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Socoder -> Off Topic -> Poking with Plastic Printers

Tue, 10 Jan 2012, 03:48
spinal
I don’t know, I imagine it would be bad for world wide economy is the only saleable products are chemicals for making plastics (and other printable products)... -- Queue communist speech from Afr0.

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Tue, 10 Jan 2012, 03:48
Afr0
Well, someone would have to produce the printers. But if someone could invent a printer for printing printers for printing food, then that would be completely awesome! You'd still need a powersource, of course, but given solarpower I'd predict that we'd be rid of the world's food problems pretty quickly. Fuck the economy!

Not to mention printers for printing printers for printing medication, clothes and beverages... awesome! People wouldn't have to work anymore!

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Tue, 10 Jan 2012, 08:26
waroffice
yay startrek replicaters.

This also brings in to question my views, being a vegetarian can I still say it is cruel to eat animals? hmmmmm
Fri, 13 Jan 2012, 10:52
9572AD
a) Solar power will NEVER be efficient enough for that. Okay, that's an opinion. Solar power is not even remotely near being in the same neighborhood as something that has the possibility to be modified to become efficient enough for that.
(Assuming consistent output and no repairs ever needed it takes upwards of thirty years for an investment into solar power generation to even pay for itself.)

b) You're forgetting MATERIALS. These printers don't print goods out of thin air.

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All the raw, animal magnetism of a rutabaga.
Fri, 13 Jan 2012, 16:08
JL235
A lot of the statistics, such as renewable energy taking decades to pay off it's investment, were mostly based on older forms. Over just a few years wind and solar have made huge strides in closing that gap. However current solar power still sucks.

Designs on the horizon are much more efficient. Some of these include solar cells which collect less energy, but are much cheaper to produce (and so become more efficient), ones powered using bacteria, and an experimental one that was on Click which uses millions of tiny infra red detectors per inch.

I can imagine future Solar Power generating a lot of energy, but overall it'll never be anywhere near as efficient as other sources of power.

The future is Nuclear Fusion, and I expect in 50 years electricity will do what the internet did for communications; become abundant and amazingly cheap.

Many issues, such as generating clean water, can be solved by just throwing more power at the issue. Many developing countries are also held back by the cost of electricity, through the pressure of using more expensive renewable sources of power.
Fri, 13 Jan 2012, 16:43
9572AD
Older forms = existing forms in this case. My statistic came from the research of a large local business looking into converting anything feasible to solar.

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All the raw, animal magnetism of a rutabaga.
Fri, 13 Jan 2012, 23:49
Afr0
You're forgetting MATERIALS. These printers don't print goods out of thin air


Theoretically. You're forgetting that air isn't "thin", and also consists of atoms like everything else - in this case, nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%).
But I'll concede to the fact that for the foreseeable future, these printers would probably need some kind of other material(s) as well(?) in order to print. Hopefully someone could come up with something that wouldn't cost much to aquire!
And I actually read about a 3D printer recently in a magazine... IIRC it used plastic as a material. It was capable of reprinting itself! Someone should buy thousands of those machines and ship 'em to Africa and Haiti. They already have tons of plastic down there from the west that is either dumped or blown there from across the sea. It takes many years for it to decompose.
Instead of waiting for it to decompose, they could use the plastic to feed to the printers so that they could print out carbonation machines!! Not only would they be able to make Open Cola, but it would also enable them to take dirty water, carbonate it and thus make it purer!

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