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...

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