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Versatile building blocks make structures with surprising mechanical properties
#11
Thanks for additional references on metamaterials research, folks. It's finals week for me, so I'm rather busy. After that, I'd love to review the pre-existing OA articles, and write expanded versions for the community's review. This project has already vastly simplified the work I'll have to do for any hard-science fiction writing, TTRPG or otherwise, simply because of the research quality and sheer amount of transhumanist concepts explored on one website. The opportunity to give back to OA is appreciated.

I absolutely agree voxel-based metamaterials represent a stepping stone to utility sand/fog. Even once we have RL commercially viable voxel metamaterials, their behavior will be several orders of magnitude less complex than what utility sand is defined as. What seems most challenging is describing possible intermediary technologies. Relatively minor 'shape-shifting' effects seem like the first commercial applications. Tent poles that don't rely on an elastic core, vehicles that change their shape based on operating conditions, improved gas seals on airlocks, personal protective equipment that alters it shape to best fit a wearer, improved earthquake resistance for buildings, and housing that reacts to weather without computer controls all seem like potential applications for voxel-based metamaterials.

If anyone has ideas for how this tech might be used in OA's early days, please shout out and I'll try to work it into my proposed article updates. Many brains are better than 1, after all.
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