Its a space of 1meter×1meterx1meter, basically a cubic meter where the matter replicator works on. (So, no replicating cars, since its too big)
How do you min-max this?
Obviously everybody now has high end computers, cameras, a variety of lenses, phones, etc. Foldable Ebikes like the aipas would fit in the space.
1 meter solar panels are a hit but since most batteries and capacitors require materials difficult to handle it becomes highly demanded.
Every political building now has thick blastproof exteriors as making bombs has never been easier, judges live in the courthouse now.
The obvious answer: Use your replicator to replicate more replicators.
The correct answer: The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.
The clever dick corollary: 1m3 is actually quite a large volume, and ain’t no rule says you can only replicate one object at a time. If whatever luxury item or commodity you want is small in volume, which it probably is, don’t forget you can replicate a whole bunch of it within a meter cube.
One cubic meter fits a literal ton of whatever you want.
A metric ton, anyway, and provided whatever you want is water.
Get together with your neighbor, replicate the parts of each other’s replicator. Repeat this daily for a bit. Exponential growth. Give it a month or so, then just go ham and make everything you want, maybe after renting a warehouse to keep them all in.
I feel the upper limit of this is probably depends on how many simultaneously unrelated things you can put on the print bed at once. Like, can I have it print me a pair of shoes, 6 sandwiches, an SD card and a bag of cat kibble all at once? Or is it going to make 6 SD kibble card sandwiches on shoe-bread? 1m³ will hold my entire groceries list for the week, but if I have to print each item individually I’ll starve.
Well… 1m^3 of rice, then the next day 1m^3 of beans, then the next day 1m^3 of potatoes, etc. - you might not like what you’re eating for the first few days, but I think you could pretty quickly accumulate enough ingredients in massive quantities to make some pretty nice meals, even if that limitation does exist.
Now I’m imagining the prank potential here. Sneak into your Buddy’s house and order a cubic meter of baked beans!
Or get together with a few neighbors, each person makes one of the basic necessities on the first day, you all split it evenly, and now you can make decent-well balanced food from day 1.
Now make enough food to give you time for a project. A complete car engine can fit within 1 m3. So can 4 wheels. Power is going to be a problem, but you could probably make 20 solar panels at once. Now your power problems are solved. And if you have solar power, you might as well make some batteries. How much power can 1 m3 of sodium batteries hold? Not enough? Well, then make another.
So now you have food and power, and you can make a car if you really want. Or you can make an electric scooter in one day. A recumbent electric bike might take 2, and an enclosure for it might take a couple more.
You’re now 2 weeks in, have a month’s supply of food or more left, all your power needs met, transportation. What’s next? Well, the bad news is your TV will have to be slightly smaller than 60" if you print it from corner to corner in the replicator, but that isn’t a bad size. If multiple things can be printed at once, you can also print a high-end computer and VR kit. If not, this might take a couple days extra. Print a small fridge or two, or, better yet, a stackable fridge freezer set. What, those don’t exist? Make them, or get the designs from someone else. Make a nice stove if you don’t have one. Now your food creation and storage options are completely covered, as well as home entertainment. Might as well make yourself some nice furniture, comfort is key, and don’t forget the bed. Make some nice clothes, too.
So you’re about a month in and food is running out. So make some more food before you run out. After that, start adding real luxuries. Spices, seasonings, cookware and other home incidentals. At this point, you probably only need to replace consumables. You should have been doing this earlier, but talk to your neighbors and friends. Visit their places, try new foods, get new ideas for how to make your life better, keeping in mind that doesn’t just include stuff.
If you can disassemble them, this is probably a good way to eliminate bounds on throughput, but honestly, even a little coordination permits for pretty enormous throughput from the get-go. You’ve got a lot of people out there.
Can… Can I replicate myself?
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I’m an average woman, at 168 cm height I can easily fit in a cubic metre if I crouch or lay in fetal position.
I often feel like I could accomplish so much more if I had a clone. Just one, more than one clone would become an expense
Anyway if that’s not an option then I’d replicate a variety of:
dollar bills.
Jewellery, gold and precious gems.
Computers, and phones, especially if I can sell some of its parts such as the graphics card
Other luxury items such as parfum, spirits, etc
Eggs
I don’t know, I feel most of these things would lose their value pretty quickly if everyone had a replicator. Kind of like what AI is doing to the creative arts. Only this time it would be the rich getting affected, not struggling artists
Well, that gives you infinite energy, since you can produce energy-containing stuff.
Hmm.
On one hand, a lot of competition for resources go away.
On the other hand, that’s also pretty disruptive.
I think that that world is going to have a lot of sudden challenges. You don’t have scarcity of any material or existing item that you can break down to less than a 1m cube unless you need it in great bulk, but you also have no ability to control production of things like firearms, explosives, drugs, physical proofs of identity, missiles, weaponized drones, etc.
I can imagine countries or organizations trying to seize the supply of replicators.
You might like the novel Singularity Sky. It’s about a planet, artificially maintained at a 19th-century tech level by its authoritarian government, which is suddenly visited by a post-scarcity civilization. Cellphones begin to rain from the sky all over the planet and whoever picks one up is given an offer: Tell us a story and we’ll give you anything you desire. One person asks for a self-replicating replicator with a fully stocked blueprint library and it ends up being extremely disruptive in many of the ways you’re imagining.
Is the 24 hour thing the only limitation? Can it replicate stuff that doesn’t exist yet?
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Day 1: create 264 gallons of water (probably enough for a month)
Day 2: create a cubic meter of food (also probably enough for a month)
Day 3 to next rationing: spend thinking of all the awesome things I could create but end up getting overwhelmed and doing nothing instead
Additional day 3: be overjoyed that you can just replicate your basic needs, so you now can work less (or not at all). All that free time! Think of all the projects xou could do!
Start by replicating junk food and beer and sloth around until the evening of Day 29, panic, make plans for some way to big Project for Day 30. Day 30 replicate stuff you need for the project. Before properly starting, realize you forgot to
buyreplicate some crucial stuff buthome depot is now closedyou’ve already used the replicas quota, be discouraged, overwhelmed, give up, promise “next month is going to be different!”.deleted by creator
I’d never have to quit drugs! Woohoo
You say it can create an object of a single M3.
I create a second one by replicating the parts.
May take a while but when the second one comes online the third one will be even faster.
I feel the astounding energy needed to create matter would be the reason for the cooldown, so having more than one would make little difference.
It can’t be the energy. It has to be a matter rearranger, not something that makes matter from raw energy. Consider a cubic meter of water. It will have a mass of 1000 kg. By E=mc^2, that water has a mass energy of 9e19 Joules. New homes in the US are built with 200 amp panels, delivering power at 120V. The typical new home can draw up to 24,000 Watts from the grid.
At this max output, it would take a house 120 million years to draw enough electricity to create a cubic meter of water from nothing but pure electrical energy.
So this thing must actually work as a matter rearranger. You provide it a supply of pure elements and it synthesizes from there. Or, if it’s fancy, it creates elements by rearranging nuclei. But it can’t be something that truly creates matter ex nihilo.
This sounds like owning a 3d printer.
Yes.
It only takes one person to make 1 cubic meter of black hole to destroy the biosphere by ripping Earth into an acretion disc.
It’s a matter replicator, I don’t think a black hole is matter?
A black hole is nothing other than extremely condensed matter.
Ah, i thought it was a hole in space or something like that, so the absence of anything, and even space was something, but not matter specifically.
It is worthwhile to note that the above is highly reductive. A “black hole” is the sort of “hole” in spacetime you’re thinking of. It is caused, however, by gravitational dilation of spacetime by an incredibly high energy density. If you stuff enough matter and energy into a tiny enough space, the gravitational force will be strong enough that no other force in the universe can keep it from getting closer, and closer. Even the forces which keep neutrons and protons from combining with each other will be surmounted, as the energy density increases asymptotically toward infinity. This tiny point of effectively infinite density is the black hole’s “singularity”. Surrounding this singularity is a region where anything (matter, light, space itself) that gets within that range cannot escape. This is because objects have escape velocities based on their masses. If you’re going fast enough, you’ll fly away from the earth never to return. If you’re not going that fast, eventually you’ll fall back down. The further you are from the earth, the easier it is to escape it. The “black” part of the black hole, called the “event horizon”, is the distance from the singularity at which the black hole’s escape velocity is equal to the speed of light, meaning that, closer than that, nothing can escape it. Hence why it’s “black”, because no light is escaping from it. Technically, a black hole is not perfectly black due to hawking radiation, and a black hole with a 0.5 meter schwarzchild radius would probably be small enough to visibly glow (just a bit).
According to a random block hole calculator I found, a black hole with a 0.5m radius would be over 56 earth masses and the temperature would only be 0.000364 K. So, still orders of magnitude less than the cosmic microwave background.
I know smaller black holes evaporate faster, but even that little thing (according to the calculator) would have a lifetime of a gargantuan multiple of the age of the universe. Like roughly a number followed by 45 zeros, times the age of the universe.
The calculator: https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/physics-notes/311-hawking-radiation-calculator
I like the concept of destroying the biosphere by shredding the entire fucking planet, lol.
Using a calculator I referenced further down in the thread, a back hole with a 0.5m radius so that the event horizon would fit within the cubic meter would have a mass of over 56 earths. We’d be proper fucked!
I’d say that society as we know it would collapse fairly quickly, with it being replaced by a communist or socialist system fairly quickly. Fields that require brains would be in significant demand, as food would become a non issue. Same thing would occur with other essentials, such as food and medicine. As mentioned in other comments, money would become worthless. And there would be people who would make new replicators who would have reverse engineered their replicators.
The main thing is positioning in order to reduce wasted space as much as possible. As someone with a 3D printer, I have a teensy bit of an idea on how to position “ready-made” to maximize space. I certainly cannot print/replicate a fully mounted car frame in a single cubic meter, but I can print parts of the frame in such a way that I can mount them like legos, if each rod is 5x5x99cm, I can fit roughly 361 (19x19, with a bit of space between them so they don’t come fused) in the cubic meter. Is that enough to make the whole frame? No idea.
Also, think about it, 1 cubic meter of sandwiches, tacos, pizza and other junk food tasting great AND being perfectly healthy. Damn, now I’m hungry.
I’d use it to make more replicators. Essentially have exponential replicators
Beyond the easy answers of replicating the machine itself or covering basic needs, I think it would be interesting to make a super computer with a small form factor capable of mind uploading. Then you print a replacement body in a position that fits within a cubic meter and presumably you can extend your life for a bit. A simpler alternative would be to replicate medicines that have been shown to extend healthspans in the short term and just take them in the recommended dosage when you need to.
Uploading your consciousness to a machine wouldn’t really extend your lifespan. Think of it like moving a file from one device to another; the file isn’t actually moved, you just get a copy on the second device. You and your digital clone will also begin to diverge immediately as the lived experience of being a new digital entity would be different from continuing life as a meat person.
The closest you can get is to Ship of Theseus it; get a machine implant which gradually takes over brain functions as cells die or parts of the brain fail. Single stream of consciousness in a single body, now fully digitised. Incidentally this is also closer to biological processes to replace cells, though the brain cells renew much less frequently then other cell types. I think some areas don’t naturally get replaced over a lifetime too but I’m not certain on that, either way you’d want to go faster than natural cell replacement.
Alternatively you could make the transfer process dissolve your meat brain. Personally I’d say you are dead and your clone lives on but its the same argument as Star Trek style transporters; the clone still feels like it’s you so if they got to where you want to go does it really matter?
Yup, mind uploading is making a copy. If the copying process is destruct, that doesn’t make it less of a copy. Your copy would remember your decision, so it will know it’s a copy as long as it knew how the process works.
I believe you are right. I should’ve been clearer in my original post, but I was envisioning getting the memories/upload state into the brain of the new body, not staying as a digital copy. My thought was that if you included memories up until the moment of death for your original self that it could be a semblance of “seamless continuation” because the clone would indeed think it is the original. However, at best, like you pointed out, it isn’t so much extension of life as replacement.
In the scheme of things, my preferences for life extension tech methods in order of “preserving the original” would be: organ replacement -> nanobots/gene tweaks -> cyborgization -> cryonics -> mind uploading to a new body
I suppose a matter replicator could advance tech in each area to make them more likely to occur though given that research would no longer have material constraints.
