Anthropogenic changes to the planet have been significant, humans need tools available that can protect against and reverse the worst effects we can inflict accidently, by carlesnes, or intentionally ready to be deployed at scale and speed. A Project By: Connor Grayson
Moving forward I want to highlight some areas where auxons can be particularly useful, while the exact design of the auxons is still uncertain they represent large scale challenges where access to power prevents any conception of remediating or restoring these challenges.
Uranium Mine Lands Restoration
Cleaning up abandoned uranium mines, the South west particularly Arizona and New Mexico have a history of uranium mining and extraction which has left dangerous piles of tailings and process residue that represent risks to local communities, often community's that are severally economically disadvantaged. To remediate this an incredibly amount of energy will be required to mechanically break down any solid tailings, and chemically processing the tailings and process residue to its constituent elements, vitrifying all radioactive and heavy metals and restoring the landscape. This will take a very large commitment of energy, that currently is unaffordable however for an auxon, with additional modifications to undertake the task, it would be readily able to perform the work and produce materials that can be sold at a profit and provide a robust energy (and potentially manufacturing) infrastructure for local community's moving forward.
Due to the additive nature of developing auxons it is critical to develop them with cyber security as a key foundation. Not only is the overarching technology sensitive and ripe for exploitation, the largescale problems solved by auxons, such as generating entire country's worth of energy, fundamentality makes any implementation of auxons critical infrastructure needing to be secured as such.
In developing auxon implementations it will be critical to outline what conditions and functions can not be degraded, or damaged. One of the most critical will be safeguarding the ability to prevent expansion of the system. While I am fond of remarking that ultimately a bulldozer can stop the expansion of the system, and this is true, the software controls on growth are a key safeguard to controlling externalities of the system during routine operations.
From time to time, I have been confronted by seemingly simple problems that leads to questions which ask if basic concepts of how I approach the world are true and this is one of these stories. I was confronted with a major problem in carbon restoration by means of in-situ mineralization, the incredibly amounts of water needed to be injected to use aqueous carbon dioxide. This has previously been solved with low injection rates per bore hole and very high permeability rock strata (See Carbfix in Iceland) however this poses problems in scaling to millions of tons per year. I realized the clear solution was using robots to carve out a heavily engineered reservoir into very shallow rock, sub 1Km, where conventional boring methods would be poorly suited. However as I started developing the concept I was confronted with a problem I struggled to solve, designing robots cheap enough that shipping them across the world to some of the most remote islands imaginable and destroying them would be affordable. It was in discussing this challenge I was told about an older paper on super automation and self-assembling machines that would in addition to a couple hours of discussion, dozens of scribbled drawings, and 20 hours of writing would ultimately change how I viewed engineering and what was possible.
30 years ago Klaus Lackner and Christopher Wendt wrote a paper looking to enable the grand projects conceived of in the 50's and 60's that were no longer discussed due to exorbitant capital and operating costs involved. There proposed solution was robotic systems capable of reproducing and expanding using only the common materials found in the earth's crust in greater then 1% concentrations. While not unique in this respect following in the footsteps of Von Numen and Dyson, they proposed three major contributions which moved it from interesting thought experiment to basic scientific research that could, with extensive follow-on work, create a new industrial revolution. These contributions, in no particular order are:
Development of the operating auxon concept.
Providing the thermodynamic calculations and experiments to demonstrate conversion of typical soil could be economically processed as ore.
Hypothesizing that each auxon can be designed in a vacuum from each other making the system design possible.
There work was able to demonstrate that the expansion of the system was tied to the ability to capture and harness energy, and that this could be accomplished at a growth rate of meaningful interest. It is at this point worthwhile to introduce the auxon, they are 10 to 30 cm autonomous robots of a variety of description capable of building the infrastructure necessary for their expansion (in this case rails), capturing raw resources, and building energy collection systems primarily described as solar panels. Due to their ability for exponential growth, they are rapidly able to build large scale energy collection and transmission systems which can be used to perform work typically thought difficult or impossible due to cost. They propose very large-scale high-rate carbon dioxide removal (Gt per year) capable of removing all anthropogenic emissions over ~15 to 20 years allowing for the subsequent anthropogenic emissions since the paper was written as one option.
Embedded within the paper is the clear expression of how energy limited human development is, and how if energy is no longer limited due to using functionally no cost renewable energy there exists no meaningful cap on what can be accomplished from global atmosphere engineering to on the much smaller scale mine land restoration that previously has not been possible due to cost. Project cost can be captured by three cost categories, labor, capital, and energy costs, with labor and capital costs on the life cycle basis also driven by energy costs. If labor cost is removed by high reliability automation, capital costs for equipment and invested materials can be converted to energy costs using the Klause Wendt auxon system with no cost renewable energy, requiring only time to capture enough energy.
What lays ahead to achieve this is uncertain, but the first steps are clear, development of initial standards that underpin all future designs. These standards will initially need to cover:
Auxon control
Track design and components and
Power and energy infrastructure
These are not easy standards to begin with as they are constraining on what is possible moving forward, however without them no progress can be made.
This is a dangerous technology to develop, not because of a risk of it devouring the planet what comes after the first deployment is unknown and will mark a sharp change in what is possible. It has incredible potential to help humanity in general and most people in particular, it also has the capability to destroy entire habitats and enable production of military equipment at scales never before envisioned.
Ultimately this is an undertaking comparable in size and complexity to the development and proliferation of the steam engine. Their inevitably will be many failed designs, and design lineages that die in time each will contribute knowledge that is currently unknowable and will not be possible without them. Success is to herald in a new industrial revolution, failure is to remove what may be the best tool to avert catastrophe.
Auxons: An Engineering Oddity @auxons - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
