Imagine having a hopper as a normal piece of equipment in your backyard. Into this hopper you put everything that needs to go -- broken toys, garbage, recyclables. The hopper then analyzes all that junk and provides a printout of the material you have available.
You then go to your 3d design program and you design something you want to print out or if you don't have design skills you either buy a design over the internet or you go to one of those freebie sites and find a design there. You download the design to the hopper. The hopper then lets you know whether or not you have the material available to print the design. If you don't have enough it provides a list of suggestions of possible items you might own that might have the material you need. Then it's just a matter of deciding whether or not to recycle those items and adding them to the mix. If you do have enough, you hook the hopper up to the 3d printer which also has a copy of your design.
Then you push the button. And you wait, but more likely you go on with your day with a plan to come back later and check things out.
Or consider this scenario. Everything's the same except for a few small adjustments. You add a nanobot solution to the hopper and the nanobots get programmed with the design. You then insert a hose to your brand new IManufacturer which can be held easily with both hands and you direct the material to the platform where you want something built. The IManufacturer of course has an output nozzle which jets the material into the center of your output platform. Of course this time you have to make sure the stream lands where it's supposed to go, so you don't get to go off and do something else while the nanobots, now inserted into the material, do their thing.
So what am I blogging about? 3d printing has been around since the 80's. Nanotechnology was first envisioned in 1959. The following website in fact will give a short timeline of nanotechnology history: http://www.foresight.org/nano/history.html
And the study of nanotechnology and material science? MIT OCW has a course in it. Free to anybody who's interested. All these things have been around for awhile but how many are learning about it, how many study it in school, how many people are even aware that Jay Leno manufactures many of his car parts this way?
(Well as far as I know we haven't gotten to the point of using recycling regularly as a material source. I say regularly because some people have done it.)
Which leads to so many different areas of discussion I don't know where to start. Who controls the technology, the 1% or the 99%? Should we be doing this? What are some advantages? What are some disadvantages? Of course, I'm not going to write about all of that here. Probably next time I'll discuss the whole idea of the future being yesterday. Or come up with some advertising slogans. Or provide a short fiction piece. Or discuss some social ills solved by nanotechnology, recycling and 3D printing which will lead to new social ills if we let it -- of course allowing the spread of technology to take its course may be nothing we can ever control...
Until Monday, then, enjoy your speculations.
