New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by PTTG

A kind of "plasma lithography device" is developed in 2022. The technology is flexible and powerful, allowing the manufacturing of anything and nearly any material that can be designed. The machine also scales in resolution freely; a single large print head can print bulk amorphous carbon at tens of grams per second, then slow down to print nanometer-scale computer traces at a dramatically reduced rate.

Normally, it would take several decades to turn a lab prototype into a new world order, but by its very nature the PLD it can duplicate itself quickly. Duplicates of the prototype were initially produced to aid in reproduction efforts, and a few found their way into the hands of journalists. In a matter of months thousands of the devices were "in the wild."

Two months later, the world is in the midst of great turmoil as every kind of manufacturing integrates what are essentially star trek replicators... and people try to develop businesses distributing PLD feedstock rods.

Narrator: "You wouldn't download a bicycle-"

Viewer: "I would if I could! ...and now, I can."


Mind you, hand-made and otherwise bespoke items will remain valuable for those who can afford them, but over all, this is going to have quite an interesting effect on the economy. Anything that requires rare or difficult-to-obtain materials will likewise still be expensive, but anything that doesn't, like bicycles, will rapidly fall in price, especially in places where it's legal to own a home PLD.

This may also result in a boom (sometimes literally) in private space travel, as the manufacturing bottleneck grows much wider (not so much 'anyone can build a Moon-rocket in their back yard,' you still need a lot of space on the ground to get at all the space up there, and a lot of material for components, but the price and production time of many components will fall significantly). That will eventually be followed by an increase in the availability of materials that are rare on Earth's surface, but common off-planet.

EDIT: Of course one downside to this, and something that will be a factor in governments making restrictions on the distribution and ownership of plasma lithography devices, is that it will make 3d printing guns much easier than it currently is (or was in mid-2013, when the article came out).

[AlexanderHowl]

Not likely, you still need energy, permission, and reaction mass. Even the smallest spaceships would be far more complex than what the average family could build, and I really doubt that many governments would give permission for the average family to operate flying weapons of mass destruction (a 10 metric ton spacecraft moving at 10 km/s possesses kinetic energy equal to 100 metric tons of TNT). Amorphous carbon objects also require pure carbon as feedstock, which costs $24 per kilogram, and would likely only increase in cost as demand would increase dramatically (I also do not see how a device that prints amorphous carbon can print anything more complex than cups and plates).

[PTTG]

The vague idea is that it ionizes or otherwise heats the source material to a plasma stream, then uses magnetic guides to "spray" the material at the target. There are a lot of problems with that, but in this case someone figured out how to do it all with a sold-state print head, plus dynamic rate changes. Also somehow they manage to make compounds with it.

Play it hard sci and make it be a background tech. Or, let it stew for an hour or two and serve a soft-sci world where everyone's cell phone can dismantle objects for raw resources and make anything.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Not likely, you still need energy, permission, and reaction mass. Even the smallest spaceships would be far more complex than what the average family could build, and I really doubt that many governments would give permission for the average family to operate flying weapons of mass destruction (a 10 metric ton spacecraft moving at 10 km/s possesses kinetic energy equal to 100 metric tons of TNT). Amorphous carbon objects also require pure carbon as feedstock, which costs $24 per kilogram, and would likely only increase in cost as demand would increase dramatically (I also do not see how a device that prints amorphous carbon can print anything more complex than cups and plates).

I do not see how any of this contradicts what I actually wrote.

EDIT: It looks like you took the worst or most annoying interpretation of my writing, and then slightly exaggerated it, but I doubt that was intentional.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Play it hard sci and make it be a background tech. Or, let it stew for an hour or two and serve a soft-sci world where everyone's cell phone can dismantle objects for raw resources and make anything.

The problem with these sorts of ideas is they tend to concentrate on the "make anything" part. But that is actually not all that revolutionary - you can pretty well make "anything" with a few thousand dollars worth of hand tools if you are determined enough. The reason that isn't important to the global economy is that it's *expensive*.

If the plasma printer can do anything *fast*, and it's not clear that it should be able to, that could have some modest economic impacts.

