Interactive video lesson plan for: Bill Nye: 3D Printing is Awesome, but It’s Nothing Compared to What’s Coming

Bill Nye casts his mind to the future to give us a picture of how the descendants of our current 3D printing technology will change our ways and our world.

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Transcript - 3D printing technology is I won’t say the greatest thing ever but it’s pretty great. So the other word you’re going to start seeing a lot more of I think is additive manufacture. 3D printing is kind of a specific style where you do layers. But I think you’ll see other additive manufacturing schemes following different fluids and materials that are buoyant in those fluids and then extracted and shapes can be created that are not possible, impossible to create by subtractive manufacture which is what I was brought up with as an engineer. You cut threads in a piece of metal or plastic to get a threaded fastener. You hollow something out. I often think about the astronauts rock boxes so they took boxes to the moon to put rocks in and bring them back to the Earth in a hermetically sealed fashion. And in order to get the boxes to be lightweight the machinist’s term is they were hogged out. So they started with a piece of aluminum this big, hollowed the whole thing out with a milling machine.

Chips of aluminum just go on the shop floor to get this thin but yet very, very strong final shape. Well in the future or maybe this afternoon very few of us will manufacture objects like that subtractively. Instead this will be made additively. And it will be lighter weight, cheaper, less waste and it will enable many, many people to participate in the additive manufactured process. And then if you have a problem at home where something’s broken, pick a thing. Your toaster. You’ll go online, find a new toaster control knob, maybe a family of designs. You’ll pick the one that you like. You’ll go to the spiritual equivalent of FedEx/Kinkos and they’ll have an additive manufacturing machine there. If you need a really sophisticated you’ll call a more sophisticated additive manufacturing machine shop. And they’ll make the thing for you. And you will not waste the toaster. You will not throw it away. You will not waste nearly as much material, hardly any material if you hadn’t manufactured the new knob or a piece or a heater wire. And this will allow us to do more with less. Read Full Transcript Here: https://goo.gl/mocoaG.

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