Potential Benefits
The benefits that this new technology is going to give us are very diverse and far-reaching. With the printers becoming more affordable and mass produced every year, poor sectors in developing countries could soon be able to get one. With a 3-D printer, they would be able to print out farming equipment parts, makeshift house parts and even solar panels (Bass, 2011). That alone would help immensely the people who rely on agriculture as their primary means of income and free up more of their time to invest in setting up businesses and sending their children to school. However, the printer not could have its impact on the far away farmlands, but also closer to home, with doctors and medical engineers already devising printable 3-D organs, a practice known as bio-printing. The bio-print process consists of 6 steps starting with the initial imaging of either an X-ray, CT or MRI of the part of choice and progressing to the design, material/cell selection, bio-printing and application stages (Murphy and Atala, 2014). This practice of 3-D organ printing would especially benefit patients who are waiting for a kidney or a pancreatic transplant. The printer could also altogether change the painful skin grafting process in which skin is outright removed from burn victims to graft new skin; in this case, the printer could just make new layers of skin on top of the burned skin to alleviate the patient of much discomfort ( Mukherjee, 2013). The impact this technology is making cannot be slighted, mainstream industries such as the agricultural and medical industries examined above as well as single individuals are already creating solid concept-stage plans to make use of the printer. For instance, researcher Roy Ombatti from Stanford University is pondering a plan to create 3-D printed medical shoes that protect against the poor of jiggers, a parasitic flea that eats the flesh of the toe and lays eggs inside (2014). If that were not enough, company Local Motors 3-D printed an ABS plastic and carbon fibered external frame of a car, while the Winsun Decoration Design Chinese company literally printed 10 houses in a single day at a cost of $5,000 each out of high-grade cement and glass material (Diamandis, 2015).