By 
There will be a world revolution in your lifetime. It is one that will shake the very foundations of society as we know it. In fact, without much notice, it has already started. And its name is 3D printing. What? 3D printing you say? Ridiculous. You sure are kidding. How can something as trivial as printing change my life? And yet it will; dramatically so.
The basics
Through several different technologies, 3D printers can print just about anything. Instead of old print as you know it, 3D printers can create solid objects from a digital model. These printers can create an object by laying down successive layers of materials, millions of them. The materials are fused with a laser. The printer adds successive layers of material until it has a model of what it is trying to create. The model can be very detailed and accurate. But the real revolutionary aspect of this technology is in the hundreds of materials that one can use to create. To date, they include plastics, aluminum, titanium steel, food (yes, food), and even biological cells.
what we can do now
Companies like Concord and Boeing already use 3D printing to create certain aircraft parts. Lockheed developed a similar process to create an aircraft wing in much less time and cost. Even now, the industry is printing auto parts (including some near-complete cars), furniture, clothing, tools, buildings, and much more. Some examples are the following:
The University of Southampton, UK, recently designed and printed the SULSA Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). It has a wingspan of two meters and can travel at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour. Others are also printing small unmanned aerial vehicles for atmospheric research. Because these blueprints are printed with embedded electronics and moving parts, designers can create shapes and structures at a fraction of the cost of traditional manufacturing.
Italian inventor Enrico Dini created a 3D printer that uses a magnesium-based material to bind sand particles together to create sedimentary stone in a matter of minutes. The process of nature takes hundreds of years. The stone can be easily molded into specific shapes avoiding the need for cutting. Mr. Dini can build a building four times faster than conventional means at less than half the cost.
3D printing is used to make reverse copies of limbs for prosthetic devices. So if a person suffers from the loss of a limb, an almost exact copy can be made as a replacement. In fact, 3D printing is used to make many bone replacements, including jaws and hips. The laser imaging process ensures that the replacement part has the same articulated joints and grooves required for tendons, nerves and veins.
What about the clothes? No problem. The fashion industry has recently used 3D printing to create everything from bikinis to Lady Gaga dresses (those are weird). But the point is that nylon can be shaped into tiny threads and shaped in any way. Eventually, the printing process could personalize clothing using body scanning to create an exact fit for the customer.
Are you hungry? 3D printing takes foods like chocolate, cheese, ground turkey, and celery and turns them into new and exciting shapes. A food printer developed by Cornell University students uses softer foods that can be poured into a print head and then pumped out with a syringe to form a complex design. The future prospects for food printing are even better.
the coming revolution
Amazing things are happening as we enter the cusp of this coming revolution. Even more exciting changes are on the horizon.
If you can print jaws, hips and car parts; Why stop there? What about the food? Food is made up of carbon, fat, and fiber. It can therefore be printed. Dutch scientist Dr. Kjeld vanBommel gave a TED talk detailing the processes for printing food that could be customized for specific diets. There will come a time in the not-too-distant future when a home food printer can be programmed to print out an individually personalized healthy (or unhealthy) diet for each hungry family member or village.
But food is only a small part of the revolution. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany have begun printing blood vessels. They have printed artificial biological molecules that are formed with a laser into the shape of real capillaries and veins. So the question arises: if you can make capillaries and veins, can you print something really cool, like a real human organ? Well, it seems that the answer will be yes.
Dr. Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine received worldwide fame when he became the first person to grow a human organ, a bladder, in a laboratory and implant it into a human being. He recently upped the game by printing a human kidney using live cells. The human organ was described as a “prototype”, so much more research is still needed in this area. But the potential for advancing medical science is more than extraordinary.
The game-changing applications for 3D printers go far beyond medical science. NASA recently funded a study to launch and operate a “3D printer satellite” in outer space. Antennas and telescopes can only be so big because they have to fold up and fit into the nose cone of a rocket. Maybe there is a different way? Perhaps mile-long antennas could simply be printed in space and unfurled while in orbit. One could imagine 3D printers using raw materials from the moon, asteroids, space debris, etc. to build spaceships and habitats. The possibilities in Final Frontier are nearly endless.
The surprising aspect of The Coming Revolution is that it will happen in our lifetime. Within the next 20 years this technology will be ubiquitous in human society. Only imagination and the availability of raw materials will limit people’s ability to print anything from teeth to weapons (yes, there are some scary aspects to this technology too). With a basic 3D printer now selling for less than $1,000, a future of globally distributed industrial production seems inevitable. The effects on human society will be nothing short of “revolutionary.”