4D Printing is 1 D Better

has passed now. Three D printing, of course, is like you said, Lauren, it's additive manufacturing. It's when you're using a device to create some sort of object, three dimensional object, layer by layer, and it's uh, it's it's somewhat of a painstaking process, but it's less wasteful than subtractive manufacturing, which is where you would take a block of something and then carve away all the stuff you don't want, right, Yeah,

And it gives you the ability to design virtually with precision. Right, you can prototype stuff, you can print it out, you can test it see if it has has any merit. If not, you can go back to the drawing board a lot more cheaply than than traditional prototyping would have worked, and much faster too. Because you don't have to sit there and try and carve it away and then send a mold or or some sort of other model off

to be manufactured in a more uh sturdy format. You can actually test things out very rapidly, and it really helps you when you're developing something brand new. Okay, well, I want to talk about this idea that popped up this year. I think it popped up this spring. Um. It's called fort printing. And you know, Joe, you're not the only one I want to talk about this. In fact, almost instantly after we uploaded our three D printer video, we had someone commenting, what about four D printing? What

is for D printing? Well, I assume it must be one better. Yes, it's better than three by a whole one. It's it's it's at least better than three. Um. Okay, so for D printing maybe better than three D printing. But what it really breaks down to it comes from this guy named Skylar Tibbots, which is an awesome name. Yeah uh. And most people became familiar with this idea through a Ted talk he had that sort of went

viral in the popular science media sphere. UM And in this Ted talk he introduces this idea of for D printing, and essentially what it is is combining two major concepts. It's three D printing with programmable materials. So when you think about things that are programmable, one would be like computer software, and that means that it has a function

that unfolds across time. So you you give some sort of input and the software takes that input, performs some form of operation upon that input, and gives you output as a result. Right, it's a it's a sequence of events in linear time. UM. And so what if you could create materials, just three D materials like a block or a sheet that also we're programmable, meaning they had they had functionality, not not not not reality, No, it's for real. What on the nano scale. That's what happens

all the time within your own body. Now you're blowing my mind. Yeah, Well we'll get into those metaphors in a bit. But basically, what we're talking about is a piece of plastica UM that can change its own shape or physical properties in response to a stimulus over time. Right, So you put something like this in your mind, a string of black plastic. It's just a tube. It doesn't

do anything as far as you know. But submerge it in water and it curls up to spell a phrase in cursive like, uh, Jonathan, the programmable material skeptic is stupid that I would not at all be shocked to find that. And then you can just remove it, Okay. So you could remove it from the water and it might revert to its original state, or you could apply a different kind of energy, say instead of water, you could apply solar energy to it, or heat, or you

could applying cone. Yeah, exactly. Um. So you shake it up and it curls into a pre arrange shape. And the way this works is just basic physical design. It's got um it's got inherent tendencies towards certain shapes, and when it encounters this energy. It doesn't have an electric motor, it doesn't have any moving parts or chemicals or anything like that. The molecules just realign to this other shape.

They have an affinity for right. And in the case of that first example, with submerging something in water, what you're really doing is is printing a single object with different materials from a three D printer UM. And those different materials have different water absorption properties, and so when when you get them wet, they do different stuffs right, right, So that makes it bend in a different way. So on the macro scale we see it end up taking

a particular shape. On the micro or nanoscale, lots of complicated things are happening so that those structures form the shape you're looking at right. Um. And so what Lauren just introduced is where three D printing hits this. So I was talking about programmable materials, but what for D printing says is, hey, you can print programmable materials pretty easily with a three D printer UM. And this could be useful in a lot of ways that we'll talk

about in a bit, uh. But but essentially the idea is you're using a three D printer to put together a thing that changes over time given a certain amount of energy applied to it and particular form. It's kind of if you want to think of it in the terms of programming as far as software goes, You know, anyone who's programmed knows the if then statement, right, if X then Y, that kind of idea. So in this case, it would be if certain type of energy is applied

to this material, then take this particular shape. That's kind of the if. Then a programmable materials, you've you've printed something that, by its very nature, when something specific is applied to it, it will change shape in a predetermined way. It's not like this is going to change shape in in ways that we didn't intend. You're you're designing it from the get go so that it will acquire a

specific shape. Yeah, so you can imagine more useful applications for programmable materials like this than just spelling out insults in cursive. You could think about furniture, say yeah, so so let's say let's say I go to my favorite furniture store. I key uh, because of course there's the wonderful Jonathan Coulton song about it. Anyway, I decided to go and I buy something, and I bring it back home and I open it up and then I look at the quote unquote simple instructions, and I realized that

the rest of my weekend is gone. As I try and put this together, and invariably something goes on the wrong way or backwards or whatever. But let's say that we have reached a point where we have this self assembling style of material, this programmable material that not only will take its specific shape once you've applied the right kind of energy, but we'll even interlock with other parts that are that are made out of that same sort

of material. They've got this great part in that Ted talk you were you were referring to, where they show this material that's broken up into little bitty pieces inside a beaker, and when you shake the beaker, you're you are introducing random energy into the system. It starts to come back together and form a a full unit as opposed to a bunch of little pieces. And this is done basically with with with with magnets and stuff like that.

