It could turn out to be even worse: the description you quote sounds very similar to the hype for the unforgivably dreadful Spore's space stage. That was so awful that even genocide couldn't break the tedium, though it was possible.

Arguably, the question of whether there will be war 'in space'(as opposed to space travel, along with some messy little ground wars on inhabited planets and any sufficiently large habitable constructs; but minimal involvement between the two), depends pretty strongly on what assumptions you bake in about travel speed and cost, as well as those about the difficulty and cost of exploiting tricky objects like gas giants or very low density clouds of gas and dust.

If travel is fast and cheap, the universe is huge, so you'll really need to be emotionally involved to take much risk on protecting this rock when there are trillions of other rocks just like it(though if Berzerkers break out, their travel will presumably also be fast and cheap, and then you have issues). If travel is too slow, war gets less likely because the offense is at a substantial disadvantage: even if you can build 'generation ships' or similar that can survive journeys in the decades to centuries range, the locals will be decades to centuries ahead of where they were when you started out, while your ship will be decrepit at best. On occasion, you'll get lucky and the locals will have nuked themselves into the ground shortly before you show up; but barring that it will hurt.

It's only really when travel is cheap and fast enough that you can viably send the fleet to somewhere; but slow and expensive enough that borders, resource pockets, and assorted other points of interest are highly valuable, that there's really a good case for something that actually looks much like terrestrial war.

I wonder if they'll find a way to keep it from feeling like little more than a reasonably ambitious Civ5 mod, notably unlike last time?

Actually, for pretty much any sort of concrete construction you're going to have to finish the walls anyway - and the ridges seen here should hold a good layer of plaster far more firmly than a smooth(ish) wall would. And if it really bothers you there are also other concrete printers out there that include a troweling mechanism to deliver a much smoother wall - this technology is still in it's infancy after all, let the folks working on practical usage and cost-effectiveness focus on that aspect for now.

You're also assuming expensive labor for finishing - while most places in the world moderately skilled labor is still pretty cheap.

I agree that this construction is almost shamefully negligent of the strengths of 3D printing, but I suspect that for some time 3D printed houses will mostly look like what people are accustomed to - if for no other reason than to gain "acceptability". Centuries of refining the technology to expedite standardized, rectilinear construction has established how things "should" look. Lots of novel architecture gets praised for it's beauty and/or functionality, but very few people want to own a house whose novelty stands to drastically reduce the pool of interested buyers.

As 3D printing improves though, and domed and biomorphic structures become cheaper than rectilinear construction (better surface-to-volume ratios, plus strength advantages) I think we'll see an increasing number of architects embracing it. It would be nice to see at least a few such designs featured in these early projects though - The "goopy lines" look might even be made to work with a more biomorphic structure.

A baseball is made of a variety of different materials - a concrete or cob house, not so much. You can realistically print an entire house frame out of just concrete - walls, roof, and conduit. You still need to hang windows, blow in insulation, install plumbing, and pull wiring to make it into a house most Westerners would want to live in - but the structure itself, and hence a majority of labor, can be all one material, printed on site.

Certainly being able to print in multiple materials will open up new possibilities, but that's nothing fundamentally new - once you can print in plastic, metal, concrete, etc (which we can already do), you're just talking about putting multiple dissimilar extruders in the same printer - hell, as I recall the RepRap mk1 was able to print in both plastic and frosting years ago - the frosting was used to provide a support structure for otherwise impossible overhangs. Seems like I've heard of them working with low temperature metal as well.

There's very little new in the world - almost every advance is an incremental improvement on the things that came before. Where things become interesting is when a new technology matures to the point where it starts actually being *useful*. For 3D printing that has so far been mostly limited to rapid prototyping and a few specialty applications like rocket components and custom-fitted medical prosthetics. And now it seems we're at the point where printing buildings is beginning to become both feasible and very cost-effective. A timely technology considering that the global population is expected to increase by around 3billion people in the next 35 years, not to mention the opportunities it will see in the US, which is now faced with retiring vast numbers of buildings erected during the post-war construction boom 60+ years ago.

Pretty big, but not ridiculous. You bring in the printer components on the back of a flatbed truck, assemble it over the construction plot, and then just keep the cement pumping until you're done. Lot's of designs out there, and a few implementations.
https://www.google.com/search?...

Why do you assume buildings will always have straight edges? Recto-linearity seems to largely be a feature incorporated for ease of construction. Consider:

* The only shape tree trunks come in reliably is "straight" - any curvature will be extremely difficult to match.
* Any sort of stacked-block construction (stone, adobe, etc) needs to be capable of tesselating consistently so that subsequent tiers follow the same line: rectangles are by far the easiest shape to create consistently, and they only lay properly in a straight line.
* for large-scale construction straight lines are by far the easiest to survey - just stretch a rope taut and mark along it's length
* Modern mass produced construction components are all flat and rectilinear - again it's the easiest shape to produce consistently.

