By Nicolas Castellon
UCR Alumnus, Class of 2013
3D printing is the next step in human evolution. Never before has mankind been able to extract forms from their minds in the most abstract ways and insert the input into a device to get a real physical object closely resembling the idea in our heads. Creative ideas will no longer be trapped in the minds of those who conceive them. Verbal limitations of our thought expression can now be transcended with the birth of this new technology. Just as the conventional 2D printer changed the way we communicate, use currency, spread literature, and reproduce private or commercial knowledge, the 3D printer will be the new benchmark in creativity. This technology will change our relationship to consumption of goods, medicine, art, and education and it will offer mankind the solution to collective problems we have not faced yet.
The gap between producer and consumer will be bridged with the 3D printer. Consumer goods will be created at home on a computer and designed by the average person without the need of massive industrial equipment or a great amount of investment. People, promoting commercial flow, will perfect goods and economic competition will be stimulated. Manufacturing will now occur at home. Businesses such as Ikea could be able to sell their 3D designs and place them online where people can download them and print them for direct use. The limits to art will no longer be the paint brush and canvass, the 3D printer will allow for beauty within the mind to be materialized in plastics and other synthetic and organic materials that will be available in the future.
Medicine will be endowed with the replication of human bones and organs. Prosthetics could be printed to the design of original limbs, knee caps, ribs, femurs and toes and the perfection of gelatin bio-ink will create functioning organs for people in need of transplants. Just as people born after the late 1980’s were taught how to use a 2D printer in computer class, students will be educated on how to use design programs like AutoCAD and use them to design objects and print them into reality.
Many technological shortcomings will be bridged by the proliferation of 3D printers. Ideas such as printing a base on the moon can become a reality within the next 10 years. This technology can be used for the creation of temporary refugee homes, replacing the blue UNHCR tents made of nylon and polyester in exchange for more sustainable and ecologically friendly biodegradable materials.
The 3D printer is a “game changer” technology. This technology opens the doors to different conceptions of how we experience life. People will have a closer relationship with their consumer goods once they have created them themselves, people will no longer die from shortage of organ donors, art will be a deeper expression of the mind, and we can aim for a printed moon colony in the near future. Just at the price of printing a single sheet of paper or an entire book has gone down massively from what it cost in the 1970s, 3D printing technology will at one point adjust to market demand and become more economically accessible to the average person. 3D printing technology will spark the democratization of creation.
Nicolas Castellon, UCR alumnus, class of 2013, is a current MSc student in Crisis and Security Management at Leiden University, The Hague. He is from Sao Paolo, Brazil.
