Will interplanetary shipping even be necessary in a future with nanofabricators?

Question

3-D printers, replicators, nanofabricators etc. are all technologies that, when pushed to their logical limit, seem to make the transport of finished goods obsolete when all you need to do to obtain any given item is simply supply your fabricator with the right raw materials. In a future with ideal fabricators, the only things that will ever be shipped between various human settlements (planets, colonies and space stations) are raw materials. Hydrogen, helium, and iron hauled from the asteroid belt and extracted from uninhabitable worlds will become the only commodities worth physically transporting across large distances.

Is this vision of the future accurate? I want to write a story where space truckers and space pirates are an important element of the plot, but the utter absence of scarcity except in the form of raw materials seems like it would kill piracy and most forms of theft pretty effectively. At the same time I'm aiming to be pretty high on the sliding scale of hard sci-fi, so completely ignoring fabricator technology and pretending that we won't improve on 3-D printing at all in the next century and a half isn't really an option without completely discrediting the plausibility of my worldbuilding.

Is there any way around this? Are any of my assumptions incorrect?

Answer 1

I think there will always be a need for long distance goods shipping, it's quite likely that large factories will still exist loooong into the future for the main reason that it will always be much faster and far cheaper to make things in bulk (how do you think the speed of a 3D printer compares with an injection molding machine when making a lego brick?). Another reason is that people can walk into a store a buy a ready made product there and then on impulse because all the hard work and waiting was done by someone else, whereas a 3D printer/nano-fab will have some arbitrary waiting time involved before your goods are ready.

For example, it currently takes around 3 months and a mind boggling number of processing stages to make a single wafer of the latest and greatest computer chips, but because a large fab can easily churn out a finished wafer EVERY 10 SECONDS, odds are they will have one ready when you want it.

Many of the industrial processes we rely on in the modern world are quite slow and time consuming, but because they are performed on an industrial scale (pun intended) and run 24/7, they are cheap and give the illusion of being ready when you want it thanks to the miracle of warehouse stock.

The only way some kind of household nano-fab could compete with this would be either

A) If the owner is willing wait months for the nano-fab to make their product or

B) if the nano-fab can somehow artificially speed up the chemical reactions involved.

So even in our interplanetary future, there will be tonnes and tonnes of long distance shipping for all kinds of things so that people will be able to just walk into stores and just grab stuff off the shelves on a whim whenever they want.

Another reason might simply be that some companies might not release the designs for their products, I mean, Samsung might have the capability to make an iphone 6, but unless Apple shares the plans it's not going to happen. Giving people the power to make your product themselves means you effectively lose control over the designs and all your IP, I can't see big companies effective open-sourcing their entire manufacturing chain any time soon.

But don't let all this discourage you from writing a good story, who knows, maybe nano-fabs really will be time and cost competitive in the far future, it's hard to say for sure. After all, as physicist Niels Bohr once said "it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future."

Answer 2

Is this vision of the future accurate?

No, it is not, because it is missing one critical element of that story. The critical part is the distribution of the technologies.

If they are distributed this or another way, you even do not need nanofabrication for that, good old automation is enough. But if not, distribution of goods may have a place, but it will be under heavy pressure for hardware hack, reverse-engineering of hardware will be a thing.

In general, without implementing some kind of as of yet unknown type of engines, it is not viable to transport goods at space distances, with ships which use reactive propulsion.

But such a distribution may have a place at initial stages.

As for the problem with pirates, let them attack information deposits - labs, space habitats, ships, which may carry such information. Humans are still a valuable commodity - especially high ranked specialists, or just specialists for pirate colonies, as they probably do not have the intent to keep education etc. For sci-fi with pirates it is a possible plot.

There was a relevant question about interplanetary trading, and I wrote there a bit more detailed about technology independence. In short it is really more efficient to have local production, considering the energies involved in transporting goods.

Still, there is a place for transporting exclusive goods. For example art and other pricey things, which are not the result of mass-production.

Answer 3

3-d printing is not nano-fabricators. There are many things 3-d printing will be able to in the future, but many things that it won't.

3-d printing as we currently envision it would work well for metals and plastics, but there are lots of things that aren't metal or plastic. I'm sure there is no way to 3-d print complex organics, so printing, say, silk or fine wool for a suit is out. I don't know if 3-d printing can make carbon fiber. You can't 3-d print drugs, and you can't 3-d print some prestige goods like chocolate or wine. Also, you can't 3-d print water, which might be very valuable in a lot of places.

