Roumen.ganeff

An Othermill

Other Machine Co.

You can think of an Othermill as the opposite of a 3-D printer. Instead of building up objects from raw materials, Othermills create objects by cutting away a larger block of material into something smaller. They're like tiny robotic sculptors, similar to the artists who chisel away at a big block of marble until it becomes a work of art.

Like home 3-D printers, however, Othermills are made to fit on a tabletop. And they've gone on sale this week, so just as with 3-D printers, you can now buy one.

One Othermill machine costs $2,200. It carves materials that are softer than its cutting instruments, including certain woods and plastics, printed circuit boards, and certain metals like brass, copper, and aluminum. The machine has a precision of one one-thousandth of an inch (about 0.02 millimeters) and works faster than 3-D printers do. Users load programs into the Othermill in popular file formats, which are listed on the Othermill website.

What can you make with all that? In a press release, Othermill's manufacturer, a San Francisco-based startup called Other Machine Co., talks about letting small businesses prototype electronics quickly. Meanwhile, Other Machine Co.'s Instructables profile has some more whimsical suggestions. There's a Halloween stamp kit, a tiny synth that makes eight-bit music, and a light-up necklace cut from circuit boards. You could potentially incorporate all of these at once into your Halloween costume.

The Othermill isn't the only tabletop "3-D cutter" you can buy. In March, Make magazine listed a few other options, including both commercially available carving machines and machines that are still Kickstarter projects. Othermill itself began as a Kickstarter project last year and only finished shipping products to its backers last month, the company reports. Now it's up and manufacturing for all customers.

The Very Green Interior Of An Imagined Colonial Transporter

Rick Guidice/NASA Ames Research Center via Wikimedia Commons

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar imagines a human journey to planets beyond our star. But that kind of trip would seem impossible in today's terms. Fortunately, a DARPA-funded task force is already working to make it happen in the next century.

Mae Jemison, leader of the 100 Year Starship Project (100YSS) told Popular Science that enormous challenges stand between human beings and colonizing a distant star system. But she believes 100YSS can bring together the diversity and creativity of invention necessary to make it happen.

Jemison has had a rare vantage point on human spaceflight. An engineer, physician, and—for six years—a NASA astronaut, she became the first woman of color in space when she orbited Earth in space shuttle Endeavour. Often, astronauts talk about the "overview effect" from space, a sense of oneness with Earth and its people. But Jemison says she found herself drawn in the opposite direction. 

"I looked down and I saw the Nile River go by, the pyramids, and my hometown Chicago, and I tried to make myself afraid. Outside of this hatch are forces totally inhospitable to human life," she said. "But I couldn't feel it. I would have loved to be up there in a bubble with just my cat."

The fact is, Jemison never strayed far from Earth. Shuttle astronauts, from the perspective of a solar traveller, barely got off the planet. No human being has gone beyond orbit of the far side of this planet's moon. Crossing the distances Interstellar imagines will involve gigantic leaps in technology and human infrastructure. Nolan gets it wrong, Jemison says, in populating his epic with vehicles that look a great deal like those travelling around Earth today.

The Not-So-Different Future

In the 'Interstellar' trailer, Matthew McConaughey sets off for the stars in a ship that looks a lot like the ones we use to orbit Earth.

Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers

She likens Interstellar's challenge to crossing the Sahara desert—another vast, lifeless space that humans have nonetheless tamed. But in the 53 years since the Yuri Gagarin made the first trip into Earth's orbit, crewed missions have yet to make a substantial fraction of a trip to a foreign star. Like the nomads who build cultures around desert crossings, Jemison says our entire approach to space travel will have to change before we attempt the interstellar vastness.

Right now, a lack of powerful yet efficient propulsion limits human civilization to this solar system. For example, the Voyager I probe, launched in 1977, speeds away farther from Earth than any other spacecraft. In 2013 it became the first in interstellar space. However, it will be another 40,000 years before it even remotely enters another star's neighborhood. Any mission making the journey to a habitable exoplanet must move a much larger weight much faster—approaching a substantial fraction of light speed—to make the trip in even several generations.

