Four stages to material abundance.
Computing with information gave us digital abundance. We are working toward computing with matter, and the path has four stages: the question, the technology, the vision and the bootstrap.
Four stages. One path.
The vision, digested. Each stage stands on its own; each unlocks the next.
The hook
Computing with information gave us digital abundance. Will computing with matter give us material abundance?
- ·Two chemistry companies
- ·Kardashev Type 1
- ·The Great Filter
- ·Compress all chemistry into one device
The technology
A string, cubed. FDM's heat problem. Water trapped in a polar carrier cools the material from the inside. Four tests. The Manifester.
- ·Vapor cooling, patent pending
- ·Soap · photovoltaic · bait already sold
- ·0.5% → 40% of the replicator's menu, if the four tests pass
- ·Mars: feedstock, not warehouses
The vision
The frontier moves fast; the floor doesn't. Universal Prosperity: give people productive capability, not only purchasing power.
- ·UBI vs. UP
- ·Energy · water · comms · manufacturing
- ·Scarcity becomes an information problem
- ·Raise the civilizational floor
The bootstrap
Singular City, a real-life MMORPG: arrive at Level 0 and level up through real quests. Paper → movie → mall beta → communities → new worlds.
- ·LifeQuest talent trees
- ·An arcade in a vacant mall
- ·Repeatable civilization bootstrap
- ·Zero-energy computing closes the loop
Computing with matter.
The question we are asking, who we are, why we are asking it, and where it leads.
Five beats.
Information computing gave us digital abundance. Will matter computing give us material abundance?
String Cubed and Timeplast are two chemistry technology companies founded by Manuel Rendon. We believe we have solved one of the most complex problems in chemistry, one that may be fundamental to reaching Type 1 on the Kardashev scale.
Stage 2: the first ancestor of the Star Trek replicator. Stage 3: material abundance and Universal Prosperity. Stage 4: a civilization bootstrap.
We want our civilization to pass the Great Filter. Creating the first ancestor of the replicator is one of the keys.
Compressing all chemistry into a single device is possible through computing with matter.
Why a replicator matters
A civilization that can manufacture function locally is harder to kill: by supply shocks, by distance, by collapse. The first ancestor is the start of that resilience.
Not only the ceiling
Type 1 isn't measured only by our most advanced machines, but by how many people can participate. That thread runs through all four stages.
Material + logic
Timeplast makes the time-programmable, water-soluble material platform. String Cubed makes the analog logic, the functional objects and the Manifester program.
PatentsManufacturing function, not only form.
What the very first ancestor of the Star Trek replicator looks like, why heat was the wall, and the uncomfortably simple way we got past it.
FDM printers are by far the most popular and reliable, because nothing beats them in simplicity and programmability. If you can bend a string of material into a three-dimensional object, you can theoretically make almost anything.
FDM has one major problem: heat.
About 200 °C is fine for inert plastics. But proteins, enzymes and pharmaceuticals are mostly heat-sensitive, so FDM destroys the very thing you're trying to print. Functional matter never made it through the nozzle.
The filament carries its own thermal buffer.
Uncomfortably simple. The phase change is designed to protect the functional chemistry travelling through the printer.
Made, sold, first of their kind.
Printable soap
Consumer cleansing filament, now in its sixth generation and six colours. Sold through Timeplast.
Photovoltaic filament
The first printable material that generates electricity from light. Patent pending, co-owned by the two companies.
Fish Bait filament
Fishing bait carrying real shrimp meal through the nozzle intact: the first protein payload we shipped.
Promising but early examples. The next stage is the most complex, and the one that matters most.
Four fundamental spaces of chemistry, one machine.
Printing one protein isn't enough. Instead of testing every heat-labile material, we attack four spaces: volatility and oxidation, chemical degradation, loss of protein structure, loss of biological activity. If a test fails, the failure tells us exactly where the boundary is so we can engineer the next version.
Four materials, four ways to fail.
If a string of material can carry these four through a 3D printer and they still work afterward, that would be evidence that printing can preserve function, not only form.
Limonene (d-limonene): volatility and oxidation. Vitamin C (ascorbic acid): redox degradation and hydrolysis. Lactase: loss of folded structure. Nisin: loss of bioactivity requiring intact structure.
Each one tests the idea from a different direction. The paper sets out the test as a preregistration protocol: the method and the pass thresholds are fixed before any data exists, and the plan is for an independent lab to run it. There's no data yet.
Our paper, Manufacturing Function, Not Only Form, fixes the test, the thresholds and the failure modes before any data exists. We would rather find the flaws now than later.
If you see a weak point in the method, the chemistry or the logic, send it to info@stringcubed.com. With your permission, we will credit the strongest critiques here.
- Credited critiques: none yet.
You figure out what you want. The Manifester figures out how to make it.
One compact machine. Multi-material cartridges. An AI that hears a request, designs the object, chooses the materials, determines the internal architecture and generates the manufacturing instructions. Speak almost any object into reality.
Preserve
Molecules that already exist, carried through intact.
