Replicator - Fact or Fiction?

Stargate replicator? No, NASA robot.

Spider Robot NASA JSC Tweetup Sarah Worthy - Licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike.

The “replicator” from Star Trek was mostly shown rustling up grub, but we all know they were rearranging subatomic particles to make air, water, condoms, iPads...just about anything that struck their fancy. They could probably even make a replicator. That’s where Stargate took up the baton, having replicators do just that with reckless, and evilly calculated, abandon.

Paper or plastic? There are a lot of unexpected turns and twists to the correct answer. 

What a wonderful sci-fi indulgence of the imagination, right? It is no longer imaginary. You can not only buy the Replicator, but the Replicator 2 and the Replicator 2X from MakerBot. Right now. $2800. Check out what the MakerBot 3D printer looked like in August 2011 when I first did a post on 3D printing...

...and what it looks like now.

Okay, it doesn't make filet mignon or tomato soup like on Star Trek, but it could make a cover for your iPhone. Makerbot's Replicator 2 is far from being the last word in 3D printing. Here's one that can print out a candy bar. 3D printing not only prints out the fabric but the dress or pants of your choice while it's at it. If you want something more durable just have it printed in stainless steel. It is not, however, solid stainless. Most 3D printing of metal involves sintering, a process that involves lasers applying enough heat to a powder so that molecules of the substance migrate from one particle to the next, bonding them together. It's like mass spot welding. The end product can be porous and that can be a good thing or a bad thing. It's lighter but not as strong. You can fill those interstices with another substance, enhancing the original properties, or utilize the porous structure for filtering or for enhancing catalytic reactions.

If this had been around 15 years ago, the “paper or plastic” question would be pretty moot. 

Here is where we get into that light-headed area where it feels as though we're living in a science fiction movie. That's because we are, so get used to it. You can have honest-to-goodness solid stainless steel parts printed. How about titanium? High temp alloys? Yeah, it's all here. Things are moving faster than you can imagine. You may think Stratasys or 3D Systems has a leg up in this field, and they are big and know a lot, but they can't print in solid stainless or titanium. They may have high-powered lasers that glue these powders together, but they don't do what this company does. Arcam AB, a Swedish company now owned by GE, actually welds metals together layer after layer with an electron beam. They build parts for NASA and Boeing.

So what other things can you print with in 3D?

glass

human cells

sugar

ice

turkey

gold

concrete

So, it's all been done with 3D printing. It's a maxed-out technology. Not hardly.

In the future, you'll be able to donate a few stem cells that will be cultured to whatever quantity required to print you an organ. This may happen before we figure out the complexities of curing cancer, so if any type or amount of cancer is detected on any organ, out it comes. You get a new one.
UPDATE: Bam! It's already happening. Check out this article from Scientific American that describes using human skin stem cells to print organs.

It costs $4000 to recycle ton of plastic bags worth $500 on open market. Here's why.

Whole buildings will be printed out. What looks like an ATV with an umbilical will actually be a wheeled, motorized printhead that prints concrete, wiring and plumbing as it traces the path of the walls guided by GPS and the building's 3D file. There is nothing to prevent us from building a city-block-large printer attached to stanchions in the corners. As it prints, it will climb these columns to whatever the "blueprints" call for. It will allow incredibly complex structures to be economically fabricated in short periods of time - a new golden age of architecture.
UPDATE: Here it is! At least a model. It is being proposed to use it on the Moon to print the first colony there. Why not use it here on Earth?
UPDATE: And here it is being used right here on Earth.

Sky cranes will be a thing of the past.
Image courtesy of  FreeFoto.com

One of the more spectacular future applications will be out of this world. An array of printheads will orbit the globe like a satellite, printing out future habitats for mankind. Asteroids will be lassoed and brought into Earth's orbit. Chunks of them will be melted down and fed into an orbital printer kept hot by the concentrated rays of the Sun by orbital mirrors. Space habitats will become a reality.

But the truly amazing stuff is when the concept of 3D printing is combined with femtotechnology. Everyone has heard of nanotechnology. A sheet of paper is approximately 100,000 nanometers thick, give or take a few. The great physicist Richard Feynman introduced the concept in 1959. People winked and nudged each other and then it came to pass, just like Richard said. And it happened in a few decades. A femtometer is a million times smaller than the nanometer. Printer heads as small as atoms will combine subatomic particles into things we can only dream of. It will herald the beginning of a materials technology that will make nanotechnology look like curing hides around the campfire by comparison. This will probably take place within the next few decades.

The answer to the plastic bag problem is reuse. This new device makes it easy. 