Of the many technologies Jemison says might accelerate a spaceship to that velocity (and, equally as important, deccelerate on the other end), only one exists today: nuclear fission. Some power plants, military submarines, satellites, and aircraft carriers convert heat from decaying atoms into energy. But no reactor has ever propelled a space engine, partly because of the dangers and inefficiencies of fission, and partly because of international treaties governing the use of nuclear power.

Where fission fails, its cousin might succeed. That is, if we can ever make it work. Fusion—smashing together atoms to form larger elements while releasing incredible energy—powers every star in our universe. With some ingenuity, it could also help us reach them.

To illustrate the diffierence between fission and fusion, consider America's nuclear assault on Japan in 1945 used fission bombs and had a combined blast area of about 20 square miles. The blast of the largest fusion bomb ever tested, meanwhile, affected 1,520 square miles.

The prospect of fusion-powered spaceflight is tantalizing, but efforts to even build an efficient reactor on Earth have stalled for several decades. Antimatter, produced in tiny, fizzling samples at CERN, annihilates with still greater power when it contacts matter. Yet scientists have only produced a few particles of the exotic substance, and the record storage time is 1,000 seconds before spontaneous annihalation. In short, we have a long way to go before filling up a gas tank with antimatter. Jemison also points to the possible construction of vast solar sails to catch photons and accelerate a craft over huge distances. Huge earthbound lasers and power sources could then propel the craft without the need to drag interstellar engines along.

But Jemison says propulsion is just the first and most obvious problem an interstellar ship's engineers have to address, and that this point is where many science fiction films like Interstellar fail. "One of the issues with applying today's space technology to the future is it blocks our way of thinking," she says. She would like to see a movie explore a more radical vision.

"Even the inside of the Enterprise [from Star Trek] looks a lot like what we have today, with grey walls and military hierarchies and buttons everywhere," she says. "We can't separate the vehicle from what it's doing and what it's carrying. It's got to be different." We should expect a starship built in 2114 to be as alien to us as the International Space Station would be to a biplane pilot in 1914. 

A ship making the journey to another solar system will likely have to leave without any plan to return. It'd also need to contain an environment that could nourish and protect decades or centuries' worth of travelers. Jemison says a lush, green ship might carry the first outbound crew. Components would self-repair, and food would grow within the walls. (Such engineering challenges plague Mars colonization ideas today.)

Even a giant, antimatter-driven, self-sustaining space colony, however, might fail on its journey. A suitable starship must be more than sustainable and powerful. It must also protect its inhabitants. Using today's technologies, an enormous lead shield would have to separate the ship's inhabitants from harsh radiation out there in the universe. (Some suggest a hollowed-out asteroid.) But in the future, magnetic technologies now bending radiation at cancer in the body might scale up to deflect gamma rays like Earth's protective magnetosphere. 

So, let's say we do build a ship that can safely carry a population over lightyears. It will be useless without a vibrant, skilled community to inhabit it, Jemison says. "That crew that goes, whether it's 50 or 10,000, needs to reflect the diversity of the planet it comes from—cultural, gender, and socioeconomic." About 10,000 travelers would be the minimum—any fewer than that, and genetic fitness would take a hit (see chart below).

Space Colony Genetic Variation

About 40,000 people would be needed to seed a genetically fit deep-space colony, according to one study.

Illustration by Katie Peek/Popular Science; chart adapted from Acta Astronautica

To bolster diverse thinking, Jemison invited researchers from wide-ranging fields onto the project, and set up programs designed to involve people without science PhDs in space travel. Today, fashion professor Karl Epselund, for example, investigates interstellar clothing for the project. And more than $2 million for advanced aerospace manufacturing training has already reached Orange Coast Community College in California, where many students now go on to work for SpaceX, according to dean Doug Benoit. Jemison says the longterm goal is to expand the base of skilled laborers and technicians who one day will form the bulk of a large interstellar crew. 

The course to a space-faring future for humanity is long and riddled with nebulae of uncertainty. Overcoming them will involve a generational shift in human ambition. Jemison says she's glad Nolan's film has built up buzz around the idea of interstellar adventures, but that she wishes such sci-fi films would show more creativity in their vision.

