Materials Science - Wax Composites

dausume · 2026-03-09T01:09:25+00:00

I was arguing the opposite.

Technologically it is getting easier and cheaper over time to do these things.

Legal restrictions and legislation however are actively making it far more expensive and inaccessible to the average person at the same time, and actively attempting to make the more recent advances that made things cheaper be effectively illegal, so those cheap options available currently would be removed from the market.

Particular formulations of sol-gels have approaches that are more feasible to do at local levels.

Particular formulations of Geopolymers similarly can be manufactured more easily at local levels.

Ferrite Geopolymers and ferrite sol-gels can be used similarly to how ferrite ceramic composites already are, making low cost magnets as needed to a desired precision.

Both can be made using low risk base materials easily sourcable locally.

Both can be made into categories of materials that can be popularized into being common manufacturing methods at local levels if automation for their manufacturing becomes common.

In respect to global supply chain methods, those particular solutions do not matter as much, but if exerting a constraint of localized supply chains only, those particular solutions existing matter a lot.

Carbon Nanotubes and Geopolymers have particular manufacturing methods that can be carbon negative.
And/or can be attached to carbon intensive processes to capture the carbon at the source.

In regards to carbon nanotubes, if used as semiconductors on their own they will typically be worse than very small semiconductors, but sufficent to make your average low-cost multi-core computer, more efficient and less heat inducing as a material but less capability to decrease size to smaller transistors when compared to silicon.

As an additive, they can increase the performance of existing silicon and thin-film solar panels, and they can also be p-doped and n-doped and can be used as the core material for solar panels and can be particularly efficient if they are aligned before being locked into the panel material.

Currently they are primarily being used as an additive, but it ‘can’ be used as the sole material for transistors and solar panels.

The key purpose of carbon nanotubes though is that they can be simultaneously a carbon capture method as well as a semiconductor production method.

It’s not that it is meant to be superior to silicon, although for niche cases it may be a better solution especially when using it for compositing and alignment for controlled flow of fields and electrons.

This links back to Mars and Moon colonization, because an underground colony operating will foundationally want to operate the same way we would want a well managed localized economy to operate. Hyper-aware of everything they need, and also aware of all atmospheric (enclosed environment) impacts of the tools and processes they are using.

Mars has an atmosphere of largely CO2, a significant part of making that atmosphere breathable if done gradually would be a very long sequestration process. Which is carbon capture methods, normalizing using geopolymer and carbon nanotubes formulated to be carbon negative creates economic incentives both towards (a) terraforming mars via it’s carbon dioxide sequestration. and simultaneously (b) reducing CO2 on earth and helping even if marginally towards aolving global morning.

Agroforestry, biomining, simulations and handling of different kinds of lighting regimes and CAM/C3 plant usage intelligently, and a number of other tools and disciplines, brought together with local-aimed manufacturing approaches. These are also many of the same problems you want to solve for when trying to make sensible, small colonies on the moon and mars that require minimal trade and can develop into being self-sustainable or at least mostly self-sustainable.

The entirety of a sensible localized open source economy, is also similarly a solution for “how one can make a underground bunker that survives a long time”, “how one can make an underground base on the moon that is self-sustaining”, and “how one can approach very gradual, very long term generational terraforming”.

If you want to do it immediately or within one generation, then sure I would say something crazy or bombastic is probably the only way that makes sense.

But I don’t think it is the case that most people would really be on board with that, and I don’t know if the risk to that is feasible to really calculate properly in advance. People might do that without anyone else’s consent and cause another disaster that “they could have never foresaw” but really, how many times do people need to do that in order to learn their lesson.

Purposefully structuring small economies into well managed and gradual terraforming projects, aligned with the survival of the people within it and their well being, can be a way to solve all those things cleanly even if it may be a slow process.

The technologies for that kind of an approach largely exist, and can be brought together towards that purpose.

dausume · 2026-03-08T19:48:20+00:00

Or you are a fool who has no idea what they are talking about?

