One single tool, and we’ll end global poverty forever. Just one incredible machine will help us easily meet the basic needs of every single human.
This amazing device? A 3-D printer.
If you haven’t heard of 3-d printers before, they’re technological marvels that can take in raw materials (like metal and plastic) and build actual 3-dimensional objects. Sounds a bit like star trek, right?
Well, these things already exist! For about a thousand dollars, you can assemble your own from a kit. and make objects out of plastic. But today we have some high end models that can make things out of metals, like titanium.
At the rate we’re progressing, perhaps within a decade, 3-D printers will produce any tool we need: machines, solar panels, computers, you-name-it, anything we want, designed from blueprints we share online and constructed out of two of the most abundant elements on earth – silicon and carbon.
Now, if you consider how 3-D printers can be used to make even more 3-D printers, well, the implications are staggering. With a way to create and power any tool we need, we’ll be able to shift away from today’s centralized system of dependence, to a distributed system of self-reliance where we manufacture goods, grow food and generate energy all on the local scales.
3-d printers are set to make our world one of abundance and equality, which will be awesome. When we are no longer starving or living in squalor, we’ll find it easier to co-exist without murdering each other, at least not on industrial scales like we do with wars today, which may be about as much world peace as we humans can hope for.
So there you have it. Another great reason to be optimistic for the future.
