Aluminum foil (2021)

Hello Amazon? Billion dollar idea here. This needs more attention. You could have fully recyclable aluminum boxes instead of cardboard. Imagine your box supply chain literally being a circle.

Aluminium foil is amazing stuff. Aluminium foil adhesive tape, in particular, is incredibly useful.

Being a multi-domain kind of geek my toolbox also contains mylar tape and fashion tape (or "tit tape" as a friend calls it) but the aluminium foil tape has proved to have many useful applications.

  > If we figure that the foil can meaningfully change direction every 20 μm, then we might think of an aluminum-foil machine as being made of “moving parts” on the order of 1000 μm² (50 μm × 20 μm), 1000 “parts” per square millimeter of foil; a roll of kitchen aluminum foil is enough to fabricate some 4 billion “parts”. A bootstrapping compiler might require 100 000 parts and thus a square centimeter of aluminum foil, cut and folded around into a shape a couple of millimeters in diameter. If it were doing only one thing at a time, and needed 10 seconds to construct/assemble each moving part, it would take about 12 days to recompile itself. This is probably adequately fast, barely, but probably not adequately robust against errors. It would probably be better to design it to have more parts and do many things at once, enabling it to be faster and correct errors.