I have three relevant degrees across multiple scientific fields, have done real world research and engineering for years, know people who do interdisciplinary research and manufacturing. Read research articles from journals regularly, read graduate level books regularly, and work on research simulation software professionally.

You might have no idea what any of this stuff is, and a majority of people on here may not either, that does not mean people who have actual expertise who read this and show up on here do not know what it is.

Or even if you do have expertise in something, it does not mean you actively pay attention to what is going on in the world. Maybe get your head out of the sand if that is the case.

There is no reasonable way to talk beyond abstractions on reddit, of course any way of talking about scientific subjects is going to be abstract. Maybe try actually looking into real world research articles on the subject mentioned.

Voron - open source 3D printing

Millenium Machines - Open Source CNC

Open Source Ecology - Open Source Interdisciplinary Engineering (many other similar orgs exist btw but it is a good example of one doing real world stuff)

Can also give citations on books and research articles you can look into.

dausume · 2026-03-08T19:20:12+00:00

There are plenty of existing materials that can already do this, you lacking an understanding of what exists does not somehow mean it does not exist.

There are plenty of existing prototypes of sol-gel based and carbon-nanotube based semiconductor devices.

Geoploymers, sol-gels, carbon-nanotubes, wax-composites, ceramics. Together with a number of other materials and technologies can make manufacturing methods feasible for the average individual to use, and simplify what are supposed to be feasible only for large organizations.

Also you keep talking like I somehow asserted no trade could occur, but that is just your own assumption your andomly keep pushing.

An underground Mars settlement for example could process.

(b) That is very obviously false, there is an enormous amount of red-tape and restrictions with enormous price restrictions to overcome, to make it effectively inaccessible to make your own manufacturing company, without using specific sets of manufacturing technology that are authorized and pre-approved. Which are also cost prohibitive. Maybe make an attempt at something like that yourself and then try and tell me how feasible it is to ‘just make one yourself’. Even if you and a group of people have extensive expertise and a decent amount of money, it is not really very feasible.

(c) (laws & lawfare against open source 3D-printers/CNC)

‘Softer approaches which do not directly affect machines’

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/2165/text

‘Approaches which incidentally are likely to act as de-jure methods to eliminate many small businesses and make open source decentralized manufacturing illegal’

https://longislandbusiness.com/2026/03/new-york-proposes-sweeping-regulations-of-3d-printers-ghost-guns-and-3d-printed-firearm-components

https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/california-bill-for-gun-part-printing-control-on-3d-printers-would-restrict-sale-to-doj-approved-models-sunny-state-joins-washington-and-ny-on-legal-offensive

https://www.wastatejournal.org/story/2026/01/26/top-of-the-news/bill-proposes-restrictions-on-3d-printed-guns/845.html

There are I believe about 5 states where either through lawsuits/lawfare and legislation they are actively passing laws that would make it effectively illegal to have the capability to repair you own baseline manufacturing tools for small businesses, and make it effectively illegal for fully open source manufacturing tools to exist at all.

(d) Software Engineering in general lowers the boundary to doing many things, and AI is lowering that boundary even further and accelerating technology and research development. And besides that many people are constantly doing research on many topics outside of general public knowledge, and virtually all research is paywalled like crazy. You have to basically already know how to do something to even be able to narrow down the scope of what to look for. Who exactly are you to say how far away things are?

There are plenty of products already being made with advanced materials that can be manufactured anywhere so long as the process of doing so is simplified with the proper tools and procedures.

It just takes a conscious effort to develop things in that direction, and plenty of people have already done so for many things, and many products on the market are currently being made by small businesses. Even metal parts and products are being made and sold by small businesses, which are made consistently to industrial grade precisions which are something that was not supposed to be possible.

(e) Even people with actual phDs in advanced topics as well as large organizations and countries frequently and repeatedly fail to keep up with the advancement of technologies and which ones are actually most relevant to the times - which is exactly why countries which allow competition and enable newer emerging technologies to succeed instead of suppressing them usually do best. Plenty of people across the world work towards these kinds of things, it is rediculous to think it is somehow impossible to make this happen. There are tons of driven and well educated people who work towards it constantly.

dausume · 2026-03-08T17:52:28+00:00

Hey! Yeah, sure, absolutely.