But the really revolutionary part of this thing is that "dismantle objects for raw resources". If you can do that cheaply enough to make this thing anywhere close to economic, that same dismantling technology completely transforms the extraction industries (coincidentally making the factory produced stuff cheaper in the bargain, making it even harder for the printer technology to really compete). Securing your raw materials is a big part of geostrategy, and nobody has to anymore. Not to mention every local garbage dump has just become an economically viable mining site.

[PTTG]

Well, the things you can't make with hand tool are advanced electronics, optics, and precision devices-- the PLD can scale down its print surface small enough to do so with ease. It can print entire functioning computers (though at a fraction of it's full ~100kg/hour rate).

It's not the most time-efficient way to make most things, but it can make weird things relatively quickly, and above all it lets someone get ALL of their things from the same place. Sufficiently advanced, even a hard-science approach to the machine makes it possible for a very small community to be entirely self-sufficient well into TL 8 or 9.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

Narrator: "You wouldn't download a bicycle-"

Viewer: "I would if I could! ...and now, I can."


Mind you, hand-made and otherwise bespoke items will remain valuable for those who can afford them, but overall, this is going to have quite an interesting effect on the economy.

The meaning of bespoke might change. Some people are always better at working any system and also at understanding options. Some people will be able to print up one of a kind things even original artworks. Hobbyists will do wonderful things.

[Astromancer]

Try this idea, it's more like a trope than a setting. Several thousand years ago a group of scholars, military folk, and merchants, visit Earth. Given the low tech level, the genetic evidence of how short humanity's life as a species was (Modern Humans have only been around for 90 thousand years or so), and the low human population, Earth was placed on the restricted list as a fragile species early in its evolution. The next visit scheduled for what we would call 3,000AD, the Aliens expected little or no change.

Some of the Merchants, noting a certain flexibility in humanity, a cultural adaptivity in children, saw some profit. They bought slaves at the various slave marts of Babylon, Ninevah, Sidon, and also in Egypt, and China, though those names weren't yet given to those lands.

Off Earth, these slaves, healthy, well fed, and free of Earth's diseases breed quickly. Human genetics turned out to be easy for the Aliens to manipulate, and cloning humans presented no problems. So the human population off Earth grew quickly. Before Rome ruled Italy, extraterrestrial humans outnumbered the Earth cousins. In the present day, humans are spread out through a vast portion of space. Most have no awareness of Earth nor much awareness of humanity as a separate distinct species. Given how widely manipulated human genes and gene pools are it might be hard to recognize many humans as human.

Basically, you can use this origin to place humans into galactic societies were and how you please. In some areas being human would clearly involve a stigma (slave species, primitives, etc.) but not everywhere. Some worlds might have been settled by free humans. Their history would be nothing like Earth's.

[Astromancer]

Southern Passage

This basically takes the idea of the trope of the gate/portal and has an artifact found in Antartica. However, this gate seems to be either locked or simply goes to only one place. This place is a planet that is earthlike, but not identical to Earth. The lifeforms of this planet seem to all have evolved from Earth lifeforms that must have passed through the gate long ago, some before Antarctica froze.

The gate/portal was discovered in the early 1950's and has been kept under wraps by the US government since then. There are a few settlements on this world, they started as exploration bases but grew into real communities. Once these communities began to come to life, certain people who needed to disappear for their own good started going to these towns.

This planet is a wilderness frontier. There is an Earth sized area to explore and the PCs are contemporary people from the USA and its close allies. Much of the planet isn't even mapped.

One notable base is a rocket launching facility on a high plateau very near the planet's equator. Rockets to send up satellites to photograph the planet and some GPS type satellites are to be launched from here.

The planet's name is still being fought over. The ordinary soldiers who work here have called it Barsoom, Middle Earth, Vulcan, Tatooine, Gallifrey, Bajor, Krypton, and Gilligan's Island. More dignified names are being looked into. The infighting makes WWI look sweet and gentle. Various names from the Grecco-Roman classical tradition are generally proposed and brutally shot down.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Various names from the Grecco-Roman classical tradition are generally proposed and brutally shot down.

Well, there goes Vulcan.

--

I'm guessing satellite mapping isn't there yet because they can't conceal all the rockets they would need.