We've come full circle. I started this with a discussion of the replicator from pop sci-fi and it's real world namesake that, while nifty, leaves us pining for the replicator of our televised fantasies. I've taken us on a tour of the current state of the art and a logical, if imaginative, extrapolation of 3D printing technology. And here we sit, finally, eating our filet mignon hot from the 3D printer that rearranged subatomic particles to make it. A printer that, to all intents and purposes, gives us what any self-respecting replicator should gives us: Whatever we want.

You're comments are always welcome.

Thanks,
Glen Hendrix, author Transmat World

For other blog posts on future technologies be sure to check out the following:

The Future of Wind Energy - An ocean of energy.

3D Printing Big Bang - It's gonna be big.

The Space Mirror Hack - Inexpensive, inflatable, orbital death ray.

Asteroid to Habitat: The Transformation Begins - The death ray combines with the asteroid to...

The Space Egg - Living, and thriving, in space.

Dramatic Changes Coming to the Airline Industry - Enjoy a hot tub on your $100 trip from LA to NY

When Nothing Means Something - Antigravity, but patentable.

Formatting Your E-book To Be Remembered

Nerve Cells (Illustrated) Benedict Campbell/Wellcome Images Wellcome Images under the Creative Commons License

An East Indian friend once confided in me, “I have the mammary of an elephant.”

I told him, “Please, no demonstrations.”

Which has nothing to do with the following...or does it?

A study shows reading the same material in an e-book does not have the same staying power as reading it in a hard format. Material read in a paper book is much easier to remember. There are several avenues of thought about why. The article describing the study is here: Are e-books bad for long term memory?

First, there are the locational cues given by a paper book. There's that valley in the middle of the book between the pages you've read and the pages you haven't read called the gutter. There is the thickness of the book on the left and right of the gutter that varies as the book is read. Page numbers, flaws in the paper, even the unconscious perception of the kerned spaces between letters trigger our brains to intensify the memory of that information or provide locational cues for its retrieval. Of course there's the obvious things like that mustard splotch at the bottom right corner of page 47 from eating a hot dog at one in the morning or the permanent indentations on pages 163 through 168 from using your Darth Vader action figure as a book mark. I think these may be a naturally occurring, unconscious, haphazard version of consciously visualizing different rooms in your mind to store information; a well-known memory trick.

Secondly, other studies show smaller screens showing less text are harder to remember than a larger expanse of reading material.

Thirdly, clicking back to find something is more distracting than flipping back physical pages.

How can e-book authors use this information? If you were formatting your own book (like as a pdf file) and selling it off your web site, there are many ways to take advantage of this knowledge. One could put a computer generated, randomly different frame around each page of text. There could be a scale on each side of the page representing how much of the book you’ve read and how much you have to go. As a note: Kindle has adopted a percentage-read device at the bottom of their page. The typical e-book author on Amazon or B&N, or anywhere else for that matter, pretty much has their hands tied as far as the visual presentation goes. They must leave it up to the publishing software programmers to add nifty memory enhancing stuff.

When you think about it, though, you really only need that stuff for textbooks, technical articles, and other non-fiction books. If you’re an e-book author writing fiction, however, the opposite approach could be taken. Make the presentation as nondescript as possible. Eliminate every spatial clue and make the number of words on the screen as few as possible. Hell, do away with the cover! After you've formatted your book in this manner, it is possible readers will forget they ever read your book and buy it again. Bwahahahaha!

Kidding. I think it would enhance fiction as well. If you incorporate every formatting idea discussed here, it's possible you could start running into people who quote from your book verbatim after reading it once. You could even be embarrassed by fans that know your book better than you.

“Remember when Bentoli asked Mumford ‘Just what do you know about the quantum entanglement frequency?’ and Mumford says ‘You’re about to call me ‘Kenneth,’ aren’t you?’ and...”

The scene ends with you running out of the restaurant with a gin and tonic still in your hand and into the cop that arrests you for trying to skate the tab and drinking unimaginatively in public.

It should give us pause to think how important presentation is to the human mind. It is more simple and more complex than we ever imagined. You would think that words on a screen are like words on paper, each conveying the same information. But words on paper have a secret life, backed up by clues for our unconscious mind as to order and retrievability. Mark my words (do not take a permanent marker and put curlicues around them), this information will soon be put to use by the likes of Amazon. Perhaps for the better, we would hope.

So back to my pachydermically endowed friend. Had I just laughed at the wonderfully naive play on words and gone on, would I have remembered it after several years? Or was it the additional memory cue of the retort not to show me? 

-------->You be the judge!<---------

Thank you,

Glen Hendrix, author Transmat World