Printing ourselves into a corner? Mankind and additive manufacturing

One technology that has seemingly come out of nowhere in recent years is the 3D printer. More correctly called additive manufacturing, it has only taken a few years between the building of early industrial models and a thriving consumer market - unlike say, the gestation period between the invention and availability of affordable domestic video cassette recorders.

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.

Falling off the edge: in search of a flat Earth

It's just possible that future historians will label the 21st century as the Era of Extreme Stupidity. In addition to the 'Big Four' of climate change denial, disbelief in evolution by natural selection, young Earth creationism and the anti-vaxxers, there are groups whose oddball ideas have rather less impact on our ecosystem and ourselves. One segment of people that I place in the same camp as UFO abductees and their probing fixation are believers in a flat Earth.

Although on the surface this - admittedly tiny - percentage of people appear to be more amusing than harmful, their media visibility makes them a microcosm of the appalling state of science education and critical thinking in general. In addition, their belief in an immense, long-running, global conspiracy adds ammunition to those with similar paranoid delusions, such as the moon landing deniers. One example of how intense those beliefs can be (at times there's just a whiff of religious fanaticism), the American inventor and stuntman 'Mad' Mike Hughes was killed recently flying a self-built rocket intended to prove that the Earth is a disc.

I won't bother to describe exactly what the flat Earthers take to be true, except that their current beliefs resemble a description of the late, great Terry Pratchett's fantasy Discworld - albeit without the waterfall around the edge of the disc. For anyone who wants to test the hypothesis themselves rather than rely on authority (the mark of a true scientist) there are plenty of observational methods to try. These include:

1. Viewing the Earth's shadow on the Moon during a lunar eclipse
2. Noticing that a sailing ship's mast disappears/reappears on the horizon after/before the hull
3. How certain stars are only visible at particular latitudes

For anyone with a sense of adventure, you can also build a high-altitude balloon or undertake a HAHO skydive to photograph the Earth's curvature - from any point on the planet!

It's easy to suggest that perhaps our brains just aren't up to the task of deciphering the intricacies of a 13.7 billion old universe, but basic experiments and observations made several thousand years ago were enough for Greek scientists to confirm both the shape and size of our planet. So what has changed in the past century or so to turn back the clock, geophysically-speaking?

The modern take on a flat Earth seems to have begun in the late 19th century, with an attempt - similar to contemporary mid-Western creationists - to ignore scientific discoveries that disagree with a literal interpretation of the Old Testament. Indeed, the forerunners of today's flat Earthers were anti-science in many respects, also denying that prominent enemy of today's Biblical literalists, evolution by natural selection. However, many of the 21st century' s leading adherents to a disc-shaped Earth have more sympathy and interest in scientific discoveries, even supporting such politically contentious issues as rapid, human-induced, climate change.

This topic is laden with ironies, few greater than the fact that a large proportion of the evidence for global warming is supplied by space agencies such as NASA. The latter has long been claimed by the Flat Earth Society as a leading conspirator and purveyor of faked imagery in the promotion of a spherical earth (yes to all pedants, I know that strictly speaking our planet is an oblate spheroid, not purely spherical).

Today's flat Earth societies follow the typical pseudo-scientific / fringe approach, analysing the latest science theories for material they can cherry pick and cannibalise to support their ideas. In recent years they've even tackled key new developments such as dark energy; in fact, about the only area they are lagging behind in is the incorporation of elements involving quantum mechanics.

But for anyone with an understanding of parsimony or Occam's Razor, the physics for a flat Earth have about as much likelihood as Aristotle's crystalline spheres. It isn't just the special pleading for localised astrophysics (since the other planets are deemed spherical); isn't it obviously absurd that there could be a global conspiracy involving rival nations and potentially hundreds of thousands of people - with no obvious explanation of what the conspirators gain from the deception?

Even for the vast majority of the public with little interest or understanding of the physics, most people considering the flat Earth hypothesis are presumably puzzled by this apparent lack of motivation. In a nutshell, what's in it for the conspirators? Until recently, NASA (nick-named 'Never A Straight Answer,') was the main enemy, but with numerous other nations and private corporations building space vehicles, there is now a plethora of conspiracy partners. Going back half a century to the height of the Cold War why, for example, would the USA and Soviet Union have agreed to conspire? As yet, there hasn't been anything approaching a satisfactory answer; but ask Carl Sagan said: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

Unlike most fringe groups, flat Earthers don't appear to favour other, popular conspiracy theories above scientific evidence. Yet somehow, their ability to support ludicrous ideas whilst denying fundamental observations and the laws of physics in the light of so much material evidence is astonishing.  Of course our species doesn't have a mental architecture geared solely towards rational, methodical thought processes, but the STEM advances that Homo sapiens has made over the millennia prove we are capable of suppressing the chaotic, emotional states we usually associate with young children.

Whether we can transform science education into a cornerstone topic, as daily-relevant as reading, writing and arithmetic, remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the quest continues for funding a voyage to find the Antarctic ice wall that prevents the oceans falling over the edge of the world. Monty Python, anyone?