[chrispi]

What do you think about rapid prototyping machines? Do you think that this will be the wave of the future post-peak oil? I for one would like to do away with planned obsolesence.

[EnergySpin]

Rapid prototypers will be one way that globalisation (economic) may continue in spite of a decline in actual transportation.
Blueprints can be trasmitted electronically and production done locally provided that some sort of industrial capacity is still in place. This is one of the driving forces behind the draconian IPR laws IMHO.

[Novus]

Rapid prototypers also known as fabricators are intended to replace factories. The vision of the fabricator is to build a self replicating machine that will eliminate the need for factories or stores in future. Insted of buying widgets in the store that were made in a factory overseas one will simply download blue-prints from the web and have the fabricator print them out in your home. These devices exist today and you can buy one from Hewlett Packard for $200k or $300k. A few hundred have been sold to research institutions and higher education. The fabricator is probably 10 years away from going mainstream when models will be a more afordable.

The problem is peak oil is happening now and this and a lot of other experimental technologies will come too late to save us. All these technologies proove one thing and that is a transition was possible but because our culture was too greedy to heed thirty 30 years of warning signs our society blew that chance for a transition. Now we face world wide depression and economic collapse at the least and die-off of most of the world's population at the worst.

[I_Like_Plants]

You can get one for $25k or so, the machine-tool shows have lots of stuff like that to see and drool over.

[evilmonkeyspanker]

uhm ya machines creating machines... what could go wrong there