Tea, Earl Grey, hot

Star Trek's food replicator may be closer than you think.  NASA even now is printing pizza, as reported in theGuardian and other news sources.  Replication of mechanical parts is already a reality.

For those of you who are not Trekkies (or more casual fans of Star Trek), the food replicators (not to be confused with the Stargate replicators) in the series could produce verbally requested items on demand. As with most technology, one has to be specific:
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While NASA has its eye on food replication, U.S manufacturing is being transformed.  In a form of pedal-to-the-metal 3D printing, layers of metal are deposited and bound to a form built up from a design programmed into the printer.  This process is revolutionizing American industry; as the NewScientist puts it "A Second Industrial Revoluton is Underway."  More to the point is this a piece from Time Magazine (requires a paid subscription), "Made in the USA."

The technology is called additive manufacturing, or more colloquially, 3-D printing. When most people talk about 3-D printing, they mean fun devices for hobbyists that can print plastic toys and other small objects when hooked up to a computer. When they talk about it at ExOne Corp., they're describing something a lot bigger. Additive manufacturing involves what looks like spray-painting a metal object into existence. These 3-D printers lay down a very thin layer of stainless-steel powder or ceramic powder and fuse it with a liquid binder until a part--like a torque converter, heat exchanger or propeller blade--is built, layer by layer. ExOne's employees are ramping up production lines to make 3-D printers at a price of about $400,000. Would-be manufacturing entrepreneurs can buy the devices and begin turning out high-tech metal parts for aerospace, automotive and other industries at lower cost and higher quality faster than offshore suppliers.

Look around the ExOne site to get an idea of the capabilities of this field.  The article from Time also offers a vision of manufacturing in the future:

ExOne's 3-D-printing machines, like a lot of new technology, will displace some labor. A foundry, for instance, no longer needs workers carting patterns around a warehouse; it can print molds and cores stored on a thumb drive, and no patterns are needed. An ExOne shop with 12 metal-printing machines needs only two employees per shift, supported by a design engineer--though they are higher-skilled workers. Rockwell [ExOne's CEO] envisions a thousand new industrial flowers blooming. "There's a world of guys out there who say, If you can deliver parts in six or seven days, hey, I don't need the machines. That's where job creation is going to come from." Overseas competitors will not be able to deliver that quickly or at the same level of quality.

Seems to me it's got to be good if it get American employers off the offshore outsourcing teet.

-- Marge