Chad's Tech Dungeon-3D Printing

The ESA's proposed 3D printed Moon base

Still think 2D Wireless Printing is cutting edge? Well...you’re just a bit behind, maybe about 3 or 4 years at this point. Either way, something new has started to become mainstream in printed home media. That something is; 3D printing. And oh how it has developed over the past couple of years! But before I move on, I will explain the idea behind 3D printing. Imagine you want to replicate a model Nicolas Cage head that you happen to have on your desk with; the lack of hair, a huge nose, and those great looking eyebrows. Well, all you would need to do with today’s modern 3D printers is get your laser scanner out, and place your object in the 360 degree field view of the scanner, and simply press “scan.” The laser scanner would take a few minutes to scan all of the details of your Nicolas Cage head, and would then show you the 3D model on your computer screen. Then, simply load your choice of colored ABS plastic 

(I would choose green), and proceed to print your marvelous creation. Presto chango! You now have a plastic copy of your favorite Nicolas Cage head!  And that’s the basic idea of 3D printing, bringing copies of any object you want, right through your home printer.

Since all of you have that wonderful image of a green 3D printed Nicolas Cage head in your minds now, let me tell you that 3D printers aren’t just for seemingly pointless things like my main example. No, 3D printing might just be one of the biggest technological revolutions of the 2010’s. Why do I say this you might ask? It’s simple. 3D printing is about to change the world of mass production, building structures, medicine, and even art. Imagine if you will for a second, a world in-which almost everything around you has been 3D printed. Your clothes, certain parts of your car, your shoes, the painting on your wall, and even certain aspects of your house! With advancements in the different materials that can be interchanged with 3D printers, this future that I’m proposing could only be a couple of decades or less away. In any case, a lot of things that you would normally shop for could instead be printed directly at home. Now that’s got to be a game changer considering that production has usually been central to corporations, not the consumer for over 200 years now.

Being that I’m on the topic of the future, I might as well say that 3D printing won’t just be stuck on planet Earth, no, but rather the final frontier. The European Space agency has proposed the idea of packing a light amount of equipment on future trips to the moon. And their solution to this problem. 3D printing. The ESA has proposed that the Moon bases and tools should be 3D printed in order to achieve this goal. A couple of structures with the use of a D-Shape printer from the company Monolite, would allow this to be achieved in around 1 week, which is truly amazing! It goes to show the true impact that 3D printing could have in the future.

But Extrapolating aside, I should mention what great things 3D printing is being used for right now. As of a month ago, Cornell scientists have managed to 3D print lifelike ears from Rat tails, and Cow ears. And with the great potential for 3D printing in the medical industry right now, organ transplants could become rather easily achieved in the near-future due to a Scottish universities research in the field of embryonic stem-cell printing. With this being said, doctor’s could simply print out a new organ for the patient in a matter of hours, and then proceed to transplant it without having a risk of biological incompatibility.To really wrap things up, we’ll have to keep extrapolating about the future of 3D printing, but it’ll be worth it. Because 3D printing has a vast amount of potential applications out there, it’s just all in what people think of as possible uses. Like with any other technological development.

- Chad Earnest - Tech Dungeon Columnist