Abundance
Space resources join with assemblers and automated engineering systems to round out the case for a future of great material abundance. What this means can best be seen by examining costs.
Costs reflect the limits of our resources and abilities; high costs indicate scarce resources and difficult goals. The prophets of scarcity have in effect predicted steeply rising resource costs, and with them a certain kind of future. Resource costs, however, always depend on technology. Unfortunately, engineers attempting to predict the cost of future technologies have generally encountered a tangle of detail and uncertainty that proves impossible to untie. This problem has obscured our understanding of the future.
The prospect of replicating assemblers, automated engineering, and space resources cuts this Gordian knot of cost prediction. Today the cost of products includes the costs of labor, capital, raw materials, energy, land, waste disposal, organization, distribution, taxation, and design. To see how total costs will change, consider these elements one by one.
Labor. Replicating assemblers will require no labor to build, once the first exists. What use are human hands in running an assembler? Further, with robotic devices of various sizes to assemble parts into larger systems, the entire manufacturing process from assembling molecules to assembling skyscrapers could be free of labor costs.
Capital. Assembler-based systems, if properly programmed, will themselves be productive capital. Together with larger robotic machines, they will be able to build virtually anything, including copies of themselves. Since this self-replicating capital will be able to double many times per day, only demand and available resources will limit its quantity. Capital as such need cost virtually nothing.
Raw materials. Since molecular machines will arrange atoms to best advantage, a little material can go a long way. Common elements like hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, aluminum, and silicon seem best for constructing the bulk of most structures, vehicles, computers, clothes and so forth: they are light and form strong bonds. Because dirt and air contain these elements in abundance, raw materials can be dirt cheap.
Energy . Assemblers will be able to run off chemical or electrical energy. Assembler-built systems will convert solar to chemical energy, like plants, or solar to electrical energy, like solar cells. Existing solar cells are already more efficient than plants. With replicating assemblers to build solar collectors, fuel and electric power will cost little.
Land. Assembler-based production systems will occupy little room. Most could sit in a closet (or a thimble, or a pinhole); larger systems could be placed underground or in space if someone wants something that requires an unsightly amount of room. Assembler-based production systems will make both digging machines and spacecraft cheap.
Waste disposal. Assembler systems will be able to keep control of the atoms they use, making production as clean as a growing apple tree, or cleaner. If the orchard remains too dirty or ugly, we will be able to move it off Earth entirely.
Organization. Today, factory production requires organization to coordinate hordes of workers and managers. Assembler-based production machines will contain no people, and will simply sit around and produce things made to order. Their initial programming will provide all the organization and information needed to make a wide range of products.
Distribution. With automatic vehicles running in tunnels made by cheap digging machines, distribution need neither consume labor nor blight the landscape. With assemblers in the home and community, there will be less need for distribution in the first place.
Taxation. Most taxes take a fixed percentage of a price, and thus add a fixed percentage to the cost. If the cost is negligible, the tax will be negligible. Further, governments with their own replicators and raw materials will have less reason to tax people.
Design. The above points add up to a case for low costs of production. Technical AI systems, by avoiding the labor cost of engineering, will virtually eliminate the costs of design. These AI systems will themselves be inexpensive to produce and operate, being constructed by assemblers and having no inclination to do anything but design things.
In short, at the end of a long line of profitable developments in computer and molecular technologies, the cost of designing and producing things will drop dramatically. I above referred to "dirt cheap" raw materials, and indeed, assemblers will be able to make almost anything from dirt and sunlight. Space resources, however, will change "dirt cheap" to "cheap-dirt cheap": topsoil has value in Earth's ecosystem, but rubble from asteroids will come from a dead and dreary desert. By the same token, assemblers in space will run off cheap sunlight.
Space resources are vast. One asteroid could bury Earth's continents a kilometer deep in raw materials. Space swallows the 99.999999955 percent of the Sun's light that misses Earth, and most is lost to the interstellar void.
Space holds matter, energy, and room enough for projects of vast size, including vast space settlements. Replicator based systems will be able to construct worlds of continental scale, resembling Dr. O'Neill's cylinders but made of strong, carbon-based materials. With these materials and water from the ice moons of the outer solar system, we will be able to create not only lands in space, but whole seas, wider and deeper than the Mediterranean. Constructed with energy and materials from space, these broad new lands and seas will cost Earth and its people almost nothing in terms of resources. The chief requirement will be programming the first replicator, but AI systems will help with that. The greatest problem will be deciding what we want. ..........................