As a counterpoint, consider cultures that had ready access to non-rectilinear building components: stacked flagstone construction for example will be comparably "gappy" regardless of the shape of the wall, and such ancient construction tends to far more commonly follow curves and ovals rather than straight lines. Likewise when using mub/cob, thatched pole, or tent-based construction you generally see circles as the dominant shape, and curves are more common that straight lines. (though this applies less to cultures that moved into such regions after already having a rectilinear tradition)

Going forward: when using a medium with no shape constraints except for overhang limits, curves have many benefits:
* Curves offer a much better area-to-perimeter ratio: 100' of wall will bound a 796 sqft circle or only a 625 sqft square. That's a 27% increase in living area with the same wall construction cost (and the same amount of thermal loss through the walls)
* Curves are much stronger than straight lines - there's a reason large dams are all arched.
* If you're printing the roof as well (and why wouldn't you?), the added strength of curves becomes even more important. You can build an extremely strong dome out of tiers of un-mortared stacked flagstone or tile, without any sort of support rigging during construction - good luck doing that with other shape. Considering that concrete is typically far stronger in compression than tension or bending, domed roofs will almost certainly become the norm, and any transition from dome to straight-line walls is going to create stress points.

Contrast that with the downsides of curved-wall construction:
* The dominant cultures on Earth are all acclimated to straight-line construction
* long, straight furniture wastes a little space against a tightly curved wall
* You won't be able to build anything that fits snugly against the curvature of more than one wall, unless some standard curvatures are established. ... that's all I can think of.

So basically it's faster, cheaper, stronger, versus cultural inertia. I know which one I'd bet on in the long term.

Perhaps this would be a reason to encourage more women to enter our field? Whether by nature or nurture women seem to generally be at least a bit better at interpersonal stuff than their comparably competent male counterparts. I suspect that having even 20-30% of the team be significantly better communicators than the current norm would dramatically improve the outcome.

Of course the counterpoint would be that to be effective the new members would have to be welcomed and integrated into the team - something our profession is notoriously bad at when it comes to women. Maybe though, if faced with an accumulation of solid evidence that their contributions would notably improve our output, we could manage to start shifting attitudes.

Hell, we might even get into a situation where you could choose between traditionally managed male-heavy teams and Agile gender-balanced teams with a comparably reliable output. Having to choose between working with either management or women, now wouldn't *that* present a quandary for some...

8.5% is significant. Of course that is not a big enough difference to make this a first-line treatment, but it could be an important option for patients for whom other treatments have failed. No one is saying this is something that everyone should use to lose a few pounds.

Most tasks don't require genius, they require quality. Rockstars often produce interesting stuff, but in a company you can't rely on them. If they leave you have an unmaintainable system that only one person ever understood. The lack of diverse ideas and experience leads to an extreme kind of monoculture. Teams are better for most tasks.

To be honest, when I (a man) say something like that it's just because I don't want to admit I've done something wrong by proposing a seemingly easy and obvious fix, then denying the greater problem. I try hard not to do it and back-track when I do, but in our culture males seem to be pushed towards the "always right, never back down" nonsense from an early age.

Of course I know a couple of women like that too, but I think it's a different problem... I can only give you the male perspective.

It seems like men are less willing to be aggressive when women are in the group, so rather than pushing their point of view as the only possible "correct" one they will compromise more. I'm not surprised that that results in overall better outcomes because it is more polarized - either the most aggressive guy is right and it turns out great, or he is wrong and it all goes to pot. A consensus and willingness to change change issues are raised is a better strategy on balance.

#include <stddisclaimer.h> // not all men are like that, statistical trend etc.

That's not a very effective way of communicating. The way you phrase it you seem to blame people for being ignorant, but often the reason they are coming to you for information is to fix that, or maybe they just have a different area of expertise. No-one can be an expert on everything.

Being a good communicator requires you to be objective and helpful. Figure out what the important information is, what the listener is likely to know and what their current understanding is likely to be. I think a lot of people really struggle with the last part, because they assume that if someone doesn't have the same understanding as them then they are just wrong or stupid and must be corrected with a simple statement of fact. Aside from anything else they are much more likely to agree with your position if you explain it well and in terms of their current understanding and beliefs.

It's not about who has a problem or winning and losing, or weeding out the morons etc. It's about getting everyone on the same page so that you function as a team, as a hive mind.

Well, once upon a time I might have made many of the same arguments. But now, RAM is cheap. I don't mind having the applications lurking around in the background. Not that I even use OSX, but last time I did (for a job) it was not a big deal, because the system had lots of RAM. And it was only 8GB, but it was plenty at the time and for the stuff I was doing, hint, not video.