I mean on at the current moment. These are more ideological um experiments than really deep chemical experiment and it's not and it's not something that you know, the the average person is going to have at their disposal any time and say like the next year or two years

or whatever. But the principle there is that maybe in the future, instead of buying a box that you come home and you open it up, it's got all these different pieces and then you spend the next if you're me seventy two hours trying to put it all together. You get something that when you add heat or you shake it up, it ends up actually taking the shape of whatever it is you specifically wanted, and it saves you a lot of time and energy and effort, and it really all the way down the line, it means

that things get simpler in design. Yeah, you could just merely dunk a plastic sheet into water, or say, expose it to sunlight or electricity from wall socket and it reconfigures itself into a coffee table. Right. And I've seen some great video that was also either part of the Ted talk or just related stuff that's in the the lab that Scalar Tipots works out of, where, for example, they showed a a sheet of plastic. It wasn't it

wasn't just a rectangular sheet. You could actually tell that it was meant to fold up into a cube and then submerged in water and then it very slowly because I think the video is sped up by fifty times normal speed, but very slowly. No, but it does, it does configure itself into the shape of a cube, which is pretty cool to see. Now if you're watching that and you're thinking this is sped up at fifty times normal speed, and all this sheet is doing is turning

into a cube. It's hard to grasp how this could have applications, but it's really just a proof of concept at that stage. Right. This lab that we're talking about the tipots friends, UM, it's called the self assembly lab. It's at M I, T and UM. They're they're defining self assembly as a process by which disordered parts build an ordered ructure through local interaction. UM. So, so what

they're really focusing on is non electronics stuff. I mean, I think that the interesting future applications are all involving some form of computerization. And they have played around a little bit with with robots, which I'll talk about in

another moment. But but but but yeah, there, you know, trying to eliminate the need to simulate and then build, or to build and then adjust, um in the long run, by by running these thought experiments and seeing, you know, like, well, what what can we how can we use physics and chemistry to get stuff to do what we want it to for us rather than us having to go in and physically change things. Yeah, it's important to remember that while the examples of this we've seen are pretty basic.

This is extremely primitive technology and well sort of respectively, in this field, it's brand new. Yeah, yeah, it's it's really just collaborations at this point between architects and artists. And there's a company called UH status is I think, and an Autodesk, and in a bunch of other industry three D printing and UH and other tech leaders are are getting in on this and going like this is cool,

what can we do? Yeah? And then you know, there are some great potential benefits to this, for example, cutting way down on the amount of resources and energy and money that takes to go into manufacturing, building out infrastructures, that kind of thing. And that's in fact, a large part of Skylar's talk is to to on on the Ted Talks. I call him Skylar, sometimes I just call

him sky Yeah, that's fair. So anyway, there's he really points out that that they're they're taking a long term view of this potential approach and saying this is something that could be you know, we love to use the word disruptive, like this could be disruptive and these these established chains of things like manufacturing where UH it simplifies stuff and saves lots and lots of money in the long run, also saves energy, which, of course that's really important,

you know, as we're still trying to develop a way of producing energy that meets the world's needs without making it an uninhabitable place. Then saving it it matters a lot. Yeah, because infrastructure right now, the way that we do it is is so rigid. It's rigid by design because it needs to be, because we we need it to last a long time and and be sturdy and whether the

elements and all of that kind of stuff. And so do we want to start talking about applications about like like like like what if instead of having UM giant metal and concrete sewer pipes or water pipes, UM, we could have forty printed water pipes that could actually adjust to demand. Yeah, this is a concept that Tibots himself talks about UM in one of his talks. I think it's the Ted talker, Okay, yeah, but he talks about

UH piping UH. And that's a perfect example because a lot of the UH materials they've already come up with respond to water. And so the idea he has is a pipe that undulates, so it could expand when there's more demand for water, contract when there's less demand for water, or it could even undulate to push the water along without the need for turbines to to move the water through. Yeah, you would reduce the requirement for things like pumping stations to to be able to get water exactly where it

needs to go. I think a lot of people when they're turning their faucets on don't realize the incredible amount of engineering it took to make that a possibility. Yeah. Um, but if the pipe itself could just work like say you're esophagus does when you swallow something. You know how you can swallow even when you're upside down. It's because of that muscle motion and softly swallow when I'm upside down.

