For some reason, I got more excited about this 3D printer NASA story than I should have.
3D printing’s not a terribly new technology – it’s been around for 30 years or so. But hearing that an astronaut who needed a wrench received one from NASA via email… into outer space… was just too many layers of cosmic awesome for me to handle. Maybe it’s because – here on earth – I could just as easily drive to my buddy’s house and give him a wrench. Even if he’s rowing a boat in a French canal or somewhere on a vision quest, I can fly there, wait, and deliver it if I like. But I can’t go to outer space no matter how patient I am or how many frequent flyer miles I have. I’ll never get a god’s eye view of my globe home unless I stow away on a space rocket. And even then I’ll probably die because I’ve failed to prepare properly my organs for bobbing around in a bubble in infinity.
So, seeing this technology I’ve never own applied to a place I’ll never go?
Mindblow level: JEALZ.
While my body may not be ready for outer space emails, it is ready for inner space emails. That is, the space inside my belly. Back here on earth, I’m still waiting for the “ink” of 3D printers to consist of some kind of synthetic precursor-to-food ingredient. I’m thinking something that serves as the makings for perfect edible replicas of exotic fruit when it hits the air. Like it’s oxygen activated to make for a smorgasbord of juicy fruit? Although I wouldn’t eat it, I’d totally sell it so I could afford more organic stuff. “No GMO! No chemicals!”
My pie-in-the-skyprinter aspirations may sound more out there than wherever that wrench got emailed to. But I’ve cause to doubt my own self-doubt at this point, because the more I learn above the next level stuff – 4D printing sorcery – the less I understand it. It’s still something I can’t wrap my head around – no matter how many times I read it. Because those two element “wrapping” and “time” are part of the basis of what makes it work. I wrote a while ago about a fabric that conforms to whatever’s beneath it. It sounded really cool in theory, but it seemed too distant a technology (commercial application wise) for me to think about how cool it could be in every day life. What 4D objects can do, though, are conform – or wrap around – the objects on which they rest, over time. With medical implants, this would be great inside of growing, twisting, moving bodies. But it could also work for other applications to things that change shape over time – like growing kids, stuff that changes shape with temperature, and the person you married.
The only problem?
Clothing companies who hop on board are gonna have to take this technology back to the lab to build in an obsoletion date make-under. Otherwise, they’ll have to hire Jessica Simpson to make next season’s line appealing enough that you wanna replace last year’s anyway (“It doesn’t matter how much I yo-yo diet, it always fits! No need for mom jeans now! *wink wink*”)
Yeah, that’d suck for me because my skinny jeans’ snugness is my bathroom scale replacement.
It’d be like The Emperor’s New Clothing – except it’d be the clothing lying to me.
But as I’m mostly alone there, get ready to see legions of tent sized ensembles with “extra small” tags.
We can call ’em Denial Duds:
“For the woman who operates outside the hemlines of society and decides what ‘small’ is for herself…”
Final thoughts: if this stuff conforms to the pressure of what’s beneath it… could we make wings with it? And like, they’d be programmed to take our body weight and the air pressure below us into account and then alter shape with the atmospheric conditions like wind and whatnot?
Mmmyeah. Time to get to the batcave and work on this, stat.