I think the solution is to say yes 3-d printing, no nano-fabrication. We don't really have any evidence that nano-fabricators will be a real thing in the future, so you can probably be good with hard scifi and 3-d printers and space truckers hauling luxury goods and fine clothing. After all, thats what the Dutch spent years hauling around Africa in the 1600s. No one needed pepper and porcelain, they just wanted it.

Answer 4

In a future like that there are 2 types of material goods that I think will NOT be replaced by replicator goods:

1. Works of art: Even if no expert can distinguish the original from the replica there still will be a market for real originals and the people with enough wealth willing to pay for it as a status symbol.
2. Same thing goes for "real food" in stead of replicator food. There will always be people that (claim they) can tell the difference and the ones that must have "the real thing" as a status symbol. (Or maybe for medical reasons, if the replication process leaves some sort of residue to which some people are allergic.)

Besides that: Space piracy doesn't have to focus on goods alone.
There could be a huge black-market for stolen space-ships.
Kidnapping people for ransom or to use as slaves comes to mind too.

Answer 5

Well, for once nanotechnology could be forbidden, even if only on some planets, either for safety reason or because of experience. On the other hand, even today hand-made quality products are valuable and I don't expect this trend to die out, I rather expect it to grow stronger. "You lived twenty years with automatically produced stuff, but I have this wooden totem crafted by a child on Afrycan III after it lost its parents to erratic nanobots. It was so expensive the child can affort a house on Afrycan II now and that's why I'm the better person."

Pirates would get a lot of crap, but very emotional, expensive crap.

Answer 6

I certainly envision shipping of elements, but that would typically come from small bodies (moons, asteroids, comets) not off of other planets. But that is shipping of bulk material throughout the solar system.

I see a need for shorter range distribution. If industrial or specialized nanofabs are capable of things that the household version is not, or if nanotech must be quaranteened in a space-based platform, then you will have possibly planetwide distribution, but no further than that: the top of the production chain would be located near each inhabited planet.

Answer 7

3d printers have one of my favorite little weaknesses. I love getting to abuse it in stories. 3d printers can only produce "quiescent" objects (that is to say, objects that hold still while printing).

Most of the time this weakness is unimportant. So many things that you want to produce are indeed quiescent. If you want to print a gear or a brick or a scaffold for repairing a broken arm, the object naturally doesn't want to change very much, so it's easy to print. If you print something more fancy, you may have to add "support structures" to hold up your product during production.

However, as you go further down that road, 3d printing runs into issues. A lot of organics, for example, are not actually stable if constructed from one side to the other. They are only stable when produced the "right way," with protien folding. Another example might be trying to forge a Matisse with nano-scale 3d printing. It turns out that properly evaporating linseed oil is not an easy task -- and it is a very flammable task! It'd be virtually impossible to match the chemistry of a true painting.

We've recently "3d printed" heart valves, but that's really only part of the story. Heart valves wont grow properly if you just 3d print the stem cells and go. What we actually did was 3d print them into a scaffold, and then used a circulatory pump to emulate the forces which shape a heart valve into its natural shape. This sort of hybrid approach would certainly be popular, but the mere access to 3d printing doesn't free you from importing the right stuff.

Answer 8

Lets assume a society with powerful general purpose nanobot tech and solar system wide space infrastructure. These nanobots could construct almost anything from a plan and abundant local materials. This includes people and so, if the nanobots are reliable and can record and recreate in sufficiant detail then you have teleportation. This atomic control over the human body need not be used to copy. Almost any disease could be completely prevented or cured. Humans might use such technology to augment themselves as they see fit. Minor changes that allow humans to thrive in 0g without bone loss are followed by more radical changes. Soon you have photosynthetic humans, humans with nanotube reinforced skin that can survive empty space unprotected, and cognitive enhancement. (other body parts may also be enhanced) At what point these beings cease to be human is left to the author.

Nanotech allows products to be designed atom by atom to have the exact atomic structure to fulfill whatever task it was designed for. As almost perfect recycling will be trivial the space habitats will not need large amounts of new resources. Everything required can be produced within the same small space station while providing a high standard of living. The energy required can easily be collected via solar panels and beamed to the outer solar system via microwaves. A couple of square meters of bin liner like solar panels (at earth distance from the sun) could provide enough power to keep a human alive and comfortable.

In short you will have a complete absence of scarcity and hardship and no one wants to take the risk and discomfort of being a pirate. This largely holds true even in todays world.

