Welcome to Day 1483 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me. This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom3-D Printing – Ask GrampsWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1483 of our Trek, and our focus on Fridays is the future technological and societal advances, so we call it Futuristic Fridays. My personality is one that has always been very future-oriented. Since my childhood, I have yearned for the exploration and discovery of new technologies and advancements for the future. I grew up with the original Star Trek series, and even today, as I am now on my 65th revolution around the sun, I still dream of traveling in space. Each week we will explore rapidly converging technologies and advancements, which will radically change our lives. At times, the topics may sound like something out of a science fiction novel, but each area that we explore is already well on its way of becoming a reality over the next couple of decades.
To keep with our theme of “Ask Gramps,” I will put our weekly topics in the form of a question to get us on track. This week’s question is, Hey Gramps, I hear a fair bit about 3-D printing today. Can you explain why it will be so crucial for our future? 
3-D Printing
Last week we learned how superfast transportation and avatars would change how we work with others. This week our focus will be on the 3-D printing revolution.   I am using some of the information mentioned in Peter Diamandis’s blogs and book “The Future is Faster Than You Think.”
3D printing is about to transform manufacturing as we know it, decimating waste, multiplying speed to market, and harnessing never-before-used materials.
It has already hit $15.8 billion in value in 2020. 3-D printing as manufacturing of products and services is projected to more than double to $35.6 billion by 2025—just five years from today.
Not only will 3D printing turn supply chains on their head here on Earth, shifting how and who manufactures our products, but it will also be a vital catalyst for making space colonies (and their infrastructure) possible.
Welcome to the 2030 era of tailor-made, rapid-fire, ultra-cheap, and zero-waste product creation on our planet and far beyond.
3D printing on the ISSToday, the most expensive supply chain in the known universe extends only 241 miles. Jutting straight up from mission control down here on Earth, this resupply network extends directly to the astronauts aboard the International Space Station (or the ISS).
Yet the supply chain’s hefty expense is due almost entirely to weight. Why? It costs $10,000 per pound to get an object out of the Earth’s gravity well. Because it takes months for that object to reach the Space Station, the storage of replacement parts takes up a significant portion of the ISS’s precious real estate.
In other words, the most expensive supply chain in history leads to the most exotic junkyard in the cosmos. The first-ever company seeking to solve these problems, ‘Made in Space,’ had the ambitious goal to build a 3D printer that works in zero gravity. A few years later, Made in Space is now in space. For this reason, on a 2018 ISS mission, when an astronaut broke his finger, the team no longer needed to order a splint from Earth and wait months for its arrival. Instead, they flipped on their 3D printer, loaded in some feedstock, found “splint” in their blueprint archive, and created what they needed, when they needed it.  Successes like that of Made in Space represent a level of...