Why the future won't have 3D printers

[avevale_intelligencer]

The internet is full of the fact that an astronaut on the ISS successfully 3D printed a wrench whose pattern was emailed up there from Earth. This is indeed a very cool trick and worth talking about for a while.

I find less compelling the idea being bruited about that this will solve all our problems for ever. But then, I've not been that enthusiastic about 3D printing in general. I think it's a fad, utterly dependent on the huge techno-industrial infrastructure we've developed on this planet over the last couple of centuries, and its continued usefulness is predicated on the continued existence of that infrastructure and its successful full-scale transmissibility to other planets. Both these preconditions seem to me very much open to doubt, both as to feasibility and advisability.

I don't actually know whether email can be made to work over interstellar distances, reliably and consistently. I don't know if 3D printing can be made energy-efficient and sustainable; from what I've read about it to date, it isn't, and while I have seen hints that a sustainable form of plastic can be made out of hemp, I don't know how practical that is right now. I gather that attempts to 3d-print guns have not been hugely successful, and long may that happy state of affairs continue; I do know that very few useful and/or complex things are made entirely of one kind of plastic.

My concern about advisability is more serious. Sure, we can maybe send out fleets of shining starships, whose computers hold the patterns for every conceivable artefact humanity might ever need, crewed by robots who can suck the raw materials from a planet and build huge factories so that when the first human colonists arrive the first cars and microwaves and warm-air hand dryers are already rolling off the assembly lines and nobody needs to know how to do anything. It would be far less work, and speaking as an idle waste of space I'm all for that.

But is that how we really want to colonise the universe? Is that the form of humanity we want to send out to the stars? What happens when the 3D printers break down, or the pattern buffers get corrupted or wiped completely, so that our first human colonists arrive on their new world to find huge stockpiles of useless plastic and a bunch of very large and expensive bricks?

Maybe I'm just an old Luddite sticking my head in the sand, but I don't think so. I don't think we're really, in our heart of hearts, all that keen on plastic. It's useful, but it isn't how we want to live for ever and ever amen. It's the easy option, whose only virtue is its easiness. I think that when people want to go to the stars they'll do it because they want to do things for themselves, and if they don't want that, they won't last long. And I think here on earth, doing things for ourselves is going to come back in a big way, sooner or later and one way or another, and that that might not be altogether a bad thing.

There's a place for easy replication, maybe--it works on the Enterprise--and certainly it's cool that we've worked out how to do it. But I know that I'm part of a generation of human beings many of whom would last about five minutes outside our technological cocoon, and that we are not the true heirs of humanity or fit claimants of the universe. Those will be the ones who, if they find they need a wrench they haven't got, can make one themselves. Or, better still, who remembered to pack the ones they were going to need before they left.

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