That's why you see me staying on my head whenever I met lunch, I know, hanging from the ceiling, drinking blood in your apartment in the darkness. We call you we gotta let's keep it on the download days. But your esophagus, when you're drinking blood like that, your esophagus goes. I think it's called peristalsis Is that correct? The name? I just call it miller time anyway, It's a muscle contraction that pushes what's in your mouth down your throat

and towards your stomach um. And yeah, and if pipes work that way, that could be really useful. Another application that that I think is interesting is in space exploration. Yes, yeah, In fact, that was one of the other points, is that this idea, that this could allow you to put together things, uh in environments that are traditionally difficult or

dangerous or deadly to human beings. So, whether it's in the Antarctic or in the outer reaches of space, if you need to be able to take some materials and build out structures, then something that would be self assembling, just given the right kind of energy would be really useful. Yeah.

Let's say we want to establish a Mars colony for humans, Okay, and we have talked about that in the past obviously, so that's a that's a big step right now, but clearly people are looking towards it, So it's a good thing to think about how we would actually do it. We put some astronauts down on the surface of Mars, they need a protective structure in which to live. Uh, where does that come from? Right? I mean, and it's not going to be exactly easy to do construction on

the surface of Mars. Yeah, they're they're already limited by the fact that they're in space suits. They can they really don't need to be spending extended periods of time out on the surface of Mars in the first place, because, as we've established in a previous episode, Mars is trying to kill you. So you want to spend as as little time on the surface, especially unprotected as possible, because you're still prone to things like radiation, let alone the

toxic environment of Mars. So one possible application would be to have this four D printed stuff to help make at least the shell of some of the habitats that you would want, right and there the various uh um well, like the Mars One Project talks about using rovers to help build stuff and construct things, which on its face seems really really complicated to me. Like I I have a hard time believing that we could build robots that

would be sophisticated enough to help doing that. But but if they're using stuff like this, that could really go a long way the process share, you know, cut down a little bit on that programming and or the durability of the robot itself, right. Yeah. Also, I'm just thinking

about how unwieldy it is to transport construction materials. I mean, if you've ever seen like a truck on the way to a construction site and all the junk it's got trying to fit together on the bed um and clearly you couldn't it couldn't already be put together because there's no space then, right, so you have so you just flow the entire house. You just put rockets on the bottom the whole house, on the oversized load on the

back of it as it's flying off. Instead, you get there with your for D printer and you've got just bulk material basically that's not as unwieldy to transportenttridges that hold the hold the stuff that you're printing out. Yeah, and it there on the surface of Mars, goes ahead and prints out the parts that you need, and so they can reconfigure and interlock however you need them to

make the structure you're going to live in. Yeah. Yeah, No, that makes, you know, far more sense to me than trying to rely on essentially a slightly more sophisticated version of the curiosity rover. Right. I mean, I think about the Curiosity Rover, and it is an amazing piece of technology, don't get me wrong. I think that is one of the most phenomenal achievements for NASA post Moon landing. But that being said, I can't imagine it building a house. Yeah,

it doesn't. It doesn't have and it's not like you could guide it easily because the amount of time it takes to get data from what minimum fourteen minute time laps. It all depends on the position of Mars and Earth in relation to one another. And also, I mean even which side of Mars is facing which side of Earth. I mean, all of that plays apart, right, So you know, you wouldn't be able to in real time guide the robot.

It would have to be able to do a lot of this autonomously, right, And that's the kind of thing that autonomous robots aren't actually that good at. I mean, you might be sitting there thinking like, oh, but robots build our cars and stuff all the time, but but that's in a very specific environment and in which things have been very specifically laid out for. It does one job.

It only has one job, and if you had if you had changed that up somehow, it's not like the robots could adjust to the new layout, right, It's not like they could suddenly uh realize that things were different and react to that. It's just they would try to keep doing what they usually do on top of all that. I mean a rover for construction. I mean, think about how exactly much work can you get done with a

solar powered bulldozer. I mean, one would wonder what kind of I mean, there might be some other form of power sell aboard it, but I wouldn't know. I mean, because that just is the way that Mars one has suggested. But yeah, I think using like a four D approach would cut back on that. Now, whether or not four D afford D approach would be sophisticated enough to meet the needs of the Mars one colony by the time they actually start to launch things at least according to