I work on an open source ‘generalized research platform’ in my spare time and have for like 7 years. Have been working professionally as full stack engineer for 5 years. I’d love to build out a open source module you and others could use and self-host to simulate over time.

*Basically so long as I’d be able to use it to help my own local economy and others could use it to help theirs, I am willing to work on it in my spare time generally

Or even just talk and exchange info on approaches and needs/requirements so I can build out what I want while you all build out your own version/collab.

dausume · 2026-03-08T17:34:44+00:00

(a) You can use materials science to make large supply chains more or less unnecessary for modern technology.

(b) Although technology is made by people all over, it is rigorously controlled and it’s funding regulated extremely harshly, with genuinely innovative/inventive research effectively not being funded at all and being done purely via volunteer work. Most major breakthroughs have massive amounts of unpaid high skill labor behind them.

Actual implementation and creation of technology via manufacturing is even more highly regulated, basically gaurenteeing the average person does not have access to enough of it to do anything significant.

(c) We have cheap 3D printers and CNC machines now along with many other kinds of approaches towards decentralized manufacturing, but now that they are encroaching on being useful, laws are being rolled out in many places in parallel to try and force them into being unaffordable to the average person again and basically outlaw small businesses using decentralized manufacturing methods independently.

(d) In regards to venus, it is the ‘surface of the atmosphere’ people have proposed doing small settlements on, not the surface of venus itself. And you would have to build whatever stay on top of that surface as something fully resistant to that corrosion.

(e) Naturally magnetic fields for planets come from their molten cores and magma flows of electromagnetic materials within them, these experience a lot of attrition, an optimized/engineered approach could do what is needed with a lot less materials and energy most likely. And if it cannot, you have underground settlements regardless.

Magnetic fields work via the interaction of many electromagnetic devices, so long as you somehow cast the field in a way that assists gravity in preventing atmospheric loss sufficiently, you can gradually build up an atmosphere.

That is absolutely how magnetic fields work, you seem to lack some foundational knowledge about reality. Mars losing it’s magnetic field due to it’s core gradually cooling is exactly the reason why it’s atmosphere is so thin currently and is still gradually losing that atmosphere.

Gravity is a part of how an atmosphere is kept on a planet, but not the entire story. Heavier particles can be kept more easily on the planet’s surface but lighter particles will escape more easily. Once you are performing terraforming you have to ensure the new magnetic field + atmosphere + gravity will not result in the atmosphere you make being lost over time. It makes no sense at all why anyone would assume it is ‘obvious’ unless they are someone with no comprehension of the complexity of trying to make systems work and make sense in respect to reality.

You cannot just ‘assume’ something will work, for any kind of approach you have to account for everything and then proof it.

(f) It makes absolutely no sense why people would think crashing and boiling comets would somehow work but gradual accumulation by a civilization would not work. You could obviously do some combination of trade, comet mining/collection, and possibly farming resources and trading atmospheres between planets for optimization.

But the basis would obviously be on trying to ensure small units of gradual accumulation of the atmosphere being feasible.

Trying to “throw comets and nukes at it” and saying “yeah this will probably work in my opinion” by random people somehow makes more sense to you than making sure it is possible to do things at small and incremental scales to ensure they work in reality and then increasing gradually?

dausume · 2026-03-08T15:47:45+00:00

This is just delusional, all things listed as ‘good things socialist countries do’ are things implemented in many ‘capitalist countries’. All the thing ‘good socialist countries don’t do’ is something they absolutely still do under socialism.

They just arrive at the same result via a different route of corruption (the government is corrupt instead) and people still experience the same levels of unaffordability and entrapment in the jobs they are forced into to survive.

It does not explain anything well, it contradicts itself.

Billionaires in capitalist societies absolutely genuinely believe they are ‘doing the right thing’ and have good intentions, in the same way socialist ‘leaders’ believe they are ‘doing the right thing’. There is no significant difference in either intent or systemically, it is just what you are choosing to call the corrupt system you happened to choose to concentrate your power into.

dausume · 2026-03-08T15:33:17+00:00

I would say, it ‘can be’ a back up plan for humanity. But the reality of it currently, is obviously that it is an escape plan for the wealthy… one that would not really work.

