Discontinued as of 08/2017.
Naton will be remembered as the first project I pursued as an official effort. The idea was ambitious: a machine that, with a base input of water, would atomically convert the H2O molecule into a chosen element in a basic geometric shape. It was briefly attempted during my summer break between college semesters, independently — and was my first introduction to reaching higher-ups. Although the main limitation was a lack of education/knowledge, I got the design to a basic conceptual process and reached out to academia nationally to obtain feedback and criticism.
Although most feedback was that it was impractical or flat-out incorrect, the main takeaway was the ability to take a concept, break it into several components, and create something I then had to communicate with others to validate on a technical level (and I learned some science and engineering concepts, plus small skills like CAD and technical writing). With the intent of the project becoming a business, I used that momentum to reach out to academia department heads and other executive leaders in my city, and got a lot of advice and words of wisdom about how they viewed their roles in leadership.
Background
It started with a picture. I was looking for a wallpaper, on a sci-fi kick, and came across an image of a person on a hill overlooking a space station off in the horizon — designed as a cube, but at a scale so large the people next to it were the size of ants. I was intrigued by the size, and started thinking about how it would be built, and more importantly how it could be built practically.
After much thought, I came to the idea that we (as a species) needed a better way to obtain materials — which led to the idea of a duplicator machine (yes, like in Star Trek lol). I narrowed the scope down to simply converting a base element into another. Water was chosen as the ideal input for two reasons: it's the most abundant resource on the planet, and it's a simple molecule to break down. Once finalized, it was off to the races of concepts and designs. 😀