their own launch plan, that that's a different story. I just think that that would be a more It seems like a more promising approach to me than what I have read so far. I'd be very skeptical about it developing that fast, but I do think that leads us to the interesting question of how it advanced. Exactly can this kind of thing get, Yeah, let's have it. Let's have a discussion about that. I've got I've got an alternative to this too that i want to talk about,

but I'll tag that on at the end. I want to talk about what what do you see, Joe as like the the let's let's imagine that this this approach really does pan out, that we learn uh, a lot of the different advantages and a lot of different ways of utilizing this. What do you see as some future like really far future applications. Right now, we've got basically

art projects. Where else can it go? So right now, you can make a string that curls into this knotted up shape, or say a sheet that folds into a cube. But if you were to shrink that way down and make billions of them, and make millions of different kinds of them that all interact in ways that produce complex macro effects. What you're talking about is something that's not

all that similar from how living things work. I mean what a human body is, or what an insect is, or pretty much any living material right yeah, is long chains of molecules that they're polypeptides that are the I mean no acid sequence in them. Determines what shape they curl up into, and the shapes they curl up into

interact in interesting ways that produce macro effects. First with with hydrogen bombs, hydrogen bombs, hydrogen bonds, goodness, migracious, and uh and then and then in tertiary structures with them with with sell fites and all kinds of other stuff.

And you know, when we had this quick discussion before we came in here to record, I pointed out that when you think about nature has had billions of years, really millions and billions of years too to really experiment and see which of these these shapes are the ones that work. Because anything that doesn't work doesn't live, and if it doesn't live, then you're you discard that and you go on. So it's not like it's necessarily any

sort of intelligent experimentation. It's just that by the very nature of the way life works, we see which shapes are the ones that actually end up being uh advent tageous. So the question is can we catch up with you know, billions of years of evolution in twenty to fifty years of R and D well, I mean, that's the years

that's that's our standard that's our standard prediction. Right. I'm skeptical, but I think it's a really interesting idea, and I think that in theory it's not impossible because of what I just said about how you know you can create incredibly complex and powerful things without micro chips or electro mechanical motors. Yeah, it does. We had this discussion earlier as well about let's say that you are using this four D stuff and it's able to take on multiple

shapes depending upon whatever seth circumstances are applied to it. Right, So let's say that you have created some kind of of of of movable robotic structure. It's got some computational abilities, it's able to perceive and move around its environment in some way, but it doesn't have any electronic part. But doesn't have electronic parts. It's all this four D printing approach.

And the first response I had was I can't under I can't quite grasp how you would apply the right type of energy and the right amounts to the right spots within this robot to make it coordinated and have it move in in a meaningful way. But Joe, you had an interesting counterpoint, right, Yeah, Well, I can't imagine

that either that seems just too impossible to me. But then again, I think if you went and you talk to somebody in the nineteen forties when computers were nascent, I mean, would they really think that electrons would someday be as programmable as they are now in our computers. I certainly think that. And and of course this, this is this completely bears out if you look at all the predictions that people had back in the early early

days of computers. They talked about, you know, one day these computers will be small, all enough to fit in a room in your house, and you'll be able to use it. But that's about able to compute five digit addition probably well. Essentially, essentially, they could not foresee the development of miniaturization. The transistor was something that they could not necessarily predict in those early days, and therefore that did not factor into their vision of the future with computers.

Their vision of the future of computers was completely based on the state of the art as it was at that time, right And clearly, if you've read if you've read science fiction from the time, it's not the people were incapable of imagining that. It's just that they were

incapable of imagining it practically. It was more like if they imagined it, it was you know, most most of the computers that you would read about, even in science fiction back in those days, would still be these enormous devices that would take up huge amounts of space because they didn't think, oh, well, there's going to be this development where we're gonna shrink these components and still maintain

and even increase their power over time. So from that same perspective, I could say, you know what, Joe, You're right, I'm basing my my skepticism about reaching that point simply because I'm thinking about the state of the art as it is today. But who's to say there won't be some development maybe a year from now, maybe tomorrow, where

it makes all of those those concerns I have. Moot, You're you're using your intuitions, and these intuitions usually serve us well, right, but but sometimes sometimes they're This is why predicting the future is such a tricky thing, because there's so many different elements that we cannot possibly predict. Uh that that happened, and then it suddenly changes everything and you think, wow, I I was not thinking big enough I'm excited in the short term about combining these

kind of materials sciences with with electronic robotics. And I mean, you know, we we have talked about three D printing electronics, and um, if you take some of these materials and uh, you know, hook them up to very basic computers hardwire them together, you could you could construct chains nodes that would that that would be you know, programmable, and that would would uh carry instructions back and forth along the chain into you know, telling the materials what to do

and where to apply the heat to bend something, or where to apply the water to create a certain effect. This is very similar to something the other thing I was going to talk about, the alternative to four D printing.

