I’m giving a TEDx talk tomorrow morning (“A Future of Radical Abundance: Transforming the Material Basis of Civilization”), then talks at several Universities in Portugal, all invited and arranged by the United States Embassy in Lisbon.

Back to Oxford next week.

See “The physical basis of high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing”.

Larger pipes, smaller motors,
surprising improvements

While in Baku, I met with Amory Lovins, a remarkable physicist / engineer / policy analyst who has changed the world’s understanding of energy systems, how they work, and how they can be radically improved. Amory’s decades of experience and thought have led to deep insights regarding not only energy systems, but systems engineering itself.

In his work, Amory has identified surprising (even shocking) gaps between technological potential and engineering results, gaps opened by a failure to frame problems correctly, to consider fundamental principles, and to make what are sometimes blindingly obvious trade-offs. He summarizes principles, methodologies, management lessons, and specific, remarkable cases in two brief, must-read papers:

• Integrative Design
• Factor Ten Engineering Design Principles

Amory shows the enormous gains that can be achieved by improved engineering methodologies, for example, radically increasing the energy efficiency of houses, skyscrapers, chemical plants, and mining operations while sometimes reducing capital costs.

Of broader importance, however, Amory offers insights into what might otherwise seem inexplicable and implausible: How standard engineering practice, presumably refined by thousands of engineers, decades of experience, and billions of dollars of design-contingent differential costs, can routinely employ standard, well-understood components (pipes, pumps, furnaces, thermal insulators…) to build systems that are grotesquely far from optimal in performance and cost. This gap between practice and potential is a key feature of today’s technological landscape, and its costs represent business opportunities.

Readers of Radical Abundance will note parallels with my discussion of gaps between current scientific knowledge and current understanding of its engineering implications for atomically precise manufacturing. In both instances, to understand how these gaps can persist, one must consider how education, cultures, institutions, and methodologies shape professions.

On the road and speaking today:

Baku Futures Forum

Next Big Things for the Future of Azerbaijan:
Implications for Action Today (Post-oil Economy)

June 3, 2013

Hilton Hotel, Baku

Organizers: Azerbaijan Future Studies Society, The Millennium Project

Partners: Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies of Azerbaijan Centre for Strategic Studies under the President of Azerbaijan, and Azerbaijan State Economic University.

International speakers and participants from NASA, US National Science Foundation, Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of Social Science, Singularity University, world renowned scientists, government officials, futurists from around the world, and other experts in S&T-related fields.

Objectives:

• To bring together foresight Stakeholders (Government – Academia – Business – Young futurists)  (30 from abroad and 60 from Azerbaijan), about 100 people
• To identify & discuss relevant issues of the potential future economies for Azerbaijan
• To explore potential agreements about concrete actions as the result of the issues and opportunities discussed during the conference to make the long-range transition away from oil-dependency with as little socio-economic problems as possible

A new introduction

“APM in brief” (see the column to the right) outlines the importance of atomically precise manufacturing and the current state of progress.

“The Physical Basis of High-Throughput Atomically Precise Manufacturing” (see link at the end) is a new page on the technology itself.

I hope that these items help to clarify the topic, especially for new readers. I welcome your comments and questions.

It’s reassuring when a reviewer gets the message the author intended, and even better when Kirkus gives the book a star recommendation:

I will be speaking in London on Thursday, May 30th, 7pm to 9pm, at the University College London; a book signing will follow. For more details see the event page. My thanks to David W. Wood, Chair of the London Futurists, for arranging this event; note that attendance requires a fee of £4 if paid in advance, or £5 at the door if seats are available.

The BBC describes an unprecedented surge of interest from state-owned and private mining companies in scraping the Pacific seabed to recover manganese nodules, mineral-rich lumps that grow at rates on the order of 1 cm per million years:

Millions of years
in the making

The chemical composition of nodules varies… Those of greatest economic interest contain manganese (27-30%), nickel (1.25-1.5 %), copper (1-1.4 %) and cobalt (0.2-0.25 %).
[“Manganese nodule”, Wikipedia]

But will there be much use for these metals in an APM-technology world? As I note in Radical Abundance:

Carbon nanotubes [of particular kinds]…can outperform and replace scarce copper as an electrical conductor….

[Several] scarce metals (including manganese, chromium, nickel, and cobalt) are used chiefly to make steel alloys that become obsolete when steel is replaced [by stronger, lighter, non-metallic structural materials].

The same is true of most of the other uses of these metals (in nonferrous alloys, for example) that are mentioned in the links above; indeed, it seems that APM-based technologies will drain most of today’s scarce minerals of most of their value.

What’s more, practical effects of this transition in technology will precede APM, because anticipation of later direct economic effects will, at the margin, shift plans and patterns of investment, and not toward seabed mining technologies (or new coal-fired power plants, or new dams, or…). And the earlier the anticipation, the earlier the effect.

Understanding the potential of APM-based technologies is of more than academic interest, and some might even see this understanding as urgent.