Some assembly required may soon be replaced with "Just Add Water."
3D printers. I never get tired of thinking about all the possible applications, like building a brand new coffee
table, or building a brand new 3D printer, or finally getting that Strickland action
figure everyone's been asking for. But all of these great products have one thing in
common - rigidity. That means they're going to keep that shape once I print them, unless
I take a flamethrower to them, or maybe a hacksaw. But the advent of something called
4D printing could turn all of that on its head! That's right, it's one "D" better! Actually,
it's not just a catch phrase, 4D printing is really about using a 3D printer to print
out self-reconfiguring, programmable material. Now imagine this. You have a non-living object
that can change its shape and behavior over time. It's kind of like a robot, but there
are no microprocessors, no circuit boards, no motors - in fact to you it looks like a
string of plastic. But you toss it into a kiddie pool, and upon contact with water you
now have a secret message spelled out in plastic cursive! Skylar Tibbits, the man who really
came up with this idea of 4D printing, has gone even further. He's created programmable
sheet material. It's a sheet of plastic that, when submerged in water, can clench up into
the shape of a cube. And a cube is just the beginning! More complex designs will mean
millions of more shapes - like self-folding origami! In the near future, imagine a smart
grid of plumbing, with pipes that can actually expand and contract in response to water demand.
Or maybe even heal if there is a frozen segment that breaks open. Or imagine self assembling
furniture. Print out a flat board and just add water, next thing you know it curls up
into a rocking chair. Now, wrap your mind around how useful this would be in a really
hostile environment, like low Earth orbit, where building stuff comes at a high cost
and a high risk. Now the prototypes we have seen so far have been pretty simple, but the
promises are amazing! Think about it on the really big scale. What about skyscrapers and
bridges. If we could make them out of smart materials like smart beams and smart bricks,
they could heal themselves after weather damage or prepare for something massive like an earthquake.
Or we flip it. We go on to the very small scale and now we have micro particles moving
around in our bodies, maintaining our health. You might be wondering, how much complexity
can build up our of stuff that changes its shape without computers or electromechanical
motors. Lets think about proteins for a second. Proteins are pretty much what make any basic
animal function possible on a cellular level. An a protein is really self-reconfiguring
material. It's a polypeptide. It's a long chain of amino acids. So once again we're
playing Copy Cat to mother nature. Now lets not get ahead of ourselves, I'm not actually
suggesting that we're going to be printing out some sort of plastic replicant that can
gain self-awareness and yearn for more life. But maybe we will. In fact, it's hard for
us to predict right now. We're just seeing the very beginning of this technology, and
the complexity could become truly amazing. So, how would you use 4D printing? Let us
know! Leave a comment below, we promise we're going to read every single one of them and
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