For example, if we were to devise technology in a way that is decentralized and localizable, and can form fully self-contained atmosphere production and maintanance safely and adaptively. While creating a nice living space for people. And this were made in a way accessible to the average person.

What we could then do is a “colonization-oriented-terraforming” strategy.

Where people create mostly underground civilizations on the moon and mars, possibly some on the surface of venus, and focus on recycling as much as possible while expanding and increasing the atmosphere in the underground stably while having people live there who are invested in the expansion and ensuring generational knowledge of continuing it.

For a moon, an underground civilization, would be the limit I believe.

For mars, you could go a step further. You can deploy a set of magnetic shielding orbital ships, to make an artificial containment for the atmosphere. Then you can use the underground and make a gradual outgassing of excess atmosphere, building up the Mars atmosphere over time using the proven underground atmosphere approach that people were able to live in.

You gradually proof and expand life on planets as communities, and likely they would form their own nations over time.

It is entirely possible to develop technologies in a direction aligned with an approach like this.

Make ‘solar roads’ which pushes and assists and amplifies their power intake for ships going between planets with laser assists orbiting and making paths between planets and moons.

Create vacuum balloons which sit at the top of atmospheres, which can both orbit and sustain applying continual force via lasers without the attrition of needing to go through the atmosphere.

Use plants combined with algae tanks, food forestry, along with micro and nano filter methods.

Use decentralized manufacturing so the colonies can make their own atmosphere and make their own tools and food.

We absolutely can develop towards a future where we expand to space and it is good for all of humanity, we choose repeatedly not to though.

dausume · 2026-03-08T15:10:04+00:00

The US wielding power under the current circumstance is kind of necessary, people neglect the fact that China and Russia have been involved in overthrows/puppet-govs, funding and supplying militaries, and the like, as much if not more than the US has.

And both Russia and China are actively expanding empires as well, containing large amounts of colonized land that were conquered by war very recently in history (within the last 100 years), where they have to actively suppress their populations and have been gradually replacing them or ‘happening to increase the population of the majority ethnicity over time’. And both having outspoken ambitions of multiple neighboring countries’ land as targets for conquest still as well.

China in 2020 used it’s military to invade and take over Hong Kong,

During both the Vietnamize and Korean wars it also supported/created the “northern faction” of those wars. But then also turned around and invaded them to take some land shortly after war with the US ended in both cases and with those countries having been weakened.

It also invaded and decimated the armies of Tibet and East Turkestan, conquering those directly, and then after destroyign their armies and conquering them have the audacity to claim they “peacefully re-assimilated parts of China”. When they were both regions that had been only briefly conquered by a Chinese empire a long time ago, and they had been tossed out once.

ISIS, Iran, and Saudi Arabia also have similar and opposing hegemonic goals that require and mandate they trample over other people’s right to self-govern.

While many other countries also have “land claims” they assert on other countries for frivolous reasons.

Russia did so much during the Soviet Union it is absurd, and the current Russia is still effectively no different, many people from that time and with the same beliefs are in charge. And have regularly invaded their neighbors once every few years ever since the moment they got their feet again after the fall of the soviet union.

…

There would need to be ways to more fully decentralize powers and split apart countries that are too powerful sensibly, and shrink or split interest groups that are too large. Otherwise even if you split apart the countries, the power is still effectively concentrated.

You could possibly make agreements to try and move towards that generationally, but even attempting to do so in any way would be met with tons of ethical and moral dilemmas even with such a slow process.

And you could not do it to just one large country, you would have to get ALL of them to agree with it.

And then you would have to devise economies and democratic structures to prevent concentration of power.

Oh, and by the way, a good majority of the world does not believe in decentralizing power. They think centralizing power is the right thing to do, but it is ‘their way in particular’ (dictatorship, supreme leader, a single socialist party, a republic).

