Some years ago I mentioned the similarities between the iPAD and Star Trek The Next Generation's PADD, with only several decades separating the real-world item from its science fiction equivalent. Today's 3D printers are not so much a primitive precursor of the USS Enterprise-D's replicator as a paradigm shift away in terms of their profound limitations. And yet they still have capabilities that would have seemed incredibly futuristic when I was a child. As an aside, devices such as 3D printers and tablets show just how flexible and adaptable we humans are. Although my generation would have considered them as pure sci-fi, today's children regularly use them in schools and even at home and consider the pocket calculators and digital watches of my childhood in the same way as I looked at steam engines.
But whilst it can't yet produce an instant cup of earl grey tea, additive manufacturing tools are now being tested to create organic, even biological components. Bioprinting promises custom-made organs and replacement tissue in the next few decades, meaning that organ rejection and immune system repression could become a thing of the past. Other naturally-occurring substances such as ice crystals are also being replicated, in this case for realistic testing of how aircraft wings can be designed to minimise problems caused by ice. All in all, the technology seems to find a home in practically every sector of our society and our lives.
Even our remotest of outposts such as the International Space Station are benefiting from the use of additive manufacturing in cutting-edge research as well as the more humdrum role of creating replacement parts - saving the great expense of having to ship components into space. I wouldn't be surprised if polar and underwater research bases are also planning to use 3D printers for these purposes, as well as for fabricating structures in hostile environments. The European Space Agency has even been looking into how to construct a lunar base using 3D printing, with tests involving Italian volcanic rock as a substitute for lunar regolith.
However, even such promising, paradigm-shifting technologies as additive manufacturing can have their negative aspects. In this particular case there are some obvious examples, such as home-printed handguns (originally with very short lifespans, but with the development of 3D printed projectiles instead of conventional ammunition, that is changing.) There are also subtle but more profound issues that arise from the technology, including how reliance on these systems can lead to over-confidence and the loss of ingenuity. It's easy to see the failure due to hubris around such monumental disasters as the sinking of the Titanic, but the dangers of potentially ubiquitous 3D printing technology are more elusive.
During the Apollo 13 mission in 1970, astronauts and engineers on the ground developed a way to connect the CSM's lithium hydroxide canisters to the LM's air scrubbers, literally a case of fitting a square peg into a round hole. If today's equivalents had to rely solely on a 3D printer - with its power consumption making it a less than viable option - they could very well be stuck. Might reliance on a virtual catalogue of components that can be manufactured at the push of a button sap the creativity vital to the next generation of space explorers?
I know young people who don't have some of the skills that my generation deemed fairly essential, such as map reading and basic arithmetic. But deeper than this, creative thinking is as important as analytical rigour and mathematics to the STEM disciplines. Great physicists such as Einstein and Richard Feynman stated how much new ideas in science come from daydreaming and guesswork, not by sticking to robot-like algorithmic processes. Could it be that by using unintelligent machines in so many aspects of our lives we are starting to think more like them, not vice versa?
I've previously touched on how consumerism may be decreasing our intelligence in general, but in this case might such wonder devices as 3D printers be turning us into drones, reducing our ability to problem-solve in a crisis? Yes, they are a brave new world - and bioprinting may prove to be a revolution in medicine - but we need to maintain good, old-fashioned ingenuity; what we in New Zealand call the 'Number 8 wire mentality'. Otherwise, our species risks falling into the trap that there is a wonder device for every occasion - when in actual fact the most sophisticated object in the known universe rests firmly inside our heads.
