ArsGeek

Would you like to get a look at the invention that will change the world as we know it? Perhaps not today, surely not tomorrow but with certainty in the next 10 years. Meet RepRap.

What is it? It’s a self replicating 3D printer. Yeah, that doesn’t sound as high and mighty as an autobalancing transportation device that Presidents and mall security have been falling off of but it’s much, much more important.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid Prototyper. It’s got two purposes in it’s existence. The first is to be able to manufacture inexpensive, solid parts made out of various types of plastic. Think about that for a second – most 3D printers available today are very expensive to purchase, maintain and operate. A cheap 3D printer however opens up all kinds of doors. Put a few of these in the poorer parts of the world and you can manufacture parts to fix, build or keep up lots and lots of things, improving the quality of life for everyone and reducing their reliance on third parties.

It’s second purpose is to be able to replicate itself. Give a community one RepRap and soon they can have dozens. Self replication is a wonderful concept – one that we should all be paying attention to. Combine these two aspects and you’ve got yourself a real breakthrough.

Look at the implications. You’ve got a machine that can produce itself endlessly given an adequate supply of raw materials. And each machine that is made can then produce other objects, from drinking glasses, tools, small construction materials to sex toys. It’s mind bogglingly simple and elegant and a real way to make a difference where such parts may be scarce. It’s also completely open source, from the software used to design 3D objects to the electronics used in building a RepRap.

They haven’t announced complete replication yet but they hope to this year. Here’s what the Darwin 1.0 RepRap can build of itself as of now.

While it’s not completely self replicating like a cornucopia machine (a machine that can create anything from the atomic level, including ice cream, weapons, robots and itself) it’s a good start, created by people not looking to profit off of it. It’s certainly got some limitations as well, such as it’s reliance on plastics as a building material, it’s need of basic electronics and it’s inability to create a working prototype from scratch – i.e. some assembly required.

Those limitations will be overcome eventually and for now it’s good to see a working, self replicating machine out in the wild. In fact, you can check this Google map to see just where all the reported RepRaps are, or get the plans to build your own Darwin 1.0 model and join the community.

In the SF world, Cornucopia machines (known also as molecular assemblers) are construction devices you feed raw materials into and get stuff out of. Often, they’ll break down anything you put into it to the molecular or atomic level, and then build on demand what you ask of it. They often come with their own store of hard to find things like radioactive materials or rare elements. They can spit out anything from coffee to a working spaceship with all the appropriate electronics and moving parts. It sounds very futuristic but may not be all that far off, particularly as we get more practice at manipulating really small things.

Self replicating machines have another interesting place in our future as well. Exploration of the Universe. Launch a self replicating probe with some basic intelligence at a nearby star system. That probe arrives, completes a survey, sends its information back to us and then builds two copies of itself. The original probe remains and updates our information while the two copies find two nearby star systems and head off to do their thing. What you have here is exponential expansion. One probe becomes two, become four, become 8, become 16 . . . until you start hitting really big numbers, really fast. As your numbers increase, your time to see every star system in the Galaxy decreases. In a relatively short amount of time we could have eyes and ears just about everywhere.

Seem pretty far fetched? Well some serious people with real science degrees are talking a lot about this. NASA type folks, in fact. This isn’t just the realm of Science Fiction authors. I’ll leave the implications of shadow projects to you conspiracy minded folks.

Of course, there are cons to such things as well. Would the probes introduce glitches to their self replication, causing evolution? Think rise of the machines.

Thinking even further, would it be possible to upload our conscious selves – who we are – in the form of data to a probe, and have it start colonizing? Stopping at each star system, replicating with our data, until it found a suitable planet to sustain life and then simply replicating us? Hundreds of copies of ourselves on distant worlds.

Then the ideas start getting funky. All this from a little 3D printer that can make it’s own parts.

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