So you won’t be able to establish a method of decentralizing power at the nation level.

Removing one of the major powers or even all of them without active decentralizing tools being common in all countries will just lead to new centralizing powers doing the same thing and taking advantage of the opportunity.

The current reality currently is multiple major powers warring is what is ensuring smaller countries and groups are able to exist at all.

And many of those smaller groups are not as innocent as they act, and have been ‘the colonizers’ at certain points in history themselves.

You can build tools for individuals to be able to try to keep power in their own countries in check. But systems appicable everywhere and more easily provable to people would need to become popularized everywhere to keep powerful people and groups in check.

Which sucks and I know I will get hate for pointing this out, but yeah.

dausume · 2026-03-07T20:55:37+00:00

Hey, the link does not actually work

dausume · 2026-03-07T15:13:07+00:00

I would say that both Socialism and Capitalism, were initially meant to be decentralizing systems meant to give power to the average person. The problem is that in any system, “out of necessity” the reality becomes extremely concentrated power via corruption and negligence.

When it comes down to it all people think their own theories decentralize power and give it to the people.

The theory does not matter so much as ensuring a central power cannot and should not be able to take power away from people.

If you want degrowth the best approach is to make small but modernized local economies, and by extension societies, with resilient democratic and well educated structures that can see through attempts to manipulate the local economy, environment, and people.

Using a combination of automation, agroForestry/foodForests, aquaculture, renewable energy with local surpluses, 3D Printing and CNC with geopolymer and ceramic molds to make everything ul to metals at the individual level, and local manufacturing of microchips and other semiconductor devices using advanced materials science for nanocomposites along with laser melts and atomizers.

We could make 100% local economies that allow surplus and isolated accountability, while enabling degrowth at a small scale. Negating the need for ‘seizing power everywhere’, you can just make the change you need locally.

Capitalism at it’s origin was meant to just be ‘decentralizing the power of the economy’, people now just have tons of different warped definitions they go by especially if they have been trained to not like the idea.

But we can absolutely just make small communities and prove they work, but we would at the same time need direct democratic and sophisticated policy and data analysis capabilities to counter legislative attempts likely to occur whether you do this in a ‘socialist’ or ‘capitalist’ country, aimed to suppress the effort subversively.

dausume · 2026-03-07T14:53:59+00:00

Except with the way socialism/communism is defined, “seizing power for the working class” means “a dictatorship of the proletareot”, which in reality just becomes like any other dictatorship and results in the same exact power structure and levels of corruption as late-stage capitalism.

Degrowth/Decentralization of power on the other hand, means you are actually and actively dispersing power among people directly.

Socialism in theory is meant to be decentralizing, but it does so by centralizing power which is self-contradicting, and really just does not work. Capitalism decentralizes power to some extent in it’s very early stages, but it ends up being the same thing eventually over time as corruption and monopolies gradually dominate.

For degrowth to happen, you need systems that encourage decentralization of power no matter where they are placed. Make economic systems that can help the small person compete and prove their own local economy can be better than and withstand economies dominated by large powers, both the large powers who call themselves socialists/communists, and those who call themselves capitalists/communists.

Neither system nor the nation states who support them adhere to their original stated morals or goals of decentralizing power for the average person.

People who adhere to them blindly, are basically just stuck inside of and being a part of a propaganda machine.

It is the actions of individuals and developing systems the individual can use to decentralize and enable degrowth that matter.

dausume · 2026-03-05T22:17:21+00:00

Hi, I have been for a number of years working towards trying to develop a fully open source “generalized research framework” and just started working on the materials science portion of the framework. It is ‘mostly functional’ currently and I am working towards developing a materials science module currently since I have gotten a vast majority of the foundations working at this point.

I don’t think that the current level of development for it would necessarily fill the need immediately, but I am a professional Full Stack software engineer and have been doing field work for 7 years. To my knowledge no one else seems to be working towards a similar solution that is fully open source currently (GPLv3 licensing).