"I'm a little sad that the impetus of the movie is we've screwed the planet up," she says. "I hope the reason we do this will be more positive."

Fence

Lava overruns a fence on October 28

USGS/HVO

Compared to most natural disasters, a lava invasion does not move all that fast. Nowhere is that more evident than the small Hawaiian community of Pāhoa, where a lava flow has been approaching the town since June 27. Now, the lava has finally arrived on the outskirts of town, overrunning private property. In the picture above, the lava behind the fence is chest-high. Geologists are keeping a close eye on the progress of the flow, which currently seems to be headed straight for Pāhoa Village Road, one of the village's main streets, and beyond that, for Highway 130, a traffic artery travelled by 10,000 cars a day. It's already crossed over one road, Cemetery Road, and a cemetery (presumably the road's namesake).  

Map

An annotated photograph showing the progress of the lava flow at 11:30 am on October 27

USGS/HVO

The flow is advancing at 48 feet/hour (approximately 0.009 miles/hour). Many people living in the path of the lava have evacuated their homes, school has been cancelled, and workers have constructed temporary access roads that could help manage traffic in the event that the lava overruns Highway 130.   

Lava flow

A shed is consumed by the lava flow on October 25

USGS/Hawaiian Volcano Observatory

Curi the robot

Harold Daniels

Andrea Thomaz, who directs Georgia Tech’s Socially Intelligent Machines Lab, teaches a one-of-a-kind student: a robot with light-up ears, named Curi. We asked Thomaz how she envisions life with robots unfolding.

Popular Science: Why should robots be able to learn?

Andrea Thomaz: Personal robots are going to be out in human environments, and it’s going to be really hard for engineers to think of all the things we’re going to want those robots to do. So my lab is trying to enable end users to teach robots. We’re thinking about different elements, from the interaction itself—how should the robot phrase questions so that it’s gathering the right kind of information?—to machine learning, or algorithms to deal with the kind of input people will provide. 

PS: Can you describe a typical interaction with Curi in the lab?

AT: We’re teaching Curi to help out in the kitchen—scoop some pasta from a pot onto a plate and serve the sauce on top. One way to do that is by physically showing the robot. You say, “Here, Curi, let me teach you how to scoop the pasta.” And you kind of drag the robot’s arm through the motion. Then you ask, “Can you show me what you learned?” and the robot will try to repeat the task, or it could ask questions like, “At this point, is it important that my hand is positioned like this?” in order to build a better model. 

Andrea Thomaz

Thomaz was among Popular Science's Brilliant Ten in 2012.

Harold Daniels

PS: Are you also watching how people interact with the robot? 

AT: Absolutely. Usually, with a little bit of practice, people can do whatever interaction [with Curi] we’ve designed. At the end of that, we ask open-ended questions about how they wish they could have interacted with the robot. People usually say they would like to be able to watch the robot try to do the learned task and then say, “good job,” or give positive or negative feedback. Some algorithms could make use of that. So that’s one thing we look at: What kinds of input do people naturally want to provide and how do we design algorithms that fit that? 

PS: Is the pasta task one way you envision robots being part of our lives? 

AT: I think we could start seeing personal robots in all parts of our life. Those that are envisioned most at robotics conferences are assistive robots, educational robots, and robots that can help in hospitals. When we ask people in our lab, the thing they want most is Rosie the Robot—a robot to clean their house and do the stuff they don’t want to do. 

PS: In the movie Robot & Frank, a robot acts as a caregiver for an elderly man. Just how sci-fi is that scenario? 

AT: For a lot of people in the community of human-robot interaction, that is the target—getting robots to a low enough price point that somebody could purchase one to be in their home and do something useful. We’re definitely not there yet, but we’re going to get there. The part of Robot & Frank that matches the vision I have for my lab is that the robot is adaptable. It’s kind of terrible that the owner teaches the robot how to steal jewelry, but he was able to define what he wants the robot to do and train it. It’s collaborative. That, I think, is going to have to be some part of the end-user interaction.

This article originally appeared alongside "Will Your Next Best Friend Be A Robot?" in the November 2014 issue of Popular Science.

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