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"The whole problem of energy sources is going to be solved by little solutions, not by some big new piece of technology that does everything. We got into this crisis by believing that we had one big piece of technology that would do everything (oil)."
- Gregory Benford
 |
| Personal Smelter | ||
| A device used to reduce metallic objects (like coins, pots, cables) to an ingot with known value. |
You can readily judge a society by the objects that are commonplace among its people. In this near future America (as seen in 1975), recycling is part of the culture.
| There was a stack of over fifty copper dollars, worth three hundred to any electronics firm, asteroid ores being poor in high-conduction metals. It was illegal to sell currency for scrap, but everybody did it, saying they'd found old saucepans in the attic of a secondhand house, or a disused cable while digging over the back yard. He tipped the coins into his smelter without counting them because only the weight of the eventual ingot mattered. |
| Technovelgy from The Shockwave Rider,
by John Brunner. Published by Harper and Row in 1975 Additional resources -
|
Smelters use a great deal of energy; in the non-sf world, a "small" smelter is one that takes the material from just one mine.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Shockwave Rider
More Ideas
and Technology by John Brunner
Tech news articles related to The Shockwave Rider
Tech news articles related to works by John Brunner
Personal Smelter-related
news articles:
- Your Scrap Copper Future
| Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick |
| GNoME AI From DeepMind Invents Millions Of New Materials |
| Omniphobic Liquid-like Surfaces And de Camp's Telelubricator (1940) |
| MXenes - Atomic-Thin Metal Sheets Now Easier To Make |
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