3D printers as they are are certainly not anything like a replicators รก la Star Trek. That would require a device that not only "prints" an object, but "assembles" the chemicals it is making the relevant part from on the fly.
And to make it sustainable we would have to supply the elements in pure form, or it would have to have the ability to harvests the atoms it needs from other materials fed into it. Either way we would need ways of handling elements like phosphorous, chlorine, and hydrogen, either at the input hopper, or in the waste hopper where the materials from the inputs that weren't used came out.
In Star Trek, the replicators were, in essence, transporters, holding the materials they use in energy form, and by implication, able to transmute their inputs as will.
It would be a nice way of dealing with waste materials, of course. Both historical (landfills and the ilk) and ongoing.
But there may be another even more valuable prize at the end of this road; artificial food. If we can produce our food, or even a part of it, without needing to grow, slaughter or hunt/fish for it, it could dramatically reduce the pressure we are putting on our environment. The main stressor on the surviving wildlife of Earth is our need for agricultural land to feed our population. Reduce or remove that, and maybe the surviving species may be left enough room to survive and maybe even re-stabilise the ecologies we are currently wrecking.
Utopian? Certainly. Feasible? I hope so. Worth doing, even partially? Yes.
no subject
And to make it sustainable we would have to supply the elements in pure form, or it would have to have the ability to harvests the atoms it needs from other materials fed into it. Either way we would need ways of handling elements like phosphorous, chlorine, and hydrogen, either at the input hopper, or in the waste hopper where the materials from the inputs that weren't used came out.
In Star Trek, the replicators were, in essence, transporters, holding the materials they use in energy form, and by implication, able to transmute their inputs as will.
It would be a nice way of dealing with waste materials, of course. Both historical (landfills and the ilk) and ongoing.
But there may be another even more valuable prize at the end of this road; artificial food. If we can produce our food, or even a part of it, without needing to grow, slaughter or hunt/fish for it, it could dramatically reduce the pressure we are putting on our environment. The main stressor on the surviving wildlife of Earth is our need for agricultural land to feed our population. Reduce or remove that, and maybe the surviving species may be left enough room to survive and maybe even re-stabilise the ecologies we are currently wrecking.
Utopian? Certainly. Feasible? I hope so. Worth doing, even partially? Yes.