That's taking a similar approach to for D printing in the sense of materials that can assemble themselves in different ways, but it's a it's a different it's a different pathway to that, which is the whole idea of the self reconfigurable modular robot, similar to what you're talking about here.

And they've been playing with this at the Self Assembly Lab back in two thousand and eight, two thousand nine, they were constructing these macrobots and DESSI bots that that are that are basically just robotic versions of that of that chain of plot stick that you put in the water and then it folds up into something different. Yeah,

and I've seen some interesting approaches with this. Now, technically what I've seen is, uh, these modular robots tend to look like little cubes or other some other simple shape polygon, and then they can join together to make you know, each of these is sort of its own little autonomous unit, but they can join together to form vultron I me, you know, a larger robot. But but see, it's if they can form in different ways. So for example, you might see one that ends up forming essentially legs to

let it crawl over an object. But let's say it comes up to a tunnel, like it's crawling over rocks and it's doing just fine, but then comes up to a tunnel that's too small for it to crawl through based on its it's it's shape right then and there, so it reconfigures itself into a snake format and then uses some snake slithering like motion to propel itself through the tunnel until it gets to the other side. And then maybe it reconfigures itself into a new shape based

upon the terrain that's on the other side. Now, this is in its current form, still very very young, just like the four deep printing is. So the designs are when you look at them, I mean, they blow my mind. I think it's amazing what's been done so far, But it's still pretty primitive stuff. They can't get down to teeny tiny levels of precision. But let's say that we extend this form of of reconfiguration and self assembly forward and we think, well, maybe we're able to miniaturize that

and make it even more sophisticated. You could have robots. They're essentially collections, kind of like a hive of various little autonomous units that can self assemble, reassemble, reconfigure numerous times based upon whatever the task is that needs to do. And if you go even further, you've got the well, you've got the one. But in furniture format, y'all, I'm talking about taking nanotechnology that can make macro sized furniture based upon your whim and then your whim and then

kill your guests. Right, But no, the the idea here being that you actually have nano materials that can self assemble and reconfigure based upon whatever it is you need them to do. That's kind of like the super science fiction version of these two different pathways. Now, it may very well be that neither of these end up developing into that. It could be that they converge and together

they develop into that. It's too early to say, but there are a lot of people who really are excited about this idea of the future where we have you know, you don't you don't have to go out and buy a new couch. You just program your couch to have a new shape. I like that. I like this idea that you know, you can decide to you know, I have decided to change the way I live. I want my entire living space to be a completely different style because I am no longer that version of me anymore.

And then with a couple of programming clicks and clacks and whatever user interface there happens to be, you could do that. Or let's say that your robot cat is scratching up your couch. Um it could if the couch has this technology, it could be self healing. It could it could mend itself. You could have a self healing couch. I wonder, and I'm not saying this is necessarily possible, but I'm just wondering how programmable materials might figure into

larger infrastructure, like say, buildings or bridges or highways. Yeah, I mean, would it would it be useful to think about this type of material in that setting? I mean, is it possible that in some way a building built of programmable materials would be able to, say, withstand an earthquake or something like that. Interesting, it's you know, it's again based upon what we've seen right now, it's it's

difficult to imagine. But then if you were to design the building so that the kinetic movement actually strengthened the building as opposed to weakened it, or in a different way, say if a building responded to shaking by becoming less rigid, which might be exactly what you want actually, so that so there's more give and it can ride out the earthquake.

For example. Yeah, if you've ever seen photos of of tension bridges during earthquakes or something like that, Yeah, that that kind of that kind of if it were all made of steel cable and was therefore tensile, then then it could end up ripping apart. And being a terrible tragedy. I think, or you know, it could have the flexibility to to not to not tear apart. There's that too well. Anyway, that the cool thing to me is that all of

this type of technology has a lot of potential. Now, whether that potential ever gets realized, we'll have to wait and see. But it's exciting that people are working on this kind of stuff and it really is like a different way of going about manufacturing and construction than I had ever anticipated. It's not something I had never really imagined this kind of thing, and it's so cool to think that it's not just something that someone's imagined, it's

stuff that people are actively working on. That's pretty awesome. Guys. If you have any comments, you want to chime in on the idea for d printing, or maybe there's some other future technology that you think is really exciting, you should join in on the discussion. Go to f W thinking dot com. That's where we have all the blog posts, we have the podcasts, we have the videos, we have lots of articles that are about the kind of subjects

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