Bill Nye: 3D Printing is Awesome, but It’s Nothing Compared to What’s Coming | Big Think

Bill Nye: 3D Printing is Awesome, but It’s Nothing Compared to What’s Coming

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If you want to see Bill Nye get worked up over a juicer, you’ve come to the right place. But he has good reason to be excited; the future shift of manufacture is in motion, and it’s been kicked off by the imagination-capturing phenomenon of 3D printing.
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BILL NYE :

Bill Nye, scientist, engineer, comedian, author, and inventor, is a man with a mission: to help foster a scientifically literate society, to help people everywhere understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work. Making science entertaining and accessible is something Bill has been doing most of his life.

In Seattle Nye began to combine his love of science with his flair for comedy, when he won the Steve Martin look-alike contest and developed dual careers as an engineer by day and a stand-up comic by night. Nye then quit his day engineering day job and made the transition to a night job as a comedy writer and performer on Seattle’s home-grown ensemble comedy show “Almost Live.” This is where “Bill Nye the Science Guy®” was born. The show appeared before Saturday Night Live and later on Comedy Central, originating at KING-TV, Seattle’s NBC affiliate.
While working on the Science Guy show, Nye won seven national Emmy Awards for writing, performing, and producing. The show won 18 Emmys in five years. In between creating the shows, he wrote five children’s books about science, including his latest title, “Bill Nye’s Great Big Book of Tiny Germs.”

Nye is the host of three currently-running television series. “The 100 Greatest Discoveries” airs on the Science Channel. “The Eyes of Nye” airs on PBS stations across the country.
Bill’s latest project is hosting a show on Planet Green called “Stuff Happens.” It’s about environmentally responsible choices that consumers can make as they go about their day and their shopping. Also, you’ll see Nye in his good-natured rivalry with his neighbor Ed Begley. They compete to see who can save the most energy and produce the smallest carbon footprint. Nye has 4,000 watts of solar power and a solar-boosted hot water system. There’s also the low water use garden and underground watering system. It’s fun for him; he’s an engineer with an energy conservation hobby.

Nye is currently the Executive Director of The Planetary Society, the world’s largest space interest organization.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Bill Nye: 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 involving 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...

[KingTaltia]

Bill Nye, arguably the reason I am who I am today, and definitely the reason why I have hope in the future.

[WackyConundrum]

No. Corporations will do everything in their power to prevent people from freely fixing their stuff. Things have to break so the new ones have to be bought and the corpo hunger satisfied.

[donaldnicol]

I met a tool and die maker 25 years ago who worked in R&D at Magna in Markham ON.He had a machine in his shop that you could put a broken part in, scan it and laser cut a new part.The part he cut for me was a stainless steel gear with a chipped tooth, for a high speed water pump.The new part fit so well the gears locked up and wouldn't turn.

[JohnMichaelStrubhart]

Bill cracks me up - "Ah, the humanity!" in response to leaving metal trimmings on a shop floor. :-D

[DSage]

3D printing is like the early computer. It took a while to prove its value to the every day consumer but when when they got better, faster, cheaper, they started to dominate our lives. Its the future.

[SuperFactsCS]

Im a Mechanical engineering student at the University of Toledo and we have a lab with 3d scanners and 3d printers where you can just scan something and print a new one

[apetrenko_ai]

Yeah, and this "additive manufacturing" that Bill describes is really nothing compared to what's coming after that. How about molecular machinery and nanoassembling?

[mynamejake]

It's great to see someone so excited about making our planet a better place.

[cheydinal]

Just too bad for 3D-print Fed-Ex when I print my own 3D printer :D

[mcconkeyb]

Advanced 3D printing is the precursor for a Startrek replicator. Once we get to the point of being able to do additive 3D printing with atoms, we will have a replicator. Its going to take a while, but we will get there! It is also the starting point for a transporter, which is partially a 3D printer, with sub-atomic particles and a sub-atomic scanner and some method of sending the data and sub-atomic particles to the new location. This will take considerably longer, but we might some day get there!

[ivpantev]

He expressed some nice sentiments here, but the last sentence is the reason why I don't think the future will look quite like he said. " I don't have time to fix it, I have other things going on". Our culture is increasingly becoming more and more consumer-oriented, and this is reflected in the way products are designed and used. Its often cheaper and more convenient to simply replace things. Most products are also not designed for long-term reliability past their guarantee, at which point they may also be considered obsolete.

So additive manufacturing might be a great process, but our additive attitude is not.

[kujo]

BILL! BILL! BILL! Inertia is a property of matter. BILL! BILL! BILL! Science rules.

[vitovtwik]

And for additive manufacturing some form of epitaxial growth will be the apogee. All those meta-materials, fully integrated circuitry, oh my.

[DontpushtheBbutton]

I thought he was going to talk about replicators. I'm sad now.

[MClaudeW]

thanks for the video Mr Bill. maybe you could have touched on the ability for entrepreneurs to build prototypes willy nilly.

[lemurlicker]

I like this format of Bill just talking about something way more than him answering silly questions.

[civilsavant]

No Bil, you don't gotta do this, but I love that you do it anyway! Your vision of the future of manufacturing is inspiring, but can we bring it to EVERYONE? If only the rich and powerful get to access to such innovative marvels, it's as good as a canvas with no painter.

[hobbyfotograf]

Hi. Have a question. I wonder to start working with name ID Tag and Business Card with son technology called 3D printing. Have you perhaps tip the 3D printer to cope with very fine 3D print. THANKS

[MiranUT]

I had a part on my food processor that needed replacing. I just called the manufacturer and they sent me the piece. I think that in the future we won't have to call anyone. The "smart" toaster will know it's broken and order what it needs by itself.

[kelseysadler]

I don't think additive manufacturing will ever be as fast or as accurate as good ol' fashioned machining. He described it like all of the chips that have been cut away just goes to waste, but it all gets recycled.