From: Brian D Williams (talon57@well.com)
Date: Mon May 21 2001 - 08:38:54 MDT
>From: "Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@aeiveos.com>
>>CurtAdams (my own favorite neoluddite wrote):
>> Organisms with complex macrostructural construction abilities
>> have rather slow doubling times. If you want to look at a house-
>> builder, the appropriate model is a tree, with doubling times in
>> years or decades.
>Bamboo actually grows *quite* fast. I think it can reach 3-4
>meter heights in a month or two. The question you have to ask
>is *why* are the doubling times that long? Is it an energy
>limitation? Is it an essential nutrient limitation? Is it
>a water limitation? etc. One of the things that humans are
>good at is mass-transport. Figure out what the limiting elements
>are in the growth equation and supply them in sufficient abundance
>to work around the problem. You could even connect your natural
>gas pipeline to a conversion unit that pumped out ATP in abundance
>for the house-seeds so they can grow in the dark! Yes, I know it
>makes it more expensive, but presumably after your house is
>finished growing, it can manufacture natural gas and pump
>it back into the pipeline, so you only need a short term loan.
Actually some species of bamboo can grow 24" in a day. (Google)
It would be a relatively simple matter for a tanker truck to lay
out a network of pipes across the ground and pump the appropriate
nanite/material/fuel slurry into the ground.
A better model might be fungi, which establish the mycelium first,
then produce the large mushroom structure literally overnight.
What exactly is a house? If all you need essentialy is a waterproof
outer shell of considerable strength to start, this is easy.
At least one type of construction consists of inflating a
hemispherical balloon on site and spraying it with a latex modified
concrete, viola! A high strength waterproof shell in a single day.
Now use the sale basic technique but spray it with a carbonaceous
nanite mixture and you would have a transparent diamonoid shell of
the appropriate diameter in a single day.
Easily fashioned into a Buckminster Fuller skybreak dwelling.
Brian
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That's "same" basic technique.....
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