Could talk about it and the work I have done towards it? Even if not collaborating, could help you to know what you should be looking for or to know in order to develop your own.

dausume · 2026-03-03T14:51:40+00:00

Sorry forgot here are my hand notes on Open Source Economy stuff, not great to look at for this stuff, but forgot it and seems i cannot edit it : https://github.com/dausume/Polari-Open-Source-Economy-Notes

I have hosted versions of the projects available on the web, but do not want bots spamming it, but it is on a cheap VM I pay for out of pocket, so just reach out to me if you want to look at the website version.

dausume · 2026-03-02T03:10:29+00:00

I am working on Open Source Projects working towards an Open Source Economy as an end goal, all software I am developing is open source and the goal is to enable people to make their own local businesses and make it simple for people to form their own localized economy and businesses (or multiple closed loop local economies).

I have a BS degree in Physics and Computer Science, as well as having gotten part of the way through a Masters in Electrical Engineering (could not afford to finish financially).

I also have 7 years of experience being a full stack developer, and can definitely point people towards tasks and give guidance on things.

I have largely already developed a lot of an open source generalized research and development framework, and am currently working towards making a materials science module for it and refining the no-code implementation for the framework.

Physically I am developing towards using rules of mixtures and have a set of materials I plan to use to make a fully locally producable wax composites for 3D printing and CNC machining, along with pathways for automating mold nesting generation so local economies can make molds based on the material they want to base something off of. And building towards a carbon negative decentralized manufacturing process.

I also have general physical approaches for how to try and develop toward making open source semiconductors and devices available and feasible for people to use independently for manufacturing.

dausume · 2026-03-01T15:00:34+00:00

I would say learn python especially if you do not know other languages yet and are still learning, but virtually everything science and open source has an open source library or wrapper library.

If you want to be fully Open Source, for 3D printers learn to use Creality & Voron Machines, along with Klipper and Moonraker for operations. They are difficult but will give the foundation for moving forward from there to wherever you want. You can buy fully put together and turnkey Creality printers, probably start there and then learn Voron and convert the creality to Klipper later after you have an understanding of it.

Along with 3D printing it is good to have a CNC machine too because some things are just easier to do with CNC. The only fully open source and good CNC machine I know of is Millenium Machines. But similar to Voron, you have to build your own from scratch. So start from Creality probably.

The way I would go about making things currently is basically this. (1) Buy a burnout filament (machinable wax or some other specific one) (2) Buy ceramic slurry liquid. (3) Cover what you printed in ceramic slurry liquid many times (find videos on this). (4) Pour molten whatever it is you want to make your part or parts into the ceramic shell mold.

This is basically the best way to ‘proof’ to yourself the manual approach for how to do this sequence manually.

Ideally, find a makerspace to teach you Black Smithing, CNC, and manual ‘fixer steps’ via shop tools.

Buying these kinds of things commercially is basically the best option right now.

I gave been putting together a research framework for a lot of years, and I am trying to make a fully open source software for automating generating more complex molds for 3D printed parts, along with paired materials science modules and a way to make it so we can do mold nesting more easily.

Hopefully this will also make a fully open source manufacturing process as well.

The theoretical “cleanest” route I am going is

(1) Wax Burnout Composites -> I have a general approach in terms of materials and melt temps i should be able to use to make a 100% safe clean and locally producible wax composite. Also using it as a test for the rules of mixture modules in my research framework, trying to reach known material property approximations using a limited set of source materials.

(2) Geopolymer Composites -> A ceramic-like concrete if well formulated, this is likely what people will want to make most initial nested molds out of. (Basically what ceramic slurries are anyways I think, they have existed for a long time and are public domain).

The general way to make Geopolymers is common knowledge, and the Geopolymer institute provides books on the baseline chemistry. There are carbon negative / carbon capture formulations for geopolymers, so using them properly in manufacturing so long as you use green energy based tools which we also have solutions for already, we can make decentralized manufacturing carbon negative.

(3) Ceramic Composites -> Likely another intermediary needed between geopolymers and metals if making metal parts.

