“Cyclic fabrication system” is a term due to Moses, Yamaguchi, and Chirikjian for, roughly, a fabrication system that can reproduce itself — a self-replicating robot. Such systems, once they exist, will eliminate scarcity of many or most material goods, make interplanetary mining an annoyingly ubiquitous reality, and convert problems like global warming and asteroid strikes from existential risks into manageable problems.
So how do we build one? This depends in part on the environment (terrestrial, space?) and the available materials (iridium, platinum, water, aluminum oxide, carbon, iron, nickel, oxygen?).
I’m going to restrict my attention here to inorganic raw materials, even though this body is typing this in an environment with a locally high density of available organic materials with very nice engineering material properties.
Fired clay is the fundamental technology for human-driven (non-autonomous) terrestrial cyclic fabrication. Although tools of stone figure prominently in the human geological record, going back a hundred and fifty thousand generations, we developed pottery some fifteen hundred generations ago, and this is currently the basis for all of human industry.
Clay has