I end with some quotes about a nanotech assembled rocket engine.

http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_4.html

Where great strength is needed, the assemblers set to work constructing rods of interlocked fibers of carbon, in its diamond form. From these, they build a lattice tailored to stand up to the expected pattern of stress. Where resistance to heat and corrosion is essential (as on many surfaces), they build similar structures of aluminum oxide, in its sapphire form. In places where stress will be low, the assemblers save mass by leaving wider spaces in the lattice. In places where stress will be high, the assemblers reinforce the structure until the remaining passages are barely wide enough for the assemblers to move.

Finally, the vat drains, a spray rinses the engine, the lid lifts, and the finished engine is hoisted out to dry. Its creation has required less than a day and almost no human attention.

Rather than being a massive piece of welded and bolted metal, it is a seamless thing, gemlike. Its empty internal cells, patterned in arrays about a wavelength of light apart, have a side effect: like the pits on a laser disk they diffract light, producing a varied iridescence like that of a fire opal. These empty spaces lighten a structure already made from some of the lightest, strongest materials known. Compared to a modern metal engine, this advanced engine has over 90 percent less mass.

Tap it, and it rings like a bell of surprisingly high pitch for its size. Mounted in a spacecraft of similar construction, it flies from a runway to space and back again with ease. It stands long, hard use because its strong materials have let designers include large safety margins. Because assemblers have let designers pattern its structure to yield before breaking (blunting cracks and halting their spread), the engine is not only strong but tough.

For all its excellence, this engine is fundamentally quite conventional. It has merely replaced dense metal with carefully tailored structures of light, tightly bonded atoms. The final product contains no nanomachinery.

Answer 9

Piracy isn't about hitting the jackpot everytime. It is a lot of hard work, with little to no luck until finally you hit paydirt.

And what do past and present thiefs get the most money and thrills from? Artwork, Antiques, Family Heirlooms, Cultural treasures, Status symbols, the thrill of beating the unbeatable etc.

Alot of items in today's world, and I assume the future, isn't expensive because of the cost to make it (although that can play a part) but rather the history or origin of the item. You can't manufacture the past history in a 3D printer, no matter how good your nanotechnology is!

Having a conveniently 3D printed wooden table or decorated vase doesn't quite make a Resolute Desk or Chinese vase of the Ming Dynasty.

Your cargo ships will be filled to the brim with expensive, hard to find, one of a kind items, being transported securely from one world to another at the whim of some super rich tycoon or political despot. Not every shipment will be so valuable. Just as today, not every shipment is so valuable. Mundane core materials still have to get transported.

If your space pirates can get their hands on the transport schedules, they will have a field day. Rest of the time? They will be scrapping the barrel, looking for that one big score and threatening the captain with mutiny.

Answer 10

What would be worth shipping between planets would depend on exactly how capable nanomanufacturing is and exactly how cheap interplanetary transport is in your world.

Things that would work under most assumptions:

• Rare elements. Even the most advanced nanotech manufacturing or 3D printing would still require the right elements in the raw materials, and a lot of high-tech devices use unusual elements (hafnium in plasma torch electrodes, neodymium in really strong permanent magnets, etc.) In addition, elements common on Earth might be very rare on some worlds (such as hydrogen on the Moon - there is some ice in the polar craters, but it would be tiny compared to even Mars's ice supply, much less Earth's oceans or the gas giants' atmospheres).

• Things that require extreme temperatures/energies to make. Plausible nanotech will likely have severe trouble with high temperatures and energies - nanometer scale is the scale of proteins, tens of nanometers is the scale of the smaller viruses, so manufacturing devices on this scale will probably be acting more like chemical synthesis than classic "factory" industrial manufacturing. That probably means fairly strict temperature dependence, and something as small and complex as a nano-manufacturer would probably be easily destroyed by the temperatures needed to produce e.g. diamond and other special forms of carbon.

• As others have pointed out, works of art, antiques, and other things valued for "intangible" reasons would likely retain their value regardless of manufacturing technologies.

Other things that might be worth it given certain assumptions:

-Complex biological products. As mentioned by others, these might be tricky to manufacture. They might be viable exports from Earth. This could overlap with "things valued for intangible reasons" - even if there's synthetic coffee/chocolate/etc. that tastes the same, rich people on Mars or asteroids might likely still value "real tree-grown" coffee/chocolate/etc.

-Things whose manufacture is artificially restricted. This would only be possible given certain assumptions about how the manufacturing technology works, but under some assumptions, some things might only be possible to "higher grades" of nano-manufacturing, which some worlds might lack - maybe because of some mercantilist-style policy or security concerns about manufacturing some weapons.