With 3D printing we can replicate nature’s intricate designs and save nature and ourselves from ruin and poverty.
3D PRINTING & MANUFACTURING
REGISTER NOW
20 JULY
08:30 – 11:30AM
Not just glue
There has been a lot of talk about the ways in which 3D printing and the automation of manufacturing will help advance a future where human labour is made redundant – where human civilization stands in peril.
But let’s look at the ways in which 3D printing can actually help our natural habitat recover from centuries of wasteful industrialisation, how it can help build new sustainable communities of producers and consumers:
- 3D printing is able to replicate the complex forms of natural designs, as these can be re-generated by fairly standard computer software. Just think about the ways in which coral reef world-wide is dying at an alarming rate and that our current efforts at rebuilding reefs are crude and depend on long time-frames. With 3D printing we now can print ready-to-use corals for submersion in the marine environment over night.
- With 3D printing we can behave like bees. The bees were the original 3D printers and now we can work they way they have since time immemorial, and even collaborate with them. We can use technology and materials that are recyclable. We can support our natural habitat by learning how it is built and giving back where we once tore down, giving impetus for new growth the way only nature knows how.
- With 3D printing and manufacturing robotics we can stop working. As the Bloomberg think piece linked to above suggested: the ways in which we automate and stream-line production will ultimately lead to a lot of free time, time to not work, to not be under the thumb. The idea of a Universal Basic Income might just be made necessary by 3D printing, just to make sure someone has some cash to buy the goods with…
- With 3D printing we are cutting wasteful transportation. One of the biggest strains on our environment come from all the lorries and tankers and cargo-flights that ship goods all over the world. If a product can be designed one place and sent electronically as a design to a place where it will be printed, a lot of this transportation will be gone.
- With 3D printing we are building new forms of community economics. If we don’t need to rely on large corporations to produce our basic tools and our day-to-day gadgets, we can start to build new bartering economies and share-economies that are fundamentally based on use-value and re-use value, not share-price value and corporate greed.
The big idea being: 3D printing is allowing us to be more flexible, more nimble, more economical, more like the other species of this world who don’t manufacture for profit, but for their own survival and for the survival of their communities.
A bee is nothing without other bees. Human beings are nothing without other humans. We are slowly learning to how to take this lesson on-board, one 3D printed object at a time, one community-based initiative at a time.
Want to find out more about 3D Printing and Manufacturing? Make sure you sign up to the DSMLF meeting on 20th July and join your peers for a lively debate on the matter.