Synthesize
Chemistry modules: polymer synthesis, advanced processing, new material classes.
Self-replicate
Perhaps the ability for the machine to print itself.
Every object you don't ship is mass you don't launch.
Instead of packing a warehouse of every conceivable spare part, you bring a manufacturing platform and feedstock, with the potential of using Martian materials to manufacture "Earth" objects.
Forward-looking statements: the Manifester is in development. Generations 2 and beyond, the share of the replicator's menu that becomes printable, and the Mars applications are goals, not products, and may not occur as described. Patent status: US 2026/0061664 A1 is pending, not granted.
Material abundance & Universal Prosperity.
The reason we want to build the Manifester in the first place: the frontier of technology is moving incredibly fast, but the floor is not rising nearly fast enough.
A different question than the one that leads to UBI.
Money doesn't manufacture a solar panel. Money doesn't repair a broken water pump. Money doesn't create a local supply chain where none exists. It helps you buy those things, if somebody else already made them and can get them to you.
Steve Jobs called us a tool species: on a bicycle we outperform the condor. The personal computer freed us from a monopoly on information. Will the Manifester be the human tool for material freedom?
Raising the minimum technological capability available to any human being.
Scarcity transforms from a material problem into an information problem. Each generation of the platform brings better technology, and fewer people care how high the ceiling is; they care how fast the floor approaches it. Manufacturing beats natural resources almost every time; the Manifester could be one of those rare products people prioritize buying.
A remote community
"Manifests" its own water filtration system locally.
A remote clinic
Produces a specialized mix of antibiotics, tailored to each patient.
A student, then an entrepreneur
An idea for a machine is produced there and then; the prototype becomes a product. The community stops consuming technology and starts producing it.
If humanity is serious about Type 1, we can't measure progress only by our most advanced machines. We have to ask how many people can actually participate.
Fertility rates may be dropping because our world's complexity outruns what we evolved for. The Manifester can be what fire was to our ancestors: more control in each individual hand, the burden of growth on the individual rather than the state.
A powerful machine in every community wouldn't automatically create prosperity. You also need people who know what to do with it. That is Stage 4.
The civilization bootstrap.
The largest project on the path is Singular City, a real-life MMORPG.
Not through charity. Not through a lottery. Not by hoping the right opportunities appear. By designing the opportunities into the system itself.
Growing up is the most detached from our natural interface we've ever been: complexity, polarization and sexy distractions make it harder for young people to become fully functional adults. A century ago choosing a career meant choosing a profession. Today it means choosing whether to work on machines, genes, intelligence, quantum information, other planets, or reality itself.
What if human development had the clarity of a well-designed game?
Gamification, not to make life trivial. To make progress visible.
Fundamentals & safety
Electrical basics.
Assemble
A small solar installation; learn to maintain it.
Repair
Help fix an actual system.
Design
Participate in designing a more advanced one.
Lead · launch · teach
Lead a team, start a business, teach the next group.
Real skills. Real projects. Real economic value. You can afford to stay at Singular City from day one with the credits you earn by completing quests. You can see where you are, what you've accomplished, and the next step.
Built in stages, not all at once.
Singular City connects the manufacturing platform from Stage 2 with the Universal Prosperity concept from Stage 3. And we have an unconventional idea for how to begin: the replicator path starts with a paper: a preregistration protocol. Everything else starts with a movie.
Manufacturing Function, Not Only Form: a preregistration protocol for the four tests. Could be transcendental.
Foretell the founding of Singular City.
An experimental campus with the accessibility of a theme park. People hang out, try the technologies, learn skills, run quests, and expose everything that doesn't work.
Test the components with real people, real costs, real constraints. Improve. Test again. If mall betas succeed, the next step is scaling to actual communities.
Manifesters and print bays: the stage-2 machine, in public
Solar, batteries, microgrid; the first talent tree
Level 0 onboarding, talent trees, quest board
Food, water and biology quests
The first public Manifester, running all day
Get your Level 0 badge; meals paid in quest credits
The parking lot powers the building
How much civilization can you bootstrap from a limited set of tools, materials and people?
A civilization on Mars cannot depend forever on shipments from Earth. Local manufacturing, local energy, local food, local everything, and people capable of continuously improving all of them. The remote-Earth and Mars problems are not identical, but they share that question. It's worth dedicating a life to.
Computing with matter, closed loop.
Today we translate problems into information, process it electronically, and use the result. But matter itself can perform useful operations. What if we programmed more of those processes directly, and connected that to a machine that manufactures the structures which execute them? Then we're no longer printing objects. We're programming physical behavior.
If we are wrong, we want to find out early. If we are right, this may be the moment our universe flipped the coin and won.
Let's build the first ancestor of the replicator.
Forward-looking statements: Singular City, the mall beta, the communities and the later steps on this path are plans, not commitments. Dates and outcomes are illustrative and may not occur as described.
One email a month. Lab notes, not marketing.
Experimental results from the function-preserving program, new filaments, patent updates and film releases.
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