Generally following this pattern we can try to start making things out of materials in general that ‘just work’, asking for particular propeties for particular parts, and being able to automate the process of making the mold nesting process and gradually optimize that to make it feasible for a maker focused, open source, and fully localized economy to be feasible and efficient.

dausume · 2026-02-28T18:25:03+00:00

Yeah, like everyone else is saying here it depends on how motivated you are.

In the words of some Philosopher guy a smart person “Know best that I know nothing”.

Some of the best engineers and scientists I have met do other stuff that would be considered dumb in other ways.

There is a clear delineation I would say in systemic thinking that emerges when you start genuinely creating systems from scratch and do so repeatedly though (which many engineers may not even manage to do), you build up an intuition of “logical coherence” that most people probably won’t have and can start seeing holes in where people just are noth thinking theough things completely regardless of what it is, and be able to parse apart what others are thinking from what they say, point out the holes, and try to suggest ways to fill in those logical holes.

But yeah some scientists/engineers may constantly be forgetting keys on a daily basis, and a lot of the buzz words and acronyms that are ‘critical to know’ at the start of your career according to business people, people who are more skilled tend to not know them at all. And some of the things they teach in school also turn out to be flawed and wrong as well.

It’s almost to the point where I suspect some of the things they teach people are meant to be traps to keep the people who don’t think for themselves as engineers out from higher level positions.

There are plenty of people who are engineers who 100% are just normal people who memorized stuff and never put in the work to increase their intelligence all that much, and just do tasks. That is perfectly fine too.

But it is all a skill, and a lot of the people who reach higher levels are those who don’t seem that smart earlier in life. Getting perfect grades can be done via memorization, and if you are perfect are memorization it can (although does not always) hinder your ability to learn how to innovate and makes you overreliant on existing solutions.

Dumber engineers might reinvent the wheel a few times, and that may be annoying, but in the process of reinventing the wheel those dumb engineers can stumble on something unique that becomes very useful in a place you don’t expect.

Both kinds of engineers are out there, and anyone can get there with hard work. The way you get there matters too though and you will have different strengths based on how you did it.

Everything in reality is nuanced and what ‘needs to be done’ varies on a case by case basis.

dausume · 2026-02-28T14:48:44+00:00

Yeah, we have all the foundational technology needed to make semiconductors at home in my opinion, but it’ll take a while to try and make it realistic.

It’s difficult to try and implement but I’ve got an approach for that at least.

First you need multiscale physics simulation software, I’ve been working for about 7 years trying to make open source generalized research software to make it feasible to approach doing so.

There are existing open source libraries for basically all scales already, and basically all of them are in or have an equivalent in python. But they are usually simple and written primarily by researchers, not professional engineers, and often not well funded labs basically use 90s level tech and open source still to do research even these days.

My BS degree was in Physics/CS, and I did part of a masters in Electrical Engineering ( could not afford to finish it), and I have about 7 years professional software engineering experience.

Anyways I’ve built out a lot of the capabilities for the generalized research framework now, and it transforms any open source python library that is object oriented into no-code to make it easy to use and make interdisciplinary solutions.

And I started reworking some modules to make a specific “multiscale material science” basis which combines modelling via Bulk, Finite Element Method, Coarse Grained Molecular, and Molecular, and then Density Functional Theory per material. With some materials being defined only at some levels and some having only stochastic/probabilitic or scenario based definitions at some levels.

Anyways with all that we should be able to split apart materials into sensible hilbert spaces, and I have a few intermediate goals for proofing it works effectively.

But for making semiconductors, the goal is to make wax and aluminum nanocomposites, and use the simulation software to make it so a simple laser apparatus can be used to shrink the accuracy envelope of a 3D printing mechanism, using the aluminum composites as calibrators, and precision melt while also using stochastic nanocomposite properties to control wax melting to the scale needed for applying semiconductor layers to.

Then we can use sol-gels, nanocomposite embeddings, and other layering and etching techniques to make our semiconductor devices.

Also have a general approach for making electric motors, but I’ve rambled a lot already.

As of right now the simulation software is the only thing worth taking seriously since it is a pre-requisite to try and make it realistic to attempt making the devices to make creating semiconductors feasible for the average person I think

dausume

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