what is going on on this forum has certainly important interfacing with the subject. But to still answer your remark that you can't see a reason that the technology required needs to be self-contained or self-replicating and that without a natural ecosystem, a Mars colony will never be self-suffiby CrazyIdea - General
Here some more recent interesting news: Cronin group involved in major EU project to make smart chemo-robots! QuoteThe EU project, named MICREAgents (EU contribution €3.4 M), plans to build autonomous self-assembling electronic micro-reagents that are almost as small as cells. These micro-reagents will exchange chemical and electronic information to jointly direct complex chemical reactions andby CrazyIdea - General
An interesting article I came across is 3D printers as universal chemistry sets for nanotechnology QuoteWe’ve speculated here about whether 3D printers could lead toward nanofactories and noted recent progress in fast printing of arbitrarily complex three dimensional objects with 100-nanometer resolution. For the most part, 3D printers have been used to print solid objects made from plastic. Nowby CrazyIdea - General
So far we have a rough impression in which direction we must look for the following steps: 1. Searching and collecting rocks 2. Processing the rocks 3. Analyze the minerals The next step will be break up, refine and synthesize those minerals to get the materials we need. For that we probably need a heating device, a microwave-device and a laser-device. I think one of the greatest difficulties wby CrazyIdea - General
If this small-scale mining-machine can be improved and miniaturized, it could be a piece of the puzzle: QuoteThe Extrac-TEC Heavy Particle Concentration (HPC) technology allows for cost-effective gravity separation of minerals of differing densities without the use of chemicals. Based on our revolutionary, new patented transverse spiral concentrator belt and benefiting from almost 20 years of dby CrazyIdea - General
Now let's see what we can learn from the latest technological piece from NASA that is driving around on Mars: Curiosity. It has an an inbuilt system to analyze rock-composition. In the article Today On Mars: Curiosity's First X-Rays Determine Mars Soil Is Like Hawaii's it says: QuoteCheMin uses X-ray diffraction, which is a standard geologic technique for identifying rocks. It was no small featby CrazyIdea - General
I was wondering if there is a name for this fictional machine or fictional team of machines that can produce anything you like from scratch. I came up with Universal Production Unit or simple UPU. How small or how big can a UPU be? I guess it must be huge to begin with, but maybe I'm dead wrong.by CrazyIdea - General
Now let's focus on something what is difficult enough by itself: 3D-printing of a computerchip. And then assuming that all the refined materials for production are already available. Is it possible to build a small machine that 3D-prints a computerchip from these refined materials?by CrazyIdea - General
I expect the chemical factory to be one of the most complicated parts of the machine. To get an impression of the difficulty of chemistry: The chemistry of almost everything And here an attempt to build something from scratch : Thomas Thwaites: How I built a toaster -- from scratchby CrazyIdea - General
A Dutch private organization Mars One wants to send 4 humans on a one way trip to the planet Mars with a spaceship to be launched in 2022, about 10 years from now. How to survive on Mars in the best thinkable way? They have figured out a lot of things already, like how to extract water from the soil, how to grow their own plants there, etcetera. But what in my opinion is missing are